Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
1:05 “I think that Maxwell’s Laws of Thermodynamics are only part of the story, and that you also have to look at the work that Ilya Prigogine did in the 60’s and 70’s where he showed that there is this principle-which they called different things, but, basically, it was random perturbation to higher states of order… Sometimes systems spontaneously organize themselves into more complex forms.”
2:30 “Language is in conquest of dimensional expression-or, something is seeking to manifest itself in a domain of time and space of higher and higher dimension.”
2:50-4:33 Terence uses Novelty Theory to describe the history of biological evolution in terms of an increasing ability to exist in and perceive higher and higher dimensions of being.”…better eyes, better muscles, better coordination, better ability to move through this revealed topological manifold with a temporal axis.”
4:40 “What spoken language is about is the recovery of memory at a later date-it’s a data recall system. And you talk about the past… and you strategize from it… When you get to writing, this time-binding function is now totally explicit, the game is out in the open-the purpose of these endeavors is to keep the past from slipping away.”
5:42 “The primate conquest of time (through time-binding technology) is the phenomenon that we call human history. This is apparently what we’re about, this is why we speak, why we write, why we invent phonetic alphabets and mathematical notation-because we are binding time. Well, you can then propagate that process forward to say, ‘What would satisfy this drive?’ Well, nothing less than a complete conquest of time itself.”
6:54 “To make this leap to the full-coordination of 4-D requires some kind of machine symbiosis… It requires that we redesign and extend our nervous system over the entire planet, and that we undergo some kind of metamorphosis, and become, instead of semi-cannibalistic primates, machine tenders of a global nervous system, some of which is gold and copper and glass, and some of which is flesh and DNA and neurons, and this whole thing is in a state of self-designing foment.”
7:55 In the preceding podcast (In the Valley of Novelty – Part 5, 35:27), Terence says that two important facts about nature have been overlooked by science. The first one (discussed in Part 5) was the increase of Novelty/complexity through time. Now, Terence begins talking about the second one (the acceleration of this complexification).
8:05 “This process of producing Novelty… is not going on at a steady rate. It’s going on faster and faster as we approach the present. It’s like what mathematicians call a cascade… The early history of the universe is dull news… stars are condensing, galaxies are ordering themselves-this is the stuff of millennia, tens of millennia, greater spans of time… Once you get down to the last 500 million years on this planet, biology is the main show.”
9:42 “When you reach the last million years, it’s as though this process of the emergence of Novelty both concentrates itself in nature into a single line-the hominids-but it also intensifies itself by orders of magnitude. So change is then happening on a scale of hundreds of years-languages are changing, pottery designs [are changing]-and as we approach the present, this becomes more and more furious. What Novelty Theory is saying is: this is not an easily explained phenomenon.”
10:56 “Human history is the shockwave of some greater event about to emerge out of the order of nature. Human history-25,000 years is all it is-is like a shimmer, an aura, something that flashes across animal nature in the geological millisecond before the thing goes cosmic, or whatever it is that it’s going to go.”
Previous Episode
031 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 5)
Next Episode
033 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 7)
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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 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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I hope you’re not getting tired of this series of Terrence McKenna podcasts because there are still a few more to go.
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In today’s program, Terrence talks about the cascade of history, human-machine symbiosis, and the Internet, among other things.
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And we’ll begin with his rap about time and the evolution of animal life on this planet.
00:00:56 ►
So, let’s hear what Terence McKenna thinks about all the changes now taking place at such a mind-bending rate here on our beautiful little planet.
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planet.
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The way I think of it is, I think that, you know, Maxwell’s laws of thermodynamics are only part of the story, and that you also have to look at the work that T. Leoprigosian
00:01:16 ►
did in the 60s and 70s, where he showed that there is this principle, which they called
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different things,
00:01:29 ►
but basically it was random perturbation to higher states of order,
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and that this occurred in systems of all levels of complexity that actually sometimes systems spontaneously organize themselves
00:01:39 ►
into more complex forms.
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So in the entropic state that you’re talking about,
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which resembles a Bernoulli gas,
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a model of dissipation of the particles of gas,
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the opposite end of the spectrum would be this notion
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that all points in the matrix become cotangent,
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which requires a higher dimension, but is still trivial.
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And that’s what I think it is.
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I think that biology, like this process which we’ve called novelty or complexification,
00:02:18 ►
that we say is increasing through time, starts simple, ends complicated.
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is increasing through time, starts simple, ends complicated. One way of talking about it is to think of it as language is in conquest of dimensional expression,
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or something is seeking to manifest itself in a domain of time and space, of higher and higher dimension.
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Because if you go back to the earliest biological emergence, they’re like fixed slimes, these
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early life forms.
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They’re essentially points.
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They don’t move through space.
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They have no eyes. They have no organs of perception. They are simply points of being. Well, then, still later in the process, they break free from their stationary points and they become motile, but they still have no perception, they’re just groping now.
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Now they’re groping specks of being, and they’ve gone from being points to the equivalent of lines.
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Well, then finally, light-sensitive chemistry sequesters itself in the membrane,
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clusters itself in the membrane,
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and these things begin to have a notion of a gradient,
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that the action is where the light is,
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that the food is where the light is. And so then this generates the concept here and there,
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which is a time-bound concept.
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Suddenly time springs into being.
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which is a time-bound concept.
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Suddenly time springs into being.
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There is the notion of the execution of will over time.
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Well, then the rest of the story of the evolution of animal life right up to 50,000 years ago
00:04:17 ►
is simply the story of better eyes,
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better muscles, better coordination,
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better ability to move through this revealed topological manifold
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with a temporal axis.
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But then, with the advent of spoken language,
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what spoken language is about is the recovery of memory
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at a later date
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it’s a data recall system
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and then you talk about the past
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and you not only talk about it
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but you strategize from it
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hunting strategies
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erotic fantasy
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mate getting strategies
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when you get to writing erotic fantasy, mate-getting strategies.
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When you get to writing,
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this time-binding function is now totally explicit.
