Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer and Galen Brandt
Terence McKenna once called Bruce Damer “a visionary’s visionary,” and Bruce certainly lived up to that reputation in his 2003 Burning Man presentation. Combining subjects as diverse as evolution, psychedelic experiences, and physics, he builds a mental construct to rival Olaf Stapleton’s classic workStarmaker.
In addition to Bruce’s ideas about a conscious universe, we were also treated to an inspiring rap by his wife, Galen Brandt, as she explains the lure of the Burning Man experience.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
3-Dimensional Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects
00:00:10 ►
Help Me Show You
00:00:12 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
Well, if you’re a little surprised that I’m actually getting this podcast out just a couple of days before I leave for Burning Man,
00:00:35 ►
well, you’re no more surprised than I am.
00:00:43 ►
To tell the truth, I really should be packing right now, but as you’ll hear Bruce Dahmer say in today’s program, we humans always seem to wait until the last moment,
00:00:47 ►
until we do the important and urgent tasks before us.
00:00:52 ►
So I’ll just stay up a little bit later tonight and finish packing.
00:00:56 ►
But right now I just feel like kicking back
00:00:59 ►
and listening to what’s going on in the psychedelic salon.
00:01:03 ►
And from the sound of the emails I’ve been getting,
00:01:06 ►
I’d say that the great majority of you won’t be able to make it to Burning Man this year.
00:01:12 ►
And since this is the first time since 2003 that I’ve been able to make it myself,
00:01:17 ►
I sure do understand what it feels like to stay home
00:01:21 ►
when the memories of the vibe on the playa grab you.
00:01:25 ►
And that also goes for those of you who have never been there.
00:01:28 ►
If you’re a regular here in the salon, I can guarantee that you’d fit right in at Burning Man.
00:01:35 ►
Speaking of which, today I’m going to play one of the all-time great Palenque Norte lectures.
00:01:41 ►
This one was given in 2003 by Bruce Dahmer and is titled, The
00:01:47 ►
Day the Universe Becomes Conscious. And I guarantee that it will seriously bend your
00:01:53 ►
mind. If you’ve not yet had a chance to encounter any of the thinking of Bruce Dahmer and his
00:02:01 ►
wife Galen Brand, then you’re in for some real mind candy.
00:02:05 ►
My wife and I first met Bruce and Galen in 1999 at the All Chemical Arts Conference that Terrence McKenna helped organize.
00:02:15 ►
And I could go on for the rest of the hour telling you stories about that week in Hawaii,
00:02:19 ►
but they’re a lot like my Navy Sea stories, you know, they improve with age, you know what I mean?
00:02:27 ►
So let’s get on with the program.
00:02:29 ►
You’ll probably figure out that I edited the audience’s questions out because you couldn’t hear them,
00:02:35 ►
but Bruce repeats them, so you don’t really lose too much other than some dead air.
00:02:39 ►
And at the end of Bruce’s talk, his wife, Galen Brand, gives one of the most succinct and poetic descriptions of the lure of the Burning Man experience that I’ve ever heard.
00:02:51 ►
And if you’ve never had the opportunity to come to a burn, well, I think Galen’s description will get you close to the spirit of what it’s like to be there.
00:03:01 ►
And now, for those of you who like to speculate on the really big picture, you’re
00:03:07 ►
going to love this talk. It’ll stretch your mind to the limit. And watch out for a hyperspace
00:03:13 ►
jump about midway through what Bruce Dahmer thinks about the day the universe becomes
00:03:19 ►
conscious.
00:03:30 ►
I’m going to try to stand up because there’s sort of more energy when you move. And thank you, Lorenzo.
00:03:33 ►
Thank you, Maricy.
00:03:35 ►
Former Podville, now Interior Village, thanks for giving us this home.
00:03:40 ►
When you come by someone’s camp and you’re in kind of a relaxed state and you start riffing,
00:03:46 ►
it’s really different than this.
00:03:48 ►
So I’m going to apologize if I take a while to get warmed up.
