Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
3:08 “…the story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy… and that this process… is accelerating… It seems as if… the whole cosmos wants to change into information… All points want to become connected…. The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together… You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that process–it’s the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe.”
4:43 “On one level, I think there is a cultural singularity… a place in our cultural development where we can’t predict or understand what will happen to us… a kind of flip-point… or doorway… or revelation…”
5:20 “The human adventure has become the cutting-edge of cosmic destiny, but it won’t always be so…”
7:04 “…we wished for transformation. Western civilization built it into it’s cultural agenda… and now, under the aegis of market-capitalism… somebody is going to put something together that is just going to completely redefine and rewrite the nature of reality itself… I’ll bet you it’s some kind of technology/drug-type thing… It may already be here.”
8:18 “What do you do when you can do anything? That’s really the question at the end of history. Once you have overcome all limitation, what is the human agenda?”
8:53 In response to a question about the role of individuals who are becoming aware of the approaching cultural singularity: “…I think we’re more than watching–I think that we spin it. We’re the spin doctors of the thing. In other words, if there’s a prophecy that must be fulfilled, it’s a kind of general prophecy… [It] is open to human definition through specific acts of creation.”
9:34 “The levels of novelty or habit in any given moment will be fulfilled–but how they’re fulfilled is a matter of human decision.”
11:00 “The strangeness of our condition signifies the nearness of the attractor. The reason that our world is accelerated… is because of the nearby presence of this cultural black hole, this singularity of technology and biological intent, that is feeding backwards into time these apocalyptic images…”
11:55 “In the collective unconscious–in which, each of us shares a part–the thing at the end of time is spinning… and it’s throwing off scintillations, which are distorted images of itself. The transcendental object at the end of time infects the history that precedes it with the images of its approaching unfoldment. This is what I mean when I say, ‘History is the shockwave of eschatology.’ The presence of history on this planet means this thing is moving beneath the surface–this protean form. When it manifests, it will shed the institutions of history the way a butterfly sheds a chrysalis.”
13:32 Terrence suggests that Novelty Theory might explain the apparent existence of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ in the universe.
14:25 “…I don’t believe that 90% of the matter in the universe goes unobserved… It’s not that there’s mass missing–it’s that there’s a law missing.”
15:01 “…Why does the Milky Way tend to stay the Milky Way? The answer is: because, as a spiral galaxy, it’s a more complex organism, a more complex structure, than it is as a dissipated, homogeneous mass.”
15:42 “…the Novelty Constant… is the constant that then causes large-scale structures to persist through time, for no other reason than that they represent higher orders of organization.”
16:40 Finding support in contemporary astrophysics’ postulation of an anti-gravitational factor that causes the universe to grow outward forever (and not collapse on itself),
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028 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 2)
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030 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 4)
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:24 ►
So, how are all of you
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today sorry it’s been so long since been here in the salon to get another McKenna
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talk out I’ll tell you about that story a little later you know it is good to
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have you back here again though for another installment of Terrence McKenna’s
00:00:44 ►
walk in the valley of Novelty.
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And I think you’re really going to enjoy this one.
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Among other things Terrence does
00:00:53 ►
here on this clip I’m playing
00:00:56 ►
is part of his famous rap about the
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transcendental object at the end of time.
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And I know most of you have heard that once or twice before,
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and so it’s one I think you’ll enjoy.
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It’s always a little different each time.
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And as you know, this is from a workshop that Terrence held in the summer of 1998.
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At least you know that if you’ve heard the previous two podcasts,
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or the first two parts of this workshop were podcasts.
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And this part, by the way, begins with his thoughts about the year 2012.
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So keep in mind that this was in 1998 he’s saying this.
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And he called the year 2012 a year where there could be a possible cultural singularity.
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And I point this out because the word cultural attached to singularity,
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because lately there’s been some discussion on the net about Terence’s,
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they think Terence’s misunderstanding of what they see as a technological or scientific or mathematical singularity.
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The criticism, I think, is mainly coming from the Ph.D. math and physics guys
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who are using the term much more precisely than I think Terrence intended
00:02:21 ►
when he spoke of a cultural singularity.
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You know, more as a poetic term, I think, than as a scientific one. Terrence intended when he spoke of a cultural singularity.
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More as a poetic term, I think, than as a scientific one.
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So you scientific types out there, hey, loosen up a bit.
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Have a talk or two and listen to how a bard and not a scientist sees these interesting times that we now find ourselves in.
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Now enslave yourself to the machine.
00:02:57 ►
Can you expand on the 2012 date and this whole idea, what’s going to be happening in your idea?