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The game is out in the open.
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The purpose of these behaviors is to keep the past from slipping away.
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And so we write down king lists and dynastic histories
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and this sort of thing.
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Well, from this point of view
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that I’m pushing here for a moment,
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that evolution is the conquest of dimensionality,
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you can see then that the primate conquest of time through time-binding technologies is
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the phenomenon that we call human history. This is apparently what we’re about. This
00:05:57 ►
is why we speak, why we write, why we invent phonetic alphabets and mathematical notation, because we are binding time.
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Well, you can then propagate that process forward to say,
00:06:12 ►
well, then what would satisfy this drive?
00:06:15 ►
Well, nothing less than a complete conquest of time itself,
00:06:19 ►
in the same way that as we look back in the history of biology,
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we see these other
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dimensional barriers were crossed from stationary from from in situ existence
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to motility to a sense of light to coordination of three-dimensional space
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now coordination of fourth dimensional space and to make this leap to the full coordination of 4D,
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it requires some kind of machine symbiosis.
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It requires prostheses.
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It requires that we redesign and extend our nervous system over the entire planet
00:07:01 ►
and that we undergo some kind of metamorphosis
00:07:05 ►
and become instead of semi-cannibalistic primates
00:07:11 ►
machine tenders of a global nervous system
00:07:15 ►
some of which is gold and copper and glass
00:07:19 ►
and some of which is flesh and DNA and neurons
00:07:23 ►
and this whole thing is in a state of self-designing foment.
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And that, you know, I don’t know how we got here,
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but it leads me to the second point I wanted to make earlier
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when I was talking about novelty.
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I said there were two things which science had overlooked, and then I discussed the first one, which is that nature is a novelty-producing and conserving engine.
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The second thing that science has overlooked and culture has overlooked is related to the first. And it’s this. It’s that this process of producing novelty
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that the universe is about
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is not going on at a steady rate.
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It’s going on faster and faster
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as we approach the present.
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It’s like what mathematicians call a cascade.
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It began slowly and has moved with greater and greater acceleration
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from the very first moments of its existence.
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So the early history of the universe is dull news.
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It’s slow moving.
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I mean, stars are condensing.
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Galaxies are ordering themselves. This is the stuff
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of millennia, of tens of millennia, of greater spans of time. Once you get down to the last
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500 million years on this planet, biology is the main show. Geology and astrophysics have receded into the background
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and where the action, the mutation, the change, the shifts is happening
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is on the surface of planets in interface with atmospheres and cosmic environments
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and asteroidal impacts and melts and all these various things that went on.
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There is a period for life before that, a long, long period, the archaeozoic.
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But you talk about Dolesville, I mean, there’s nothing going on there.
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Well, then when you reach the last million years it’s as though
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you know this this process of the emergence of novelty both concentrates
00:09:54 ►
itself in nature into a single line the hominids but it also intensifies itself by orders of magnitude.
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So change is then happening on a scale of hundreds of years.
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Languages are changing, pottery designs.
00:10:21 ►
And as we approach the present, this becomes more and more furious. Now, and so what novelty theory is saying is this is not an easily explained
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phenomenon. It’s not simply a natural consequence of our being in the world means that the world process is approaching
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some kind of definitive cusp in its development. In other words, that human history is the
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shockwave of some greater event about to emerge out of the order of nature
00:11:06 ►
that human history, 25,000 years is all it is,
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is like a shimmer, an aura,
00:11:13 ►
something which flashes across animal nature
00:11:16 ►
in the geological millisecond before the thing goes cosmic
00:11:24 ►
or whatever it is that it’s going to go.
00:11:29 ►
And so for us, you know, human history has this enormous dramatic impact
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because our lives last 70 or 80 years if we’re lucky.
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I mean, we’re as ephemeral as mayflies.
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For us, human history is 1,500 generations.
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But in terms of the species, it’s a fever.
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It’s a moment that has come upon us.
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And now we’re deep, deep, deep into it.
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And deep enough into it, I think, that we can begin to actually talk about what lies at the other side.
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to actually talk about what lies at the other side.
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And it’s, you know, our religions have become almost the architectures of our social hopes
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and this coincidence of calendrical synchronism
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that we’re undergoing.
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And what I mean by that is that the Mayan civilization fixated on the heliacal rising of the winter solstice sun Sun and the Galactic Center, an event which occurs only once every 26,000 years, occurs
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in 2012. They fixated originally founded by a Roman dictator,
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misses the same 26,000 year node with a millennial date by only 12 years.
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So, you know, that’s.001% on a scale of 10,000 years.
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So, for all practical purposes, these two calendars both reach very
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important culmination dates, very near to each other in eternity, if you think about
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how much time that is. So what does this mean? Well, if you’re a Jungian or believe in the greater larger dynamics
00:13:48 ►
of the unconscious
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it means that on the wheel of cosmic time
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somehow the appointment of the end of a world year
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has arrived
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why is it keyed to the galactic center?
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I wouldn’t, at this point, care to speculate.
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I could be dragged into it,
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but it’s probably not the best way to spend our time.
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But the point is that this phenomenon of novelty conservation,
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which has been going on for a very long time throughout the whole life of the universe, is now happening so rapidly that it’s down into the scales of time where it’s discernible in a human lifetime.
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less than a human lifetime.
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Now change defines everything,
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even for such microbes as ourselves,
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where before we were embedded, as it were, in the much more slow-moving processes of climate change
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and glaciation advance and retraction and that sort of thing.
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Now we make our own time.
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And we even talk about downloading ourselves into machines.
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Well, as we sit here, we’re functioning at about 100 hertz,
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about 100 cycles a second.
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If you were downloaded into even today’s desktop computer,
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you’d be running at 200 megahertz.
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Suddenly, 2012 would appear as far away in time
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as the bust-up of Pangea is in the other direction,
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because you would have stretched time.
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All time is is how much you can jam into a moment.
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It’s very easy to suppose that we’re on the brink of a weird kind of pseudo-immortality
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where time spent in circuitry is essentially time spent in eternity.