00:03:53 ►
But what I want to do is tell you a series of stories that have occurred either from trips
00:03:58 ►
or from the weird brain that was plopped in this cranium for some reason.
00:04:07 ►
That’s kind of an interesting analogy.
00:04:09 ►
Think of your brain coming from the sky.
00:04:12 ►
Think of it very, man, if you’re walking out on the fly and your head suddenly comes open like there’s a hinge in the back.
00:04:19 ►
And there’s actually no brain in there.
00:04:22 ►
But a new brain, you know, brain’s like a wobbly piece of gelatin. That’s actually no brain in there. But a new brain, you know, a brain is like a wobbly piece of gelatin.
00:04:27 ►
That’s a new brain.
00:04:29 ►
That’s a great brain.
00:04:31 ►
And it’s coming down, so you’re going to receive it.
00:04:33 ►
So you’re out in the playa, and a beam of light, you know, that’s coming out of center camp,
00:04:37 ►
you know, they’re doing, what are those called?
00:04:39 ►
The moments or something.
00:04:41 ►
They’re calling the lights out of center camp.
00:04:44 ►
The tele or something. I end up calling the lights out of center. The telebeams.
00:04:46 ►
So you’re standing there, and a new brain is telebeaming down into you,
00:04:50 ►
and it’s a wobbly thing.
00:04:51 ►
See it from the distance, and it’s coming down, and it just fits just perfectly.
00:04:54 ►
It attaches all the connectors, RS-232 and FireWire connect, and you’ve got a new brain.
00:05:01 ►
So I think that that’s, in a sense, what Burning Man kind of can do for you
00:05:10 ►
if you let the old one go out.
00:05:11 ►
And I think in any trip that that can happen.
00:05:14 ►
I have a bizarre nervous system.
00:05:17 ►
When I go to the dentist, it’s eight shots.
00:05:21 ►
They’ll do this continuous row of shots,
00:05:24 ►
and they’ll do things like shoot stuff right through,
00:05:28 ►
experimental stuff go right through the enamel,
00:05:30 ►
and they can’t put me out.
00:05:32 ►
So this has been a problem for a long time.
00:05:34 ►
And since my father has had a series of root canals,
00:05:37 ►
I knew I was in for a series of root canals,
00:05:39 ►
and you know what root canals are,
00:05:41 ►
and they can’t knock me out.
00:05:43 ►
So I started asking, and I found one dentist
00:05:46 ►
that said, oh, there’s anecdotal evidence that if you have this problem, you also have
00:05:53 ►
a bunch of other problems and you describe them. And he said, then you have nerves running
00:05:57 ►
alongside each other in parallel all over the place. And so this explains my strange addiction to multitasking.
00:06:09 ►
But what happened was we had set up a date to go,
00:06:13 ►
and Terrence and I had been connected through cyberspace by a follower of Terrence.
00:06:18 ►
And so I started to talk to him on the phone a lot.
00:06:20 ►
This was in 99.
00:06:22 ►
And he came to visit us in the Santa Cruz Mountains where we live.
00:06:27 ►
And I sat him down in front of an avatar virtual world.
00:06:31 ►
We put a monitor in front of him, a microphone, talking head avatars,
00:06:35 ►
people talking over him.
00:06:37 ►
And he was like, I realize this man should see this stuff.
00:06:41 ►
You know, Timothy Leary kind of grokked cyberspace
00:06:44 ►
but didn’t really have too much experience.
00:06:46 ►
He did email and everything, but Terrence says
00:06:47 ►
with us, he should see the multi-user
00:06:49 ►
cyberspaces because they’re getting
00:06:51 ►
incredible. They’re astounding things.
00:06:54 ►
He sat him down in front of one.
00:06:55 ►
It’s crude. This is 1998.
00:06:58 ►
He talked to people in this world and his
00:06:59 ►
mind was going. He says, how can I
00:07:01 ►
represent what’s in my mind in this world?
00:07:26 ►
A lot of people have come in. It’s not scheduled. It’s not scheduled yet. You know, cyberspace isn’t that change? What’s the message there?