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date and this whole idea what’s going to be happening in your idea well i talked this morning about uh how the story of the universe is that information which i call novelty is struggling
00:03:17 ►
to free itself from habit which i call entropy and that this process which informs the whole history of the universe
00:03:25 ►
on all scales, chemical, biological, cultural, etc. is accelerating, speeding up. And it
00:03:34 ►
seems as if what wants to happen is the whole cosmos wants to change into information or
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put another way in a geometric model.
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All points want to become connected.
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The thing is achieved through connectivity.
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The path of complexity to its goals
00:03:54 ►
is through connecting things together.
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Well, if that’s true, then you can imagine
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that there is an ultimate end state of that process.
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It’s the moment when every point in the universe that there is an ultimate end state of that process.
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It’s the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe.
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And if that’s what the universe is trying to do
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to overcome its dissipate state,
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its spread out state
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and somehow function as a unitary monad
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then this point does not lie too far ahead of us
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in time given the acceleration rates
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of all these technical processes
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so at least locally
00:04:41 ►
so on one level I think
00:04:43 ►
there is a cultural singularity.
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What I mean by that is a place in our cultural development
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where we can’t predict or understand what will happen to us.
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A kind of flip point, if you want, or doorway, if you want,
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or revelation, if you want.
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And it’s built in to the structure of space and
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time it’s that novelty and its emergence is now operating at such a fine scale
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that it’s actually reflected in the lives of individual people the human
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adventure has become the cutting edge of cosmic destiny.
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But it won’t always be so.
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It will actually move through the human domain and into smaller and more rapid and compressed domains of concrescence.
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And probably in our lifetimes.
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And what will this mean or what will it look like?
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It seems to me it’s just not possible to say,
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because we’re too far away from it.
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Even though it’s only 14 years in the future,
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if it’s in 2012,
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those 14 years are going to be so mutational,
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so transformational, so transformational,
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that right now in time we can’t see around the corner.
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We’re summoning strange helpers to our aid.
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The machines that we had such confidence in controlling
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are actually a kind of intellect of some sort that is alive
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and with us in the historical continuum and evolving at a far faster rate than we are.
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And what all this leads to and how it works is very, very difficult to predict. And I’m
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not a paranoid. I don’t see, I don’t, I think it’s very difficult
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to predict. I think we wished for transformation. Western civilization built it into its cultural
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agenda. Science delivered far more than we ever dreamed in terms of understanding of matter and
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energy and space and time. And now under the aegis of market capitalism,
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where everything is in a state of furious competition,
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somebody is going to put something together
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that is just going to completely redefine and rewrite
00:07:19 ►
the nature of reality itself.
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And my bet is it will be some kind of a technology.
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It could be a drug.
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It could be a machine.
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It would be
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nice to think that it might be a
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technique or a teaching,
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but just looking at the history of the human
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race, I’ll bet you it’s some kind of
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technology slash
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drug type thing
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that is just going to be plugged in
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to us and our consciousness
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and our aspirations
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and it may already be here.
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It may be the internet.
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It may be nanotechnology.
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It may be biotechnology
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and cloning
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and quantum teleportation
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and virtual reality
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and all the rest of this.
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I mean, we are just at the brink of taking these various pieces of the God-magician puzzle and putting them together and figuring out, well, what can you do?
00:08:18 ►
What do you do if you can do anything?
00:08:23 ►
I mean, that’s really the question at the end of history.
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Once you have overcome all limitation,
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what is the human agenda?
00:08:31 ►
Yeah.
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Do you believe, then, that this is something that we’re observing
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or we actually play a part in its development?
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So what is the purpose of these hallucinogenic experiences?
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Is it to get information so we can influence the outcome,
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or are we just watching?
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No, I think we’re more than watching.
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I think we spin it.
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We’re the spin doctors of the thing.
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In other words, if there is a prophecy which must be fulfilled, it’s a
00:09:06 ►
kind of general prophecy. Something like, and man shall become dirigible in the last
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decades, or the first decade of the third millennium. It’s general. In other words,
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what does that mean, man becomes dirigible? We turn into airshipships we become oblate spheroids we what what what what
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does it mean well that’s open to human definition through specific acts of creation the levels of
00:09:35 ►
novelty or habit in any given moment will be fulfilled but how they’re fulfilled is a matter of human decision
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an example which maybe makes this clearer
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is from statistics
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for example we know that in the next 12 months
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between 8 and 11 people
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will jump off the Golden Gate Bridge
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but who those people will be
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is surely not decided today
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they have the right who those people will be is surely not decided today.
00:10:10 ►
They have the right, through the experiences they meet along the way, to either include or disinclude themselves in that group of victims.