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And people will choose toward the close of their lives to migrate into the virtual realms
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where the laws of physics are replaced by the laws of the programmer’s imagination.
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You really then are entering into your own private Idaho, so to speak.
00:16:20 ►
Teilhard de Jardin, for those of you who don’t know his work, was a Jesuit paleontologist and primatologist who wrote in the 1950s The Omega Point, The Phenomenon of Man. Nothing I say or little that anybody has said about cyberspace, about the meltdown of humanity into some electronic collectivity has been surpassed by Teilhard de Chardin. human beings were on this earth, and that they would generate what he called the noosphere.
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And the noosphere was simply the atmosphere of electronic and radar
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and radio and telegraphic and television signals
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which surround the earth,
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that we would build a new atmosphere, as it were,
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a technosphere of information.
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And information is a very key concept in all of this.
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What I call novelty, you could arguably call information.
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What I call habit, you could arguably call noise.
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call noise.
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And, you know, this is a vision of being where there’s a struggle between these two antithetical forces.
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One, described by the second law of thermodynamics, entropy.
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The other described by novelty theory, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, etc., etc.
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And they are, in every
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situation, locked
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in struggle. The amount
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of order and disorder
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in any situation is
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dictated by the unique
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configuration of the
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local struggle between these
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two forces, if you want to put it
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that way.
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But the good news is,
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it’s not a Manichean thing.
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It doesn’t go on forever.
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These two forces are not quite equally pitted.
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Over time, novelty wins.
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Order wins.
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Order triumphs over disorder and builds higher states of order
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so in a way you could think of the whole process
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as what engineers call a damped oscillation
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that habit is this oscillation
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in a space of perfection
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and it is eventually damped
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by the surrounding
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telos toward concrescence.
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A lot of the words that I use to talk about this are taken out of Alfred North Whitehead,
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who’s, to my mind, the great unread philosopher of the 20th century.
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And he wrote a book called Process and Reality
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in which he talks,
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tries to build a general vocabulary
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for talking about being.
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And, you know, it comes off as very psychedelic
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and very chaotic, dynamical
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kind of anticipation.
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Check out Whitehead
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the
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thing which has
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made my
00:19:50 ►
novelty theory difficult
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to sell in terms of
00:19:55 ►
the ugly knobs and
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warts on it as a theory
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were that it has this built in
00:20:01 ►
crazy
00:20:03 ►
assumption
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which is that in the very short term meaning that it has this built-in crazy assumption,
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which is that in the very short term,
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meaning the next 15 or 20 years, the world will, in part,
00:20:15 ►
completely transform itself.
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And so it’s in the category
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with apocalyptic thinking,
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millenarian thinking, miraculous thinking, deus ex machinas, squirrely revelations, all of that, all of which I abhor.
00:20:34 ►
But you can’t escape the mathematical implications once you draw the curve of the asymptotic acceleration into novelty.
00:20:46 ►
There’s a group of people, you can read their stuff on the internet,
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they’re called extopians or singularists.
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And they’re very hard-headed engineering types, libertarian geeks,
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not psychedelic, not spiritual in any sense of the word, and
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they propagate out curves such as the human population curve, the curve of information,
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number of papers being published, the curve of the amount of energy being released, so
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forth and so on.
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All these curves reach infinity somewhere before 2025.
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What does it mean to say these curves reach infinity?
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Nobody knows. It’s a singularity. It doesn’t make sense.
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It’s a mathematical contradiction.
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What it means is your model is broken.
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What is going to happen has so many dimensions embedded in it that your simple
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propagations of curves method of analyzing it are giving you crazy data that makes no
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sense. And, you know, I’m being semi-unemployed. I have the leisure to spend many hours a day reading journals and surfing the net and so forth.
00:22:06 ►
And I’m telling you, all these esoteric fields of knowledge, all these solid state physics,
00:22:29 ►
drug design, genetic engineering, long base interferometry,
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on and on and on, these cabals of secret societies. In each case, they’re reaching out for the ultimate pieces of knowledge in their field.
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And no one is coordinating the implications of all this
00:22:46 ►
across the face of the rising tidal wave of understanding.
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What really is happening is that a very, I wouldn’t say a complete control
00:23:00 ►
of the world of matter and energy is coming into being,
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but a leap forward is being taken.
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And all under the aegis of this key concept of information.
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Information is more primary than time and space,
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more primary than light and electromagnetism.
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Information is the stuff of being.
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It’s all you will ever know.
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It’s all you can ever know.
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The rest are ghostly hypotheses
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to explain the behavior and the presence of information.
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And it’s almost as though it has a syntactical life of its own.
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It’s almost as though it’s a virtual life form of some sort
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that is running on a primate platform.
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I read a very interesting thing by Danny Hillis,
00:24:03 ►
who wrote The Connection Machine. He was talking about songs and he
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said, you know, primitive human beings, especially young juveniles, like to imitate each other
00:24:18 ►
and make strange noises. And some strange noises are easier to make than others.
00:24:28 ►
And so you begin to have a population of short bursts of strange noise.
00:24:35 ►
And these populations, we’ll call them songs, just to make it easy.
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Short bursts of strange noise.
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And some of these songs are easy to remember and some are not.
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And that’s the environment of selection.
00:24:52 ►
So the easy to remember songs survive,
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and the hard to remember songs go extinct.
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And there’s only a limited number of human beings to sing the songs.
00:25:04 ►
So the songs must also compete
00:25:06 ►
for this resource, which is the human singer. And to this point, the human beings have been
00:25:15 ►
like a parasite, or the host of a parasite. These songs have conferred no adaptive good at all to the human being but when the songs
00:25:26 ►
begin to aggregate around repetitious behavior because of this that’s where
00:25:34 ►
there’s a high likelihood of survival because that’s where there’s a high
00:25:38 ►
likelihood of repetition then you begin to have a syntactical net.