00:07:28 ►
You’re hosed.
00:07:30 ►
I’m a Canadian, so I do that with beer.
00:07:35 ►
Anyway, so Terrence said, I have a problem.
00:07:40 ►
I get on jumbo jets and I fly thousands of miles to speak to groups of 40 people. It’s really exhausting. Can I use this medium to reach my audience? So
00:07:52 ►
we said, all right. We flew to Kona, stayed at his house. He has this wacky wireless,
00:07:58 ►
or had sadly, this wireless dish that in the morning it goes pop, pop, pop as it heats up. And it connects with, it’s a military thing from the Pentagon.
00:08:08 ►
The Pentagon’s helping here, believe me, some of them.
00:08:11 ►
Anyway, and it was going 40 miles line of sight.
00:08:14 ►
That’s how the guy had the Internet.
00:08:15 ►
And the whole place is on a generator.
00:08:17 ►
It’s in a Hui, which is a shared property in a jungle.
00:08:20 ►
And he’s there, and it’s like, the Net’s on.
00:08:22 ►
Oh, it’s off.
00:08:22 ►
No, it’s on.
00:08:23 ►
No, it’s not.
00:08:23 ►
Oh, fuel the generator.
00:08:25 ►
We got the net connection, 40 megabits connection.
00:08:29 ►
And so we did this virtual world experience.
00:08:31 ►
His son, Finn, built a psychedelic world of parts.
00:08:34 ►
And then he had emailed a list.
00:08:36 ►
Were any of you there?
00:08:38 ►
It was the online alchemical experience.
00:08:41 ►
Forty people showed up from his list as avatars.
00:08:44 ►
They teleported in in and there was a
00:08:45 ►
psychedelic world. And his parents, we had him on a webcam in the world and his avatar, which is his
00:08:50 ►
digital representation, moving around. And he started, it was only type, only typing, but it was
00:08:55 ►
quite a neat thing. And eventually people, they wrote trip reports on it. So that kind of got us
00:09:02 ►
started in cyberspace direction, sort of weird, weird direction.
00:09:07 ►
But before now, this is where I should have been woken up by the stream of consciousness that came in through here.
00:09:12 ►
Why did why am I telling you this? Because I realize that I’m a complete lightweight.
00:09:16 ►
I didn’t take any drugs. If I smoke pot, it just makes me crabby and goes away.
00:09:22 ►
And I’ve never done anything. And I’m going to see Terrence McKenna,
00:09:26 ►
and I’m not going to understand anything the man is saying if I don’t have a trip.
00:09:31 ►
But I realized for me to have a trip is going to be challenging.
00:09:37 ►
So they found these mushrooms.
00:09:39 ►
You know, it’s a beautiful little dried bag of mushrooms.
00:09:42 ►
And then he said, okay, we have to find the right setting.
00:09:45 ►
And it turns out there was this rocket ship being rolled out in the Mojave Desert on March 1, 1999.
00:09:53 ►
And it was a rotary rocket.
00:09:54 ►
It looked like a huge traffic cone.
00:09:56 ►
And it was supposed to go up on rockets that would go around to the bottom and then come down.
00:10:01 ►
And when it got to about 10,000 feet, a Sikorsky Sky Crane helicopter prop would come out and it would like land gently, you know, as these guys
00:10:08 ►
were sort of joysticking it in.
00:10:11 ►
And it was supposed to be cheap.
00:10:12 ►
There was a dot-com type rocket company called Rotary Rocket Company.
00:10:14 ►
So we went out there and I thought, this is kind of neat.
00:10:16 ►
We’ll go to that.
00:10:17 ►
And all these people are, it’s 3,000 space weenies, Pete Conrad, all these space weenies,
00:10:22 ►
science fiction writers, all looking to the sky. We’re going to, this is carrying humanity to space.
00:10:28 ►
It’s carrying, I’m going to kind of get into that.
00:10:30 ►
Maybe this thing’s going to work.