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So in that same way, I think the future, the details are ours to fabricate.
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The great landscape over which the city of time will be built
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is given by natural law.
00:10:36 ►
And where we are in time is very near this attractor.
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And then people sometimes object to this and say,
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well, don’t you think it’s weird,
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a weird coincidence
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that we happen to be so near the attractor
00:10:52 ►
when presumably it could have been throughout time.
00:10:56 ►
Well, no, I don’t think it’s weird.
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I think the strangeness of our condition
00:11:02 ►
signifies the nearness of the attractor.
00:11:06 ►
That the reason our world is so accelerated,
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the reason all effects are being smeared toward Omega,
00:11:14 ►
is because of the nearby presence of this cultural black hole,
00:11:20 ►
this singularity of technology and biological intent that is feeding backwards into time
00:11:28 ►
these apocalyptic images.
00:11:31 ►
And I would predict that
00:11:34 ►
between now and 2012
00:11:36 ►
there will be ever more
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hysteria, prophecy, prediction, revelation,
00:11:47 ►
squirrely teachings,
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people bawling out their strange despair on every street corner.
00:12:01 ►
Because in the collective unconscious of which each of us shares a part,
00:12:07 ►
the thing at the end of time is spinning like a club ornament,
00:12:10 ►
like a Christmas tree ball, like a bar ornament, and it’s throwing off scintillations, which are distorted images of itself.
00:12:17 ►
The transcendental object at the end of time infects the history that precedes it
00:12:23 ►
with the images of its approaching unfoldment.
00:12:27 ►
This is what I mean when I say
00:12:29 ►
history is the shockwave of eschatology.
00:12:33 ►
The presence of history on this planet
00:12:36 ►
means that this thing is moving beneath the surface,
00:12:40 ►
this protean form,
00:12:42 ►
that when it manifests,
00:12:44 ►
it will shed the institutions of history the way a butterfly sheds a chrysalis when it breaks out of its metamorphosis.
00:12:53 ►
But the period of latency, the period inside the shell for this metamorphosing super creature is the 25,000 year season that we call
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human history. The fact that it’s
00:13:08 ►
the same period of time as the
00:13:10 ►
precession of the equinoxes,
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I don’t know, don’t ask me.
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Fortune or coincidence.
00:13:17 ►
Yeah.
00:13:18 ►
Terrence.
00:13:20 ►
I’m interested in your reaction
00:13:22 ►
to the recent announcement
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by astronomers
00:13:25 ►
that more than 90% of the universe is composed of something called dark matter.
00:13:31 ►
Well, this has been a problem in astrophysics for a while.
00:13:36 ►
What it is, is to state the problem differently,
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the universe seems to hold together far better than it should given
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the amount of matter that we can observe in other words given the amount of
00:13:54 ►
matter we can observe our physics of gravitation tells us that the galaxies
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should fling themselves to pieces and everything should assume a kind of uniformity.
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Why doesn’t it do that?
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This is called the dark matter problem.
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My thinking on this is
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this is a good problem for novelty theory
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to cut its teeth on
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because I don’t believe that 90% of the matter in the universe
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goes unobserved. I think the neutrino has a slight mass and that that accounts for a significant
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portion of the unobserved mass in the universe and the rest of it, it’s not that there’s mass missing. It’s that there’s a law missing.
00:14:45 ►
And behold, what law is it?
00:14:48 ►
It’s the law of novelty on one level.
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Because if you believe there is something called novelty
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working at extragalactic and galactic scales,
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then that answers your question,
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why does the Milky Way tend to stay the Milky Way?
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The answer is because as a spiral galaxy,
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it’s a more complex organism,
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a more complex structure
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than it is as a dissipated homogeneous mass.
00:15:18 ►
So it’s that, and if this were proven,
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you would actually have,
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begin to work toward a quantified measurement of the strength of the novelty field.
00:15:30 ►
Because you would take the known mass of the universe, you would subtract the newly discovered mass of the neutrino,
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and the amount that was left you would proclaim as the novelty constant,
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that was left, you would proclaim as the novelty constant,
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which is the constant which then causes large-scale structures to persist through time for no other reason
00:15:53 ►
than that they represent higher orders of organization.
00:15:58 ►
You know, recently, the most recent ultra-revolution in astrophysics,
00:16:03 ►
which means in the last six weeks these days,
00:16:06 ►
is the discovery that there seems to be some kind of repulsive force,
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a kind of anti-gravity, if you will,
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that the universe seems to be expanding slightly faster
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than the laws of physics say it should.