00:25:46 ►
And I think that in a sense this is our situation,
00:25:50 ►
that we were early parasitized by a kind of virtual life form
00:25:55 ►
that lives only in syntax and is essentially time-sharing
00:26:00 ►
and piggybacking our nervous system.
00:26:03 ►
But at some point we insisted around it
00:26:07 ►
somewhat the way a cell membrane trapped early bacteria
00:26:11 ►
and turned them into mitochondria.
00:26:14 ►
So now we can think with this linguistic symbiote
00:26:20 ►
that shares our brain space.
00:26:24 ►
However, it’s very interesting, this idea.
00:26:31 ►
I mean, this may seem trivial to you.
00:26:33 ►
It’s new to me, so I’m into it.
00:26:37 ►
I read this book by George Dyson called Darwin Among the Machines,
00:26:43 ►
and I highly recommend this book.
00:26:46 ►
This is a great book, fun book, Darwin Among the Machines.
00:26:51 ►
And one of the points that he makes in there,
00:26:54 ►
that I had sort of, I mean, when you hear it, you say,
00:26:56 ►
yeah, I always sort of knew that,
00:26:58 ►
but I had never quite grokked it in its full implications.
00:27:02 ►
One of the points he makes in there is that when we talk to each other,
00:27:07 ►
when we make sense to each other,
00:27:12 ►
what we say can be perfectly made formulaic through symbolic logic.
00:27:23 ►
In other words, that the branch of mathematics called symbolic logic
00:27:27 ►
is capable of portraying human language and human logical processes perfectly.
00:27:36 ►
But the interesting thing is that this language, symbolic logic,
00:27:41 ►
is the language which machines speak with great fluency.
00:27:47 ►
This is the great bridge between us and the machines,
00:27:54 ►
that fundamentally we speak the same language,
00:27:57 ►
that and to a human being and and to a microprocessor mean the same thing.
00:28:06 ►
So there is no great barrier.
00:28:13 ►
It’s all conceptual between us and machine intelligence.
00:28:20 ►
Machine intelligence is the most likely form of alien intelligence to arrive and complicate our social dialogue because in a sense it’s already here, in a sense we are putting a great deal of effort into creating it, Its emergence depends on this very same appetite for novelty
00:28:46 ►
that allowed us to squeeze ourselves out of the rules of molecular chemistry.
00:28:53 ►
And again, it’s happening at these very high megahertz rates.
00:28:59 ►
Machine evolution will not be like human evolution
00:29:02 ►
because what it took us 50,000 years to achieve,
00:29:07 ►
it can achieve potentially through distributed processing in minutes, hours. Hans Moravec
00:29:14 ►
says of artificial intelligence, we may never know what hit us. It will simply be, come to be. And what would that look like?
00:29:25 ►
We have no idea, or its relationship to us at all.
00:29:30 ►
Yeah.
00:29:31 ►
You said it’s like a linguistic analog of the morphogenetic field that Rupert talks about as far as communicating with evolution.
00:29:40 ►
Yeah, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s like that.
00:29:42 ►
yeah I hadn’t thought of it that way but it’s like that
00:29:44 ►
novelty theory and Rupert’s theories
00:29:49 ►
of the morphogenetic field
00:29:50 ►
are very closely related
00:29:52 ►
he doesn’t believe in a temporal attractor
00:29:57 ►
he believes things are pushed
00:29:59 ►
by necessary causuistry
00:30:01 ►
but the unfolding of the morphogenetic field
00:30:04 ►
and the unfolding of the morphogenetic field and the unfolding of the
00:30:06 ►
time wave, you’re talking about the same thing. You’re talking about the four. You see, in a way,
00:30:14 ►
what science is all about is it will tell you what is possible. If you want to know if something is possible, you ask the expert in that science.
00:30:27 ►
But what science can’t tell you, and what you usually really want to know,
00:30:34 ►
is out of the class of the possible, what things will actually occur.
00:30:43 ►
And we have no theory for this, strangely enough. We have no theory
00:30:49 ►
for out of the class of the… I mean, I suppose somebody who was a fundamentalist or some
00:30:55 ►
kind of Christian might say, well, God’s will. Out of the class of what is possible, what
00:31:02 ►
comes to be is God’s will.
00:31:11 ►
Well, that would be one theory of what it is that winnows the actual from the possible. A scientist would say pre-existing conditions.
00:31:17 ►
In other words, somehow the circumstances into which any phenomenon is born
00:31:25 ►
skew it toward its ultimate developmental end state.
00:31:31 ►
It’s almost like the law of karma or something,
00:31:36 ►
that by the circumstances into which you find yourself,
00:31:40 ►
then you are carried forward to some conclusion that was inevitable based on that.
00:31:48 ►
Novelty theory is not a
00:31:51 ►
it’s not
00:31:54 ►
predestination. It doesn’t
00:31:59 ►
say that the future has happened. If you believe the
00:32:03 ►
future has happened you have you believe the future has happened, you have all kinds
00:32:06 ►
of philosophical problems on your hands. Because, you know, for truth as a concept to have any
00:32:17 ►
meaning, you have to have error. If you think what you think because you can’t think anything else,
00:32:27 ►
which is what predestination is,
00:32:30 ►
then what does the search for truth and meaning look like
00:32:35 ►
in a cosmos like that?
00:32:37 ►
It’s meaningless.
00:32:38 ►
No.
00:32:39 ►
In a predestined cosmos,
00:32:40 ►
you think what you think
00:32:41 ►
because that’s what you think
00:32:42 ►
and you can’t think anything else.
00:32:44 ►
It doesn’t have anything to do with truth so there must be at least that much freedom freedom
00:32:52 ►
to err in the mind but of course the mind through the body is an extension into the world you know
00:33:00 ►
for all the the huffing and puffing of modern science and neurophysiology,
00:33:06 ►
they still can’t tell you how you can think,
00:33:11 ►
I will close my hand and close it.
00:33:16 ►
I mean, this is mind over matter.
00:33:18 ►
This is telekinesis.