00:10:32 ►
You know, and maybe it won’t tip over, the funding won’t run out.
00:10:35 ►
And so it was a really uplifting day.
00:10:37 ►
And then Jim took me back to a hot spring called Isabella, near Lake Isabella.
00:10:42 ►
It’s for spring seekers.
00:10:44 ►
It’s a great place.
00:10:46 ►
And he set me up, lit a fire, middle of nowhere, rushing river, completely alone, full moon
00:10:54 ►
coming up, and said, here. I took a bunch of them, you know, sitting around, sitting
00:11:02 ►
around. Oh, okay, the psychedelia that I’m seeing are kind of like what I see every night
00:11:06 ►
when I go to sleep, normal background.
00:11:09 ►
Because sometimes you do that, right, when you have a real stimulated day.
00:11:12 ►
So I said, oh, what the heck, you know, I’ll take them all.
00:11:16 ►
And it was 12 grams.
00:11:21 ►
Because I thought, oh, damn, this is not going to work.
00:11:23 ►
I’m sitting here at 12 grams.
00:11:26 ►
And so this is how the trip began.
00:11:29 ►
And Jim was not going to ever hear me screaming,
00:11:33 ►
because that’s initially what I did.
00:11:36 ►
Because in mushrooms, you get this sort of dissolving
00:11:41 ►
where the whole world becomes polygons, like this place here, actually. Only a very much smaller polygonving where the whole world becomes polygons like this place here, actually,
00:11:45 ►
only a very much smaller polygon, so the whole world dissolved.
00:11:49 ►
But dissolved to such a point, I said, oh, that’s very nice.
00:11:52 ►
It’s dissolved.
00:11:54 ►
That’s fine.
00:11:54 ►
I can deal with that.
00:11:55 ►
Then, of course, you start to dissolve.
00:11:59 ►
Now, because of the intensity of it, I could feel, and this is, I think, if you get to this point, how
00:12:07 ►
to survive this, maybe this is something you can do. I started to dissolve. This happened
00:12:14 ►
to me once before in my life. I was one day sitting in front of a very powerful woman
00:12:18 ►
who had the power. I think I’m empathic. So she could throw stuff inside me.
00:12:28 ►
And she started stripping me down like an onion.
00:12:30 ►
I could feel my soul getting torn down, down, down.
00:12:31 ►
I had to stop her.
00:12:32 ►
I stopped her with voice.
00:12:33 ►
I remembered that.
00:12:38 ►
She would have absolutely torn me apart, taken me apart.
00:12:41 ►
And there are people like this out there. But you have to be able to receive that.
00:12:44 ►
So I realized I’m going to completely dissolve.
00:12:47 ►
Where your consciousness is gone and it’s coming.
00:12:51 ►
It’s just simply happening.
00:12:53 ►
How do I stay?
00:12:55 ►
One question is just let it happen, but it’s the most terrifying thing.
00:13:00 ►
I was standing up screaming for Jim DeHalvner.
00:13:02 ►
He wouldn’t have been able to do anything, and he was just having a great time.
00:13:06 ►
It was a good thing that he didn’t come.
00:13:08 ►
But what happened was I realized, as I was screaming,
00:13:12 ►
that it would change a little pattern in the polygons that were surrounding me.
00:13:17 ►
I could create a little signal.
00:13:19 ►
I said, this is how I’m going to survive.
00:13:22 ►
Now, the voice at Terrence in my head was saying, it’s just
00:13:25 ►
chemicals that will go out of your system. But I thought, you know what? I could completely
00:13:32 ►
dissolve. There was nothing, I got sense that I could actually be one of those people that
00:13:37 ►
goes. So the voice. So I started singing, doing anything I could to create this tendril.
00:13:45 ►
And if I did voice, there would be a little thing going off.
00:13:48 ►
And I said, I’m still here.
00:13:50 ►
Because I can create something consciously that has something that hooks back to verify I’m still here.
00:13:57 ►
Voice.
00:13:58 ►
So little red patterns and little green patterns.