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slightly faster than the laws of physics say it should.
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And they’ve gone back to some work Einstein did and rejected in the 20s
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where he actually hypothesized this anti-gravitational factor.
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This, if proven, could be arguably
00:16:41 ►
a tremendous piece of evidence in favor of novelty theory
00:16:46 ►
because one of the things novelty theory says
00:16:48 ►
is the universe never goes back
00:16:51 ►
to its initial conditions.
00:16:55 ►
Well, in astrophysics, there’s been this debate.
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Does it or doesn’t it?
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If gravity, if the force of gravity
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is at a certain level,
00:17:04 ►
then eventually the outward expansion of matter in the universe would be halted
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and the whole thing would implode upon itself.
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The latest findings indicate that will not happen,
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that the universe grows outward into infinity forever,
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never retracing its steps and always elaborating new forms
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and new emergent properties.
00:17:32 ►
Let’s see.
00:17:33 ►
I’ve had an experience on drugs
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and I’ve read about it.
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Other people have had a similar experience
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which is that
00:17:40 ►
what’s presented to you as perception
00:17:44 ►
takes the form of a series of stills.
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And so this resonates for me
00:17:53 ►
with some teachings in Buddhism
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and in Sufism
00:17:58 ►
that basically
00:18:02 ►
what appears to us as manifestation
00:18:04 ►
is actually coming through as a series of stills,
00:18:07 ►
and we kind of glue it together with our mentation of it.
00:18:13 ►
And I wondered if you had come across this,
00:18:16 ►
or you have any comments on this,
00:18:18 ►
or you think it’s just a stray phenomenon,
00:18:21 ►
or is it of some cosmological import?
00:18:23 ►
Well, it’s certainly interesting
00:18:25 ►
that film and talkies and all that
00:18:29 ►
really got rolling in the 20s,
00:18:32 ►
which is when quantum theory
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really got rolling.
00:18:35 ►
And quantum theory is, on one level,
00:18:37 ►
a theory that reality is delivered
00:18:40 ►
as a series of stills,
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you know, this mysterious quantum
00:18:44 ►
between which then there is some great incomprehensible gulf
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and these things arrive this way.
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I know what you mean.
00:18:53 ►
I have seen the slideshow, the series of hallucinations
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where it’s click and this thing hangs in space,
00:19:00 ►
no movement whatsoever, click, weird and interesting. But on the other hand, I’ve
00:19:11 ►
seen all kinds of weird themes and variations on simply a visionary movie. That’s one kind
00:19:18 ►
of hallucination. For instance, I sometimes see text, and then as I watch the text, the level of sense and nonsense drifts.
00:19:30 ►
Words flip over, letters turn themselves upside down, words that made sense are replaced by gibberish.
00:19:39 ►
Well, now what kind of a hallucination is that? You have to be a printhead. I mean, could a wetoto have a hallucination like that
00:19:48 ►
where text was going through these variations?
00:19:51 ►
Ralph has described to me mathematical hallucinations,
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you know, drifting parentheses and factorial signatures
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and all this stuff moving around,
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and you’re watching it and you understand it somehow.
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moving around and you’re watching it and you understand it somehow. I’ve had those things like when you’re a little kid and you get it in a cereal box and you pull it one way
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and the lion is in the cage. You push it one way and the bars become what the foreground
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reverses and becomes the background and now there’s a tiger in the cage and I describe
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the hallucinations with the sliders
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on them
00:20:30 ►
and so
00:20:32 ►
I don’t know I think
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it’s all and everything
00:20:35 ►
you cannot conceive
00:20:38 ►
of information in a way
00:20:41 ►
that the hallucinogens
00:20:42 ►
then can’t
00:20:44 ►
see your bid and raise the ante.
00:20:48 ►
Yeah.
00:20:55 ►
What is it about the I Ching that qualified you in the eyes of the entity
00:21:03 ►
that it revealed the time wave.
00:21:07 ►
I have a sense of an attractor.
00:21:10 ►
I see what the I Ching is,
00:21:12 ►
but I don’t see the relationship.
00:21:14 ►
Well, here it is in a nutshell,
00:21:17 ►
or a not-shell, as James Joyce said.
00:21:23 ►
I was not a sinologist. I was not a scholar of Confucian or Han dynasty
00:21:30 ►
occultism. The good news is the part of the I Ching that I looked at is older than all
00:21:38 ►
of that. What my attention was drawn to, is the only way I can put it, by this teaching entity, was the sequence of the King Wen sequence.
00:21:51 ►
Little detail, King Wen is a person who may or may not have been a real person
00:21:57 ►
who supposedly lived around 1150 BC,
00:22:02 ►
and he got into some political trouble and he was put into prison.