00:33:21 ►
This is, science is just completely baffled as to how this can take place at all.
00:33:27 ►
It’s a fundamental miracle, been good for 5,000 years, still knocking them dead.
00:33:34 ►
And it’s by that trick, that we don’t understand how it’s done,
00:33:41 ►
that will and mind and intent enters the world and cities get built and
00:33:48 ►
armies sent marching and religious revelations written down and so forth and so on. But I
00:33:57 ►
think that the, you see, for years I was like crying in the wilderness about this ramping up towards some kind of hyper-complex unravelment of the social machine in the very short term.
00:34:13 ►
But now I feel much more confident than I was ten years ago.
00:34:18 ►
Now ten years closer to the end date.
00:34:21 ►
Because the internet looks to me like the backbone
00:34:25 ►
of the emergent thing
00:34:28 ►
I mean the internet
00:34:29 ►
is a huge
00:34:31 ►
and not fully
00:34:33 ►
comprehended cultural
00:34:35 ►
step that we have
00:34:38 ►
now totally committed ourselves
00:34:40 ►
to it’s nothing less
00:34:41 ►
than the building of a
00:34:43 ►
thinking nervous system
00:34:45 ►
the size of the entire planet.
00:34:49 ►
And our
00:34:49 ►
most important,
00:34:51 ►
we’re wedded to this thing.
00:34:53 ►
Our banking,
00:34:56 ►
military planning, corporate
00:34:58 ►
capitalization,
00:35:00 ►
long-term planning,
00:35:02 ►
design process, inventory
00:35:04 ►
control, resource extraction,
00:35:06 ►
everything is running on this strange companion that we built to be indestructible
00:35:15 ►
because we built it at the height of the Cold War.
00:35:19 ►
And so, you know, it has no nodes of control,
00:35:22 ►
and it’s the most complex thing ever put in place on this planet
00:35:28 ►
since DNA, you know, cooked itself out of the primal ocean.
00:35:35 ►
Yeah.
00:35:36 ►
Again, somehow, are those people that have had these experiences
00:35:40 ►
going to be spared a certain type of…
00:35:44 ►
Yeah, you put your finger on it it’s that
00:35:46 ►
to the degree that people are psychedelic they will be less anxious about what will happen
00:35:53 ►
because what psychedelics show you is that there is life after history there is something outside
00:36:00 ►
of culture if you don’t know that by one means or another, then you will define what is
00:36:06 ►
happening as, you know, the end of the world, the literal apocalypse, the collapse of everything,
00:36:12 ►
when in fact that’s not what it is. It’s just the collapse of historical, print-based, cultural
00:36:20 ►
models and models of the self and the psyche. I embrace it. I mean, we’re not about to blow out here or go extinct. And we never escaped from the yoke of nature. Nature has taken some hits in this neighborhood. 65 million years ago an object encountered the earth that nothing larger than a chicken
00:36:47 ►
on the entire planet
00:36:48 ►
survived that encounter
00:36:50 ►
and guess what it cleared the way for
00:36:53 ►
the flowering plants
00:36:55 ►
the source of all these compounds
00:36:57 ►
we’re so interested in
00:36:58 ►
and the ascendancy of the mammalian order
00:37:01 ►
our dear selves
00:37:03 ►
we are here because of the most appalling bad hair day
00:37:09 ►
this planet ever endured.
00:37:12 ►
So when you start judging this stuff
00:37:15 ►
and saying what’s good, what’s bad,
00:37:18 ►
it’s very hard to say.
00:37:21 ►
Nature is incredibly profligate
00:37:25 ►
and will take enormous chances to preserve novelty,
00:37:29 ►
to keep the novelty game going.
00:37:32 ►
And so I feel that in a sense nature will open a way for us.
00:37:39 ►
Nature is interested in this process.
00:37:42 ►
We represent the greatest step in organizational
00:37:46 ►
realignment
00:37:48 ►
and redesign since
00:37:50 ►
life left the ocean.
00:37:52 ►
Yeah.
00:37:54 ►
It’s grace. It’s the will
00:37:56 ►
of God that makes these
00:37:58 ►
more and more complex systems
00:37:59 ►
fall into place.
00:38:03 ►
This relates to
00:38:04 ►
a question
00:38:05 ►
which was unanswered here this morning,
00:38:07 ►
which was about teleology.
00:38:10 ►
The Darwinian theory of evolution
00:38:13 ►
is very hostile to teleology.
00:38:17 ►
First of all, what is teleology?
00:38:19 ►
Teleology is the idea
00:38:21 ►
that the universe has a purpose.
00:38:24 ►
And Darwinian evolution is hostile to this
00:38:27 ►
because Darwinian evolution arose in 19th century England
00:38:31 ►
where the reigning intellectual paradigm was called deism.
00:38:36 ►
And deism is the idea that God made the universe like a clockmaker
00:38:42 ►
and then he went away and left it going uh and in other words the
00:38:47 ►
divine clockmaker the universe was structured by a force which has now withdrawn from it
00:38:54 ►
and darwin and his circle were very clearly atheistic and they wanted to see biology as requiring no purpose to direct it at all.
00:39:12 ►
And so they created the dual concept of random mutation and natural selection.
00:39:36 ►
Random mutation is just that because of copying errors, radiation, drift, and a toxic material in the cellular environment, that the DNA messages degrade.
00:39:48 ►
So that’s mutation. selection is that this DNA is then subjected to the selective winnowing out that the environment lays against it. So by the meshing of these two processes, this is Darwinian theory,
00:39:56 ►
by the meshing of random mutation and natural selection, you get the slow incremental emergence of new forms.
00:40:07 ►
And these forms, some of which confer advantage and some don’t.
00:40:11 ►
Most don’t and they’re eliminated.
00:40:14 ►
Those that do stay in the system.
00:40:17 ►
And incrementally, the system seeks to come to equilibrium
00:40:23 ►
with the selective forces
00:40:26 ►
that are operating on it.