00:14:02 ►
And just as long as I kept the voice, if I stopped, I started to disappear.
00:14:08 ►
If I started again, I started to be inexistent.
00:14:12 ►
And when you’re on, it’s a razor’s edge.
00:14:14 ►
It’s like walking on, we’ve got the Grand Canyon on this side and Mars Canyon on this side,
00:14:20 ►
and you’re walking on a razor’s edge on one of these things.
00:14:22 ►
Because if you start to get scared, you’ll go right over. It’ll cut you and you’re walking on a razor’s edge on one of these things, because if you start to get scared, you’ll go right over.
00:14:27 ►
It’ll cut you, and you’re gone.
00:14:29 ►
So in a sense, it’s not even about discipline.
00:14:32 ►
It’s about knowing that the only thing you can do is just hold that level
00:14:38 ►
and just keep going forward.
00:14:40 ►
Allow the time to keep passing under you as you go to that point where the severity of what you have done is taken out by your metabolism.
00:14:51 ►
But so it’s not even about discipline.
00:14:54 ►
You just simply know you’re going to not exist if you don’t do this.
00:14:58 ►
So you just do it.
00:14:59 ►
We just do it anyway.
00:15:03 ►
So I think as the level came down, all kinds of things happened after that.
00:15:08 ►
I think when when you go through something, I guess Terrence told me later that was a heroic dose.
00:15:13 ►
I guess that’s the term for I didn’t know what I didn’t know what I was doing.
00:15:19 ►
What happens, I think, after something that severe is you come out of it and the larger vistas open up.
00:15:27 ►
If you’re going to go through something that’s completely terrifying, you know, in life,
00:15:31 ►
if you go on the bungee jump thing, right, what happens afterwards?
00:15:35 ►
You suddenly are open.
00:15:37 ►
You’re open wide.
00:15:38 ►
You survive something about which you are most afraid.
00:15:41 ►
So on trips, the theory that I have is, at least for me, the theory which
00:15:46 ►
is mine, which is one theory, which is one data point, is that going through something
00:15:49 ►
like that meant that what came after was big, really big, because nothing got through that
00:15:56 ►
little razor’s edge bridge. Nothing but just basic soul got through there. Everything else was blown to smithereens
00:16:05 ►
as I walked across it or voiced across it.
00:16:09 ►
So what happened was I came out
00:16:12 ►
and it was almost like a sense of experience
00:16:14 ►
I had here at Burning Man
00:16:15 ►
where the first year I was at Burning Man
00:16:18 ►
four or five years ago,
00:16:19 ►
walking on the playa at night,
00:16:21 ►
suddenly my brain flipped over,
00:16:23 ►
you know, that gelatinous blobby thing and
00:16:25 ►
was convinced that this was now the new reality hey it’s 1999 party like it’s 1999 but she guess
00:16:32 ►
what all those office buildings and all that stuff and military-industrial complex and in
00:16:37 ►
highways and it’s all gone this is now the reality that was some past thing. This is reality. You’re convinced of that. It’s
00:16:47 ►
a total immersion experience. What happened during this trip was I could, in this state,
00:16:54 ►
initiate some sort of a collapse in the universe. I could start it. That weird thought, all
00:17:01 ►
I could start it.
00:17:06 ►
And that weird thought, you know, all of a sudden,
00:17:09 ►
the mountains around me, the rushing river in the mountains,
00:17:11 ►
everything just started to pile in.
00:17:16 ►
The New York Stock Exchange around the earth started to pile in,
00:17:17 ►
started to come apart.
00:17:19 ►
Everything just sort of started to go in.
00:17:22 ►
And then I realized the stars were starting to come in.
00:17:23 ►
This thing was initiated.
00:17:27 ►
And this thing, the whole thing just started to go in.
00:17:30 ►
It was like, okay, someone pushed the button or gave permission for the universe to do what it’s supposed to do,
00:17:35 ►
which is somehow come together in some way.
00:17:37 ►
And I was like, I was pushed and pressed in
00:17:41 ►
like you’re pressed against a balloon or a ball.