00:22:06 ►
And while he was in prison,
00:22:07 ►
he arranged the sequences
00:22:10 ►
of the hexagrams of the I Ching
00:22:13 ►
into a sequence,
00:22:15 ►
which is called the King Wen sequence,
00:22:19 ►
and which is the sequence
00:22:21 ►
traditionally used in China ever since.
00:22:30 ►
Well, so the teaching voice said, look at the sequence.
00:22:38 ►
And the first question, it was like posed as a series of questions,
00:22:40 ►
a dialogue between a teacher and a student.
00:22:49 ►
The question it posed for me is, is the sequence a sequence? Or is it simply a traditional jumble? Now, what would be the difference? Well, if it’s a sequence, then
00:22:55 ►
there’s a rule that makes it, that orders it. If it’s just a jumble, then there is no rule that orders it. It’s just like a randomly shuffled pack of cards.
00:23:08 ►
So I was like, you know, this is in over my head kind of stuff.
00:23:13 ►
I was basically just an Asian traveling freak.
00:23:18 ►
But I looked at what’s called the first order of difference.
00:23:23 ►
The first order of difference is how many
00:23:26 ►
lines change as you go from one hexagram to the next. Not a very deep concept. I mean,
00:23:34 ►
the first hexagram is all solid lines. The second hexagram is all broken lines. Hexagrams
00:23:43 ►
have six lines.
00:23:47 ►
Therefore, what is the first order of difference as you go from hexagram one to two?
00:23:53 ►
Six. Six. All lines change.
00:23:57 ►
So I graphed this.
00:24:00 ►
And to make a long story short,
00:24:02 ►
I discovered artificial arrangements.
00:24:06 ►
I discovered that these hexagrams had been arranged to cause certain results to occur.
00:24:14 ►
That somebody had gone in there with an intent to achieve certain mathematical conservation effects.
00:24:24 ►
And I worked on it and worked on it
00:24:27 ►
and eventually what came out of it
00:24:29 ►
was a fractal algorithm,
00:24:33 ►
a wave for you and I.
00:24:36 ►
And this wave is like a stock market graph
00:24:40 ►
except that it’s not showing the price of something.
00:24:44 ►
It’s showing the price of something.
00:24:49 ►
It’s showing the ebb and flow of habit and novelty.
00:24:52 ►
And when the wave moves upward,
00:24:59 ►
habit, entropy, conservation, recidivism is increasing. And when the wave moves down, novelty, innovation, information,
00:25:10 ►
the wave moves down novelty innovation information connectivity anti-antropic process is increasing and the idea was that this would allow an understanding of history that you would be
00:25:17 ►
able to lay the wave over the past and when you got a perfect matchup with past revolutions, breakthroughs, atrocities, migrations, language changes, and so forth, you would just propagate the way forward into the future.
00:25:35 ►
And you would have not only a theory of history, you would have a theory of future time.
00:25:41 ►
And so all this was done, to make a long story short
00:25:47 ►
and the nature of the mathematical object being used
00:25:54 ►
was that it was a damped oscillation
00:25:56 ►
or it was a self-limiting cycle
00:25:59 ►
so it didn’t just go on and on to infinity
00:26:03 ►
it actually had a finite end.
00:26:05 ►
Well, the big surprise was when we got it matched up to history
00:26:10 ►
in the way that we felt was the best way,
00:26:16 ►
the way that’s most true to the most events
00:26:19 ►
in the intuition of the largest number of people kind of argument.
00:26:24 ►
Then we went to see where is the end point?
00:26:28 ►
Where is the singularity?
00:26:30 ►
Thinking that it could be hundreds of years in the future,
00:26:33 ►
thousands of years in the future, millions of years in the future.
00:26:37 ►
This was in 1975.
00:26:39 ►
Discovered, no, it’s 38 years in the future.
00:26:49 ►
So that was the first surprise that the wave which seemed to work so well on the past burdened itself with a new near-term prediction that seemed highly
00:26:57 ►
unlikely the second surprise came some six weeks later when somebody pointed out that to the day, to the day, we had
00:27:08 ►
calculated our way to the end of the Mayan calendar. Now that is weird, folks. The only thing I have in
00:27:17 ►
common with the Mayan calendar is that we both, I and the Maya, took psychedelic mushrooms.