00:40:28 ►
But these selective forces,
00:40:30 ►
which are continent,
00:40:32 ►
incidental radiation from space,
00:40:35 ►
weather, climate change,
00:40:37 ►
so forth and so on,
00:40:38 ►
because these factors are themselves
00:40:40 ►
changing over time, mutating,
00:40:43 ►
the system can never come to equilibrium.
00:40:47 ►
And so for Darwinian evolution,
00:40:49 ►
evolution is what’s called a random walk.
00:40:52 ►
The system destabilizes, it corrects itself.
00:40:56 ►
It destabilizes, it corrects.
00:40:59 ►
Destabilizes, it corrects.
00:41:01 ►
And after billions of years of this,
00:41:03 ►
lo and behold, you get animals like
00:41:05 ►
ourselves. But these 19th century evolutionists were keen to say, do not imagine that this
00:41:13 ►
is God’s purpose or that the final form was prefigured in the original form. No, this just happened like this. Well, now we’ve had 150 years to absorb all this.
00:41:31 ►
In the meantime, Mendelian genetics,
00:41:33 ►
the particulate nature of the gene has been understood.
00:41:36 ►
The molecular nature of the gene has been understood.
00:41:39 ►
We can say some new things about this.
00:41:41 ►
Also, we are no longer under the spell of deism.
00:41:49 ►
That’s a crank idea that nobody is that keen for.
00:41:53 ►
And so it’s a different intellectual world.
00:41:55 ►
Well, now when we look at nature, we see a different picture.
00:42:00 ►
We see that where Darwin said
00:42:04 ►
nature is all red in tooth and claw,
00:42:07 ►
we see that the way to be a successful species,
00:42:13 ►
the way to survive, is to make yourself indispensable to your neighbors.
00:42:20 ►
Then, instead of attempting to push you down and extinguish you,
00:42:25 ►
if you can cut deals with everybody in your neighborhood,
00:42:29 ►
providing various chemicals or energy supplies
00:42:32 ►
or other affects in the environment,
00:42:38 ►
then everybody will begin to pull your way.
00:42:41 ►
So in fact, cooperation is what is maximized
00:42:46 ►
among species.
00:42:48 ►
And a huge complex organic system
00:42:50 ►
like a coral reef or a rainforest
00:42:52 ►
is actually attempting to come
00:42:56 ►
to an equilibrium of balance
00:42:58 ►
that is the point of greatest benefit
00:43:01 ►
for the greatest number of organisms
00:43:03 ►
and species in the system.
00:43:06 ►
Well, this is a whole different picture, and it opens the possibility.
00:43:15 ►
These new sciences like complexity theory, global dynamics, chaos theory, have made it now respectable to think about
00:43:27 ►
processes that are drawn by something in the future
00:43:32 ►
rather than pushed from behind.
00:43:34 ►
In the 19th century, that was inconceivable.
00:43:37 ►
All that was known was the chain of cause and effect.
00:43:42 ►
But now we see that the temporal landscape
00:43:45 ►
has what are called basins of attraction in it,
00:43:48 ►
and that certain processes are actually drawn forward
00:43:52 ►
by their presumed end states.
00:43:55 ►
And so it seems less outlandish to us, I think,
00:44:03 ►
to suppose there is a purpose.
00:44:06 ►
And also we see a level of global integration
00:44:09 ►
and global mutation
00:44:11 ►
that Darwin couldn’t have even dreamed of.
00:44:15 ►
The idea of elements of time
00:44:18 ►
having their particular qualities,
00:44:20 ►
have you correlated that with astrology at all?
00:44:24 ►
Well, it’s somewhat like astrology, except astrology
00:44:27 ►
believes that planets and stars and the arrangements
00:44:31 ►
among them represent shifts in a kind of
00:44:35 ►
energy field. In a way, this is more abstract.
00:44:40 ►
Wang Pi, who was a medieval
00:44:43 ►
Chinese mystic, his thought comes eerily close to my own in that the way he pictured this was that you have the sequence moving in an abstract dimension, but you have the sequence moving at a certain speed and overlaying that is another sequence moving at a
00:45:07 ►
different speed and over that another version of the King Wen sequence moving
00:45:13 ►
at another speed and that a given moment is a slice through these levels that
00:45:21 ►
creates a unique juxtaposition of the levels so it is in
00:45:26 ►
that sense very astrological but it’s all calculated independent of any
00:45:33 ►
observation of nature although if it’s true then it’s interesting that there
00:45:40 ►
are correlations in the cycles in the King Wen sequence to astrological cycles.
00:45:47 ►
Specifically, the system that I elaborated on one level contains a cycle of 384 days.
00:45:58 ►
That’s the number of lines, 6 times 64,
00:46:03 ►
the number of lines in a complete sequence of the I Ching, 384 days.
00:46:08 ►
Well, it happens to be 13 lunar cycles.
00:46:12 ►
Exactly.
00:46:13 ►
Well, then if you take it times 64, you get a number, 67 years, 0.10425 days,
00:46:22 ►
which is 6 sunspot cycles.
00:46:25 ►
And sunspot cycles also occur in 33-year cycles.
00:46:30 ►
Well, it’s known that the early Han Dynasty Chinese knew about sunspot cycles.
00:46:37 ►
They were the first people to observe them.
00:46:40 ►
So, you know, without hypothesizing super technologies or any kind of Atlantis type stuff, we see that the King Wen sequence could have been a kind of gear used in a system of multiplicands that predicted lunar cycles, sunspot cycles on two levels, and then with one further multiplication,
00:47:12 ►
this processional great year, this 26,300 year cycle.
00:47:15 ►
So it’s a neat kind of resonance calendar.
00:47:23 ►
And given the sorry state of Chinese calendar making in historical time,
00:47:30 ►
it’s interesting that you can derive a very accurate calendar from the I Ching,
00:47:34 ►
more accurate than the calendar we’re presently operating on. If you use a 384-day year length,
00:47:38 ►
the problem, of course, is that a year of that length would precess against the sun.