00:17:43 ►
And I was just become part of this thing that just came in.
00:17:48 ►
Sometime later, I came out of the tent.
00:17:55 ►
I guess what was happening was I was in this tent, and I came out,
00:17:59 ►
and of course being in this state that, no, there was no mountains and no rushing stream,
00:18:04 ►
And, of course, being in the state that, no, there was no mountains and no rushing stream,
00:18:10 ►
I could just simply float up into the space, which I could see, which there was a glowing orb.
00:18:14 ►
And, of course, when I woke up in the morning, my thumb was all bashed in,
00:18:17 ►
and the tent was upside down and broken and, you know, things like that.
00:18:19 ►
But I managed to get out of it.
00:18:23 ►
So I’m out of the tent, but, of course, there’s no earth, so I didn’t feel that.
00:18:28 ►
There’s no earth, there’s no nothing, you’re just simply floating. And the moon actually was forming. When I viewed the moon, I guessed that light,
00:18:32 ►
it was the core universe that was now starting to coalesce as a
00:18:36 ►
single being. It’s like, okay, someone
00:18:40 ►
pushed the button, I’m forming. And I, was I
00:18:44 ►
part of that?
00:18:45 ►
Was I in that?
00:18:47 ►
Who was in there with me?
00:18:49 ►
Was everything in there with me?
00:18:50 ►
Was I outside of it?
00:18:51 ►
What was going on?
00:18:53 ►
And a question came to me is,
00:18:58 ►
all that had made it through that bridge
00:19:01 ►
was this tiny little bit of you that’s called your soul,
00:19:04 ►
or you’re not even a soul, but it’s almost like a little wave,
00:19:08 ►
a little carrier tendril of existence.
00:19:11 ►
It’s all that you exist.
00:19:14 ►
And so I asked this in a sense, as being part of this universe,
00:19:20 ►
I said, what does this little tendril need to be part of this?
00:19:25 ►
And the voice came back, all it needs is love.
00:19:29 ►
And from that later on, my life really changed.
00:19:35 ►
Because if all that the inner part of you that exists needs is love, that’s it.
00:19:43 ►
That’s the only thing it needs.
00:19:45 ►
And, of course, it should give love because love is two-way.
00:19:50 ►
When Terrence was passing away, and this happened in January of 2000 or February of 2000,
00:19:57 ►
he was in a bed in Marin.
00:20:02 ►
I wasn’t there, and he just had trouble breathing.
00:20:06 ►
He was saying, keep breathing to everybody in the room.
00:20:09 ►
Sometimes I stop breathing, and maybe it’s a result of trips or just my weird head.
00:20:13 ►
If you stop breathing, you start to die.
00:20:15 ►
So Terrence, and you’re on E and things, you can also stop breathing,
00:20:19 ►
so be really careful.
00:20:20 ►
If you stop breathing, it’s like worse than stopping drinking water on the playa.
00:20:24 ►
But he came down to the point.
00:20:26 ►
Now, Terrence was this guy that was, and this is sort of a message from Terrence to bring here.
00:20:31 ►
Terrence was a guy that was very much in his head a lot of the time, anyone who’s heard him speak.
00:20:37 ►
Very bardic, you know.
00:20:41 ►
But what happened to him as he started to break down,
00:20:44 ►
But what happened to him as he started to break down,
00:20:50 ►
and the doctors told him when he was diagnosed with this massive brain tumor that he had,
00:20:52 ►
that it looked like a psilocybin mushroom.
00:20:54 ►
Can you imagine that? And, of course, Terrence being the ironic guy that he is, well, of course.
00:20:59 ►
So as he was passing away, he was dissolving.
00:21:03 ►
All this stuff about everything was dissolving,
00:21:06 ►
and he kept saying over and over again, it’s just about love.
00:21:10 ►
The whole psychedelic movement is about love.
00:21:12 ►
It’s not about convincing people of doing one thing or another.
00:21:15 ►
It’s sort of gone off course.