00:27:31 ►
Well, is it so woo-woo that it’s actually as though there’s a barcode in there? And if you get deep enough in and pass all the gates and pass all the passwords
00:27:38 ►
and get to the sanctum sanctorum, that then is revealed this axis point of time whether you are doing it a thousand years
00:27:49 ►
ago as or two thousand years ago even as the maya did it or whether you’re doing it 38 years in
00:27:56 ►
advance of the moment that this is the message the mathematical astronomical Pythagorean download
00:28:05 ►
that the mushroom seems to give a lot of people.
00:28:12 ►
I mean, I don’t say if you take mushrooms
00:28:14 ►
you will find yourself caught up in the dynamics of the Mayan calendar,
00:28:17 ►
but you might, many have.
00:28:21 ►
I certainly, you know, I’m more
00:28:26 ►
rational than I may sound
00:28:29 ►
here
00:28:30 ►
I’m a good person to be the message
00:28:33 ►
for such a squirrely idea
00:28:35 ►
because I doubt
00:28:37 ►
I know absolutely
00:28:39 ►
how flaky this sounds
00:28:41 ►
how unlikely
00:28:43 ►
how lightly anchored.
00:28:45 ►
So I’m not here to found a cult.
00:28:49 ►
I just had a very wiggy experience
00:28:53 ►
that unlike, you know, the problem with most people’s
00:28:57 ►
really wiggy experiences is that it never gets down
00:29:02 ►
to the nitty gritty.
00:29:05 ►
And by the nitty-gritty, I basically mean a mathematical formula
00:29:10 ►
that you can then throw up on a blackboard and say to the experts,
00:29:16 ►
this is what God said to me, is it horseshit or what is it?
00:29:20 ►
Usually what happens in these self-risen
00:29:25 ►
kundalini
00:29:25 ►
or psychotic
00:29:26 ►
break
00:29:27 ►
or shamanic
00:29:28 ►
whatever
00:29:28 ►
or psychedelic
00:29:29 ►
runaway states
00:29:30 ►
is that
00:29:31 ►
there is a
00:29:32 ►
revelation
00:29:33 ►
and it’s quirky
00:29:34 ►
and it’s
00:29:36 ►
personalistic
00:29:37 ►
and it’s usually
00:29:38 ►
messianic
00:29:39 ►
and it’s
00:29:41 ►
unanchored
00:29:42 ►
so people
00:29:44 ►
put you away
00:29:45 ►
because they just say,
00:29:47 ►
well, you have no proof
00:29:48 ►
that you’re the Kvitz Haderach
00:29:50 ►
sent from Arcturus
00:29:52 ►
to lead mankind to milk and honey.
00:29:54 ►
You just say this
00:29:56 ►
and you say it too much
00:29:58 ►
and too loudly and inappropriately
00:30:01 ►
and so now we’re going to drop a net over you.
00:30:03 ►
The good thing in my view of what
00:30:06 ►
happened to me is it actually got down to a mathematical proposition a law a hypothesized
00:30:14 ►
law which is you may turn out to be false but it it was a contender. You understand what I mean? It played in the highest class of competition of all,
00:30:28 ►
which is in the realm of formal mathematical theory,
00:30:31 ►
as did Pythagoras, as did some of Plato’s work.
00:30:37 ►
If you’re interested in this kind of thing,
00:30:39 ►
read the 10th book of the Republic, the Myth of Ur.
00:30:43 ►
Do any of you recall what’s going on there?
00:30:46 ►
This is Plato.
00:30:47 ►
He’s at this banquet,
00:30:49 ►
and then the conversation takes this sudden left turn,
00:30:53 ►
and he tells this story about this guy, Ur,
00:30:56 ►
who was a soldier and died,
00:30:59 ►
and was dead eight days,
00:31:01 ►
and then came back,
00:31:03 ►
and then he lays out this rap, one of the most puzzling passages in
00:31:07 ►
the entire platonic corpus the myth of er and it’s this mathematical treatise about this thing called
00:31:14 ►
the spindle of necessity which is the ratios are given and how it’s something inside something else
00:31:23 ►
and something turns one way and something turns one way and something
00:31:26 ►
turns another way and the ratios are like this and like this. This is one of the most argued
00:31:31 ►
about passages in the ancient literature. What is being described? What does it mean? Well,
00:31:37 ►
it’s another one of these mathematical downloads. I am still willing to argue that what I put down about the I Ching is true,
00:31:48 ►
or that a truth is very close to the surface in all of that.
00:31:54 ►
Think about the I Ching for a moment.
00:31:58 ►
This is one of the world’s oldest intellectual artifacts.
00:32:03 ►
This is a mathematical notation system of some sort
00:32:08 ►
for the purpose of creating a physics of time,
00:32:12 ►
a phenomenological description of the order of time
00:32:15 ►
based on human observation.