00:47:44 ►
that a year of that length would precess against the sun.
00:47:51 ►
But this may have been, for political or religious or philosophical reasons,
00:47:55 ►
acceptable at the time that calendar was formulated.
00:48:00 ►
My fantasy is that there was a war, a calendrical war,
00:48:11 ►
in the pre-Shang Dynasty time, a war between the solar materialists and the lunar mystics.
00:48:18 ►
And it was basically a war about how the calendar should be, because you know the calendar is the largest frame of reality.
00:48:29 ►
frame of reality. For instance, our calendar, with its fixed equinoctial points, is a lie.
00:48:39 ►
Our calendar promotes a belief in the permanence of eternity, when in fact everything is slipping and sliding around. The fact that the equinoctial points are traversed every year on the
00:48:46 ►
same solar year day gives rise to a kind of patriarchal hubris arguably yeah the
00:49:01 ►
difference between a schizophrenic and a psychedelic traveler being that maybe one can’t navigate its way back.
00:49:08 ►
And I was wondering two things.
00:49:11 ►
One is have you had any work with schizophrenics and what was that interaction like?
00:49:17 ►
And the other was more a take on modern culture,
00:49:28 ►
the common channel-surfing couch potato,
00:49:31 ►
that it has some schizophrenic quality to it. I was thinking of the movie Twelve Monkeys
00:49:35 ►
with the Brad Pitt character in the asylum
00:49:38 ►
when he says that the thing that separates
00:49:41 ►
a sane citizen from insanity
00:49:43 ►
is how much he allows his culture to straitjacket him.
00:49:48 ►
Well, I don’t know.
00:49:50 ►
Schizophrenia is a very complicated subject because several syndromes, which are quite different, are all lumped under schizophrenia.
00:50:02 ►
lumped under schizophrenia.
00:50:03 ►
You know,
00:50:06 ►
probably the kind of schizophrenia that I’m sensing you want to talk about
00:50:09 ►
is what’s called process schizophrenia.
00:50:12 ►
This is where somebody becomes
00:50:14 ►
really spun up
00:50:15 ►
and it can come after days
00:50:18 ►
of not sleeping or something
00:50:20 ►
and then people begin to have
00:50:22 ►
really funny ideas
00:50:23 ►
and they want to tell everybody about them
00:50:27 ►
and they go to the manager of the business
00:50:31 ►
with fantastic ideas that are going to make a whole bunch of money.
00:50:35 ►
The problem is they just don’t make sense to anybody but them
00:50:39 ►
or they start hearing voices
00:50:41 ►
or they become convinced that they have a special mission.
00:50:46 ►
And it turns out that this phenomenon, which we pathologize pretty confidently,
00:50:53 ►
actually is not that different from people who are having real legitimate breakthroughs
00:51:00 ►
and understanding their lives in new ways.
00:51:02 ►
It’s a shifting and reordering of the dominance of the psyche.
00:51:07 ►
And I tend to agree he’s dead now,
00:51:10 ►
but R.D. Lange, the English psychiatrist R.D. Lange,
00:51:17 ►
what I observed of schizophrenia went on at La Charrera
00:51:22 ►
in those days that are described in True Hallucinations.
00:51:26 ►
And my really strong conviction coming out of that was
00:51:30 ►
it should not be interfered with by depressive drugs.
00:51:36 ►
That it’s some kind of a process of a healing, of an acting out, and that the biggest favor you can do the person
00:51:48 ►
is to let them, to the greatest degree possible, do what they want to do and not interfere
00:51:55 ►
with them. And if you medicate them and incarcerate them, the thing is aborted and squashed and
00:52:04 ►
distorted, and then they have a great deal
00:52:07 ►
of trouble ever getting their act together.
00:52:10 ►
It was very fortunate.
00:52:12 ►
I mean, how many psychiatric residents have ever seen an untreated schizophrenic?
00:52:17 ►
The minute these people hit the front door of a hospital, they’re given Stelazine or
00:52:23 ►
lithium or something.
00:52:27 ►
And
00:52:27 ►
yet, you know, it seems more
00:52:30 ►
as though Jung was on the
00:52:31 ►
right track. This is a
00:52:33 ►
process in the
00:52:35 ►
dynamics of the unconscious
00:52:37 ►
that wants to
00:52:39 ►
work itself out
00:52:41 ►
to a conclusion. Now, obviously
00:52:43 ►
if they have violent fantasies
00:52:46 ►
or seem dangerous to themselves or other people,
00:52:49 ►
you can’t let that go on.
00:52:51 ►
But I think the treatment of schizophrenia
00:52:54 ►
is largely at the convenience of the practitioner.
00:52:59 ►
And people are warehoused.
00:53:01 ►
And, you know, if I were going crazy,
00:53:03 ►
I think the thing that would really throw me over
00:53:06 ►
the edge would be to be put with a bunch of really crazy people it’s always seemed so odd to me that
00:53:13 ►
if you go bananas they put you with all the other people who’ve gone bananas who are the worst
00:53:18 ►
models for you to be in the presence of and are quite unsettling to normal people,
00:53:26 ►
let alone people who are having boundary dissolution
00:53:28 ►
and self-identity problems.
00:53:31 ►
So, yeah, yeah.
00:53:32 ►
There are some studies that show that what it creates is a,
00:53:36 ►
in schizophrenic states,
00:53:38 ►
there’s a more common shift in brainwave rhythms,
00:53:42 ►
which is associated with an enhanced immune system
00:53:46 ►
and result in less cancer.
00:53:49 ►
And I’ve been curious as to whether or not the use of psychedelics may also provide those frequent shifts,
00:53:55 ►
which are probably more necessary to health.
00:53:58 ►
So as soon as we depress, for instance, schizophrenics,
00:54:01 ►
what happens is they go back to normal cancer rate of the normal
00:54:06 ►
population so their immune system doesn’t function as well so in terms of looking at enhanced immune
00:54:11 ►
function whether or not frequent shifts which coming in and out of psychedelics may and i don’t
00:54:17 ►
know if you know anything about that well in some sense the kind of process schizophrenia, the messianic, grandiose schizophrenia that we’re talking about here,
00:54:28 ►
is an overexpression of self-definition.