00:21:17 ►
It’s about love.
00:21:18 ►
So Terrence himself, who was this kind of hard-knock guy,
00:21:21 ►
I mean hard-nosed guy, found that too, eventually, by dissolving.
00:21:26 ►
His brain dissolved.
00:21:27 ►
So then I started to think about the connection between the universe and the brain.
00:21:35 ►
Because what is this thing, this power that we have,
00:21:39 ►
that when we’re in an altered state,
00:21:41 ►
it doesn’t have to be on a chemical substance,
00:21:43 ►
we can just be dreaming,
00:21:44 ►
that things can come into your mind that are amazing,
00:21:48 ►
that are unexplainable, stuff you’ve never seen, that your mind has put together.
00:21:54 ►
Well, it turns out, I started to study, because we do a lot of stuff on missions to Mars
00:21:59 ►
and weird stuff like that, so it’s always thinking about space and stuff.
00:22:04 ►
What you have to do, in a sense, and this is almost like the ultimate trip you can ever
00:22:08 ►
go on, is contemplating the scope and scale of the universe.
00:22:14 ►
Now, some of us, you can go to the playa and look at the Milky Way, and suddenly you get
00:22:17 ►
a little peek of that.
00:22:19 ►
But I think the ultimate trip is to use the new tools of the knowledge of how old things are and how
00:22:26 ►
miraculous things are and how big things are and how this is at the time a
00:22:30 ►
profound time in human history cosmologists are putting together a
00:22:33 ►
model of what which may likely be the model of the formation of the universe
00:22:38 ►
now there’s disputes about what model is really happening there but what’s
00:22:43 ►
happening is all these symmetries are being discovered.
00:22:46 ►
So, for example, the symmetries that are so profoundly weird and simple that they make you rethink your life.
00:22:54 ►
So this is like cosmology for spiritual whatever.
00:22:59 ►
Maybe that, for instance, the guy named Guth, a professor, I think he’s at Harvard or MIT,
00:23:05 ►
and he has written a Guth equation that he believes shows that all gravity
00:23:10 ►
and all stuff like energy and matter, if you put it all up together, it adds to zero.
00:23:16 ►
So if you took the entire universe and were able to get it to come into contact, it would vanish.
00:23:21 ►
So you are made out of stuff that isn’t stuff. The stuff you’re made out of is not stuff. It has a
00:23:29 ►
complement somewhere that completely cancels it out. Now that’s kind of a weird thought. It’s sort of like, why do we take
00:23:36 ►
things so seriously then? The whole thing, so what is the universe? It’s a bunch of differences. So the universe in
00:23:49 ►
that case, if the stuff ever gets together, it’s gone. It’s completely gone. Now how did
00:23:53 ►
the universe get started? Well, Goose suggests that it was done through a random quantum
00:23:59 ►
field. There was no universe, and there was this quantum field somehow, which doesn’t
00:24:03 ►
have matter or nothing. And then somewhere in that field, after eons of time,
00:24:06 ►
a little random wiggle happened.
00:24:09 ►
And if you look at a lot of Native American tradition,
00:24:11 ►
actually they talk about the wiggle at the beginning of time.
00:24:13 ►
The wiggle was this odd thing about,
00:24:18 ►
whether I have a twitch or something,
00:24:22 ►
something became different than another thing for some reason.
00:24:26 ►
So God perhaps was the wacky process that made that happen
00:24:30 ►
when the universe, the pre-universe, was this beautiful light level field.
00:24:33 ►
Everything was happy.
00:24:35 ►
And suddenly there was this wiggle.
00:24:36 ►
Why did you wiggle?
00:24:37 ►
Now the wiggle was profound because it unfolded the universe from that point.