00:32:18 ►
And it arises in a completely non-Western context.
00:32:22 ►
It arises in a context, we presume,
00:32:25 ►
of shamanism and proto-daoist values.
00:32:30 ►
And I think that what happened
00:32:33 ►
was that people with a very different set of agendas
00:32:37 ►
than those of Western civilization
00:32:40 ►
chased after an understanding of time
00:32:43 ►
in the same way that we chased after an understanding of time in the same way that we chased after an
00:32:46 ►
understanding of matter and the way you understand time is not by building enormous instruments or
00:32:54 ►
clashing elements together or no time the essence of understanding time lies in understanding and understanding organism. And so it yields to a very low-tech
00:33:06 ►
observational style of natural science,
00:33:10 ►
which we call yoga.
00:33:13 ►
By looking inside the body and the mind,
00:33:18 ►
as you still gross physiological functions,
00:33:23 ►
subtler and subtler
00:33:25 ►
shells of vibration
00:33:28 ►
and emanation and physiological activity
00:33:31 ►
come into view and eventually
00:33:34 ►
if you, my hypothesis is
00:33:38 ►
that eventually if you do this with sufficient
00:33:40 ►
care and attention
00:33:42 ►
you get down to some kind of level
00:33:46 ►
where you’re actually at the level
00:33:49 ►
of the primal quantum mechanical vibrations
00:33:52 ►
that lie behind everything.
00:33:55 ►
In other words, you are in the realm
00:33:56 ►
of the primal patterns.
00:33:59 ►
The primal patterns whose activity
00:34:03 ►
downloads and eventuates as the macro physical world
00:34:08 ►
in other words you’re in the realm of the butterfly’s wing in the chaos theory
00:34:13 ►
that says the butterfly’s wing can start the cascade that leads to the hurricane
00:34:19 ►
well these people who penetrated to this realm mapped it phenomenologically.
00:34:27 ►
They said time is a thing of elements,
00:34:32 ►
in the same way that Western science discovered matter is a thing of elements.
00:34:36 ►
They said time is made of elements.
00:34:40 ►
Well, then the question immediately becomes for the rational mind,
00:34:44 ►
how many elements?
00:34:46 ►
a million? ten thousand?
00:34:49 ►
one hundred?
00:34:50 ►
the answer is observe
00:34:52 ►
make notes
00:34:54 ►
observe similarities
00:34:56 ►
observe differences
00:34:58 ►
mathematically analyze your data
00:35:00 ►
the answer is
00:35:02 ►
sixty four
00:35:03 ►
time comes in sixty 64 irreducible species. And the hexagrams of the
00:35:11 ►
I Ching are simply a way of noting and assigning each one a distinct gestaltung for purposes of
00:35:20 ►
manipulation. And in the same way that plutonium is not sulfur
00:35:25 ►
and tin is not oxygen,
00:35:28 ►
these species of time display properties.
00:35:33 ►
Time is not as Newton thought,
00:35:36 ►
pure duration,
00:35:37 ►
some kind of intellectual abstraction
00:35:39 ►
necessary for a serial universe.
00:35:43 ►
Time is a real thing.
00:35:44 ►
It’s as palpable as electricity. necessary for a serial universe. Time is a real thing.
00:35:47 ►
It’s as palpable as electricity.
00:35:50 ►
It’s as real as radiation.
00:35:52 ►
It’s a thing. And so then what’s going on is that
00:35:57 ►
objects which arise in time
00:36:01 ►
carry the impress in their structure of the medium
00:36:08 ►
in which they arose.
00:36:11 ►
And so organism becomes a microcosmic
00:36:15 ►
downloading, a mapping of the architectonics
00:36:20 ►
of being. I don’t find this
00:36:24 ►
occult at all.
00:36:25 ►
This seems to me quite reasonable.
00:36:27 ►
Let me give you an analogy
00:36:29 ►
to help you understand what I’m saying here.
00:36:32 ►
Think of a sand dune.
00:36:36 ►
Notice that when you envision a sand dune
00:36:40 ►
that it looks like wind.
00:36:44 ►
The thing in your mind looks like wind. Well, now let’s analyze
00:36:48 ►
what’s going on here. The sand dune looks like wind because sand dunes are made by wind. Okay,
00:36:57 ►
what is wind? Wind is a pressure gradient phenomenon that is variable in time.
00:37:06 ►
What is a sand dune?
00:37:09 ►
It’s a download, a flattening.
00:37:12 ►
It’s a one-dimensional picture of the wind. If you had a good computer and you had a sand dune,
00:37:15 ►
you could compute backward from the sand dune to the speed of the wind.