00:54:31 ►
And in that sense, you would expect an enhanced immune system to accompany it.
00:54:38 ►
The immune system defines the chemical self.
00:54:42 ►
So if the self is somehow being
00:54:45 ►
overexpressed to the point
00:54:46 ►
where it becomes a pathology
00:54:49 ►
or a burden on the functioning
00:54:50 ►
of the social group,
00:54:52 ►
then it wouldn’t surprise me
00:54:54 ►
that the immune system
00:54:57 ►
would be functioning
00:54:58 ►
very efficiently.
00:55:04 ►
What else do I want to say about this?
00:55:10 ►
Well, I guess that’s it.
00:55:16 ►
Well, I guess that’s about it for us today, too.
00:55:20 ►
Say, did you catch that bit that Terrence did about the Internet?
00:55:24 ►
Just keep in mind that this talk was given in the summer of 1998,
00:55:30 ►
and the Internet was still pretty new and unknown to the majority of people,
00:55:34 ►
even here in the United States.
00:55:37 ►
It was during some conversations with Terrence during that weekend,
00:55:41 ►
along with the dialogue between him and Ralph Abraham that Saturday
00:55:45 ►
night that inspired my last book, The Spirit of the Internet, which, by the way, you can
00:55:51 ►
read online on the MatrixMasters.com site.
00:55:56 ►
And as soon as I can get around to it, I’m going to put it up in PDF version online.
00:56:01 ►
You can just download it for free and print it out yourself and read it.
00:56:05 ►
It’s a little easier than reading the HTML pages.
00:56:09 ►
Soon, actually, that’ll be the only way you’re going to get a hardback copy or a printed copy
00:56:14 ►
because I’ve finally gotten down to the last few hundred of the paperback copies.
00:56:18 ►
Soon I can stop carrying all that around every time I move.
00:56:22 ►
Stop carrying all that around every time I move.
00:56:28 ►
Well, it’s really too bad Terrence isn’t still with us today, so he can join in some of the discussions about human-machine symbiosis
00:56:33 ►
that are taking place on some of the more esoteric online lists today.
00:56:39 ►
His understanding, I think, of how big a role the Internet is going to play
00:56:44 ►
and is going to play in the years immediately ahead.
00:56:48 ►
He was just really ahead of his time right back then.
00:56:51 ►
Can you imagine what a fantastic rap he could spin off from one of the current discussions on some of the AI lists
00:57:00 ►
about the odds of the first general artificial intelligence to manifest itself being in favor of that event taking place on what is currently
00:57:09 ►
the largest interconnectable public computer complexes in the world namely
00:57:15 ►
Google’s lead you to speculate on that one on your own for now it does present
00:57:21 ►
some interesting possibilities though particularly since Google already uses a lot of technology
00:57:29 ►
A lot of bots, robots to do its work
00:57:32 ►
And they’re really good at what they do
00:57:35 ►
For one example, when these podcasts started becoming more popular
00:57:40 ►
I had to find a way to pay for the increased bandwidth that we were using
00:57:44 ►
So I decided to try adding a to pay for the increased bandwidth that we were using and so I decided to try
00:57:46 ►
Adding a strip of Google Google’s Adsense
00:57:49 ►
ads on some of my blogs
00:57:52 ►
So at the main matrix masters that comp site
00:57:54 ►
I decided to test it first in my war on drugs blog just to be sure there wasn’t any
00:58:01 ►
You know any way that they would put up some ads with that, you know, just
00:58:06 ►
say no bullshit and stuff like that.
00:58:08 ►
So I did a test and the very first ad that came up was for legal services from a good
00:58:15 ►
friend of mine, Richard Boyer.
00:58:18 ►
Some of you probably already recognize that name because in addition to his private law practice, Richard is director
00:58:26 ►
of the Center for Cognitive Liberty, which is one of the websites you definitely need
00:58:31 ►
to have bookmarked. If you don’t already, you can find that at www.cognitiveliberty.org.
00:58:40 ►
Anyway, when the Google bot pulled that ad up first, I knew right then that Google probably knows a lot more about me than most of my friends do.
00:58:52 ►
Because I can guarantee you that Google is the only one of that group who has read every single one of the million plus words on the thousands of pages I’ve posted on the MatrixMasters.com site in the last seven years.
00:59:06 ►
So beware, or I would suggest rather you be bold and blog your thoughts on Google.
00:59:15 ►
After all, if the big artificial intelligence wakes up in Google’s network one day,
00:59:23 ►
don’t you want it to know a little about you and your own words?
00:59:27 ►
Well, I think I’ll leave you with that one and chew on it for a while.
00:59:32 ►
Maybe have a little smoke, kick back,
00:59:35 ►
and kick around some of these thoughts,
00:59:38 ►
some of these out-of-the-box ideas.
00:59:41 ►
What have you got to lose if you start thinking
00:59:43 ►
way outside of your particular cultural box
00:59:46 ►
these days?
00:59:47 ►
You know, unless you’re perfectly satisfied with the life you’re living right now, you
00:59:53 ►
don’t have a lot to lose just by trying a few new ideas on for size.
00:59:59 ►
Give it a try.
01:00:00 ►
You know, thinking can really be a lot of fun, at least when you get really far outside the box.
01:00:07 ►
Just be sure to keep one foot on the ground, though.
01:00:10 ►
You know, we want to be sure to see you all again back here in the psychedelic salon for our next podcast,
01:00:16 ►
when we’ll continue this series of Terrence McKenna from the summer of 1998.
01:00:22 ►
So thanks for being here today.
01:00:21 ►
from the summer of 1998.
01:00:24 ►
So thanks for being here today.
01:00:28 ►
And as always, thanks to Chateau Hayouk for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:00:32 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo,
01:00:34 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:00:37 ►
Be well, my friends.