00:37:20 ►
Well now, taking that image, think of it this way.
00:37:26 ►
Think of the grains of sand as genes.
00:37:32 ►
Think of the wind as 500 or 700 million years of time
00:37:39 ►
moving those genes around, blowing them around,
00:37:43 ►
recombining them, breaking them apart, pushing them together.
00:37:47 ►
At the end of that time, life would bear the imprint
00:37:53 ►
of the medium in which it came to be.
00:37:57 ►
So it is, in fact, not a leap of occult faith
00:38:02 ►
that the human organism would have impressed upon it
00:38:06 ►
the categories
00:38:07 ►
that shape time
00:38:09 ►
because we arose
00:38:11 ►
in time
00:38:13 ►
and you keep
00:38:16 ►
talking about biology and you talk
00:38:18 ►
about the leap from biology
00:38:20 ►
into culture
00:38:21 ►
and you talk about the medium
00:38:23 ►
what do you think of the Internet as the wind or the medium,
00:38:30 ►
and that the mememic qualities that are occurring in culture,
00:38:36 ►
you know, tying into the genetic codes like biology does,
00:38:41 ►
is the real medium for unfolding what I mentioned to you earlier, the global intuition.
00:38:49 ►
It seems like all of this stuff is fitting together these days.
00:38:54 ►
Well, there’s this thing called the two to the sixth end rule. I’m not sure that I can
00:38:59 ►
quote it directly, but Benjamin Wharf figured this out out and it’s that in any lexical
00:39:06 ►
tree no
00:39:07 ►
category on any level
00:39:09 ►
can contain more than two to the
00:39:11 ►
sixth N members in other words
00:39:13 ►
64 so
00:39:15 ►
in a way we’re
00:39:17 ►
dimensionally imprisoned
00:39:19 ►
inside this because our minds
00:39:22 ►
work this way and so do our
00:39:23 ►
bodies
00:39:24 ►
DNA like the I Ching, runs
00:39:29 ►
on a code based on 64. There are 64 codons coding for the various amino acids that make
00:39:37 ►
up all the proteins that organize organic nature. Well, so you have the I Ching, which categorizes time as having 64 categories.
00:39:48 ►
You have the DNA,
00:39:50 ►
which arose as the most elegant expression of complexity in time,
00:39:55 ►
running on 64 categories.
00:39:59 ►
Then you have the human brain
00:40:00 ►
running on the platform of animal organization run by DNA and we discovered through
00:40:08 ►
Worf’s law the to the sixth end rule that our lexical categories are ruled by these same
00:40:14 ►
limitations so it appears you know what I said earlier this morning that life is undergoing some kind of conquest of geometry.
00:40:26 ►
And I almost picture it like protoplasm flowing into a crystal landscape.
00:40:33 ►
We conquer this geometry by assuming its shape in some sense.
00:40:39 ►
So it transforms us even as we overrun it.
00:40:46 ►
What a thought. What a thought.
00:40:48 ►
What a thought.
00:40:49 ►
It transforms us even as we overrun it.
00:40:53 ►
You know, I guess the question is,
00:40:55 ►
are we becoming our machines or are machines becoming us?
00:41:01 ►
That’s the real question today.
00:41:04 ►
And did you catch the part about
00:41:06 ►
2012 where he said, we spin it, we’re the spin doctors of this thing, the details
00:41:12 ►
are ours to fabricate. So if that’s the case then hey let’s start fabricating
00:41:20 ►
this thing in a more sustainable and less fearful way.
00:41:25 ►
Actually I guess I know I can tell you what to do to help our species prepare
00:41:32 ►
for some difficult times that I think are just ahead but I can tell you to
00:41:36 ►
follow your heart you know I’m sure that deep inside you know what’s the best
00:41:41 ►
road for you to take and it may not be the easiest road but you know what’s the best road for you to take. And it may not be the easiest road, but, you know, it’s the one with heart.
00:41:48 ►
Well, I hope you enjoyed hearing more of Terrence McKenna today.
00:41:53 ►
I’ve got a couple more of these to go, and I’ll try to get them out as soon as I can.
00:41:59 ►
I guess I ought to tell you that I’m in the process right now of moving to a new place,
00:42:03 ►
and so I won’t be able to get a new podcast out every week just like I’d like to,
00:42:08 ►
but I hope you’ll bear with me until I can get resettled again.
00:42:13 ►
Anyway, thanks for being with us here today in the psychedelic salon,
00:42:18 ►
and thanks again to Chateau Hayouk for the use of their fine music.
00:42:24 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:42:29 ►
Be well, my friends.