00:24:42 ►
Because, oh, you’re different than me now. Well, I’ll
00:24:46 ►
make more different stuff than you. And, and I’m, oh, we’re growing. Oh my goodness. Suddenly there’s
00:24:52 ►
this huge monstrous thing that’s growing. It’s starting and getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
00:24:57 ►
Now, another part, weave in another part of the story. Voice. Remember we talked about voice for survival. What does a baby
00:25:05 ►
do when it comes out of the womb? It screams, shouts, screams, hollers. That is how the
00:25:13 ►
baby announces, I’m here, you know, I exist. Well, it turns out we did a weird conference,
00:25:20 ►
we don’t do anything but weird conferences, where we took 60 people to a place called
00:25:24 ►
the Burgess Shale, which is way up in the Canadian Rockies,
00:25:28 ►
not far from where I was raised, which has a city block on quarry cut out of the hillside
00:25:33 ►
full of fossilized Cambrian creatures.
00:25:38 ►
It’s about 600 million years old.
00:25:43 ►
It’s like a book.
00:25:44 ►
It’s like a library. You can
00:25:46 ►
actually go to the shale and it’s all layers of rock. You can pull a book out, any piece
00:25:50 ►
of shale, crack it open on the side, open it up, and it’s plastered with soft-bodied
00:25:55 ►
creatures. No bones in those days. And you can see, oh look, this creature ate another
00:26:01 ►
creature for lunch. It’s a unique place in the world, really,
00:26:05 ►
because for some reason, at the bottom of an escarpment,
00:26:09 ►
600 million years ago,
00:26:10 ►
these creatures were falling off a big cliff underwater,
00:26:12 ►
and they were collecting, and there was no oxygen,
00:26:14 ►
they didn’t rot,
00:26:15 ►
and they got compressed into this nice little book of beings.
00:26:20 ►
At the very time when nature was figuring out how to make bodies.
00:26:24 ►
So single-cell things have been around for a long time,
00:26:27 ►
perfected that model, and then suddenly bodies emerged.
00:26:29 ►
Now the bodies in the Burgess Shale have five eyes on stocks,
00:26:33 ►
13 pairs of flaps.
00:26:34 ►
They’re wacky.
00:26:36 ►
It’s like nature said,
00:26:38 ►
cool, let’s try all these combinations and see which ones work.
00:26:42 ►
And so it’s this weird period of algorithmic explosion,
00:26:47 ►
like in software, like software viruses or something.
00:26:50 ►
You can actually see this.
00:26:51 ►
So we took all these people there because we thought,
00:26:54 ►
we’ll take paleontologists and computer scientists and artists,
00:26:57 ►
like Stephen Rook, people who you may know about.
00:27:01 ►
We took them up there to stand there and look at this thing
00:27:04 ►
and contemplate sort of beginnings.
00:27:07 ►
This is 600 million years ago. It’s not that far back, but contemplate ourselves 600 million years ago.
00:27:14 ►
So why am I reading this story? I’m reading this story.
00:27:17 ►
And because if you stand at a place like that and you look at, you know, you see, oh, well, that’s just a, there’s
00:27:25 ►
a bunch of these squishy creatures and I can see an eye flattened out and then I can see
00:27:29 ►
whatever.
00:27:30 ►
Ah, that’s really cool.
00:27:31 ►
And then it suddenly hits you.
00:27:33 ►
These are my ancestors.
00:27:36 ►
But wait a minute, you know, back then there weren’t people and nothing else there.
00:27:41 ►
That was what was there.
00:27:42 ►
What did I come from?
00:27:44 ►
Oh, there’s, oh, so I said, what did I come from?
00:27:47 ►
The paleontologist said, you came from this. It was this little thing here that had this
00:27:52 ►
little cord on its back. He said, that’s the thing we call picaea,
00:27:56 ►
and that’s the birth of all vertebrates, the backbones. That’s the backbone there,
00:28:00 ►
and that’s what you come from. I thought, that’s interesting.
00:28:05 ►
And when I look out at your faces, what occurred to me,
00:28:09 ►
and why you should think you’re special,
00:28:12 ►
not in sort of church lady, you’re special.
00:28:17 ►
I’m trying to give you the idea of how far back you go.
00:28:21 ►
You’re not just sort of so-and-so’s daughter,
00:28:23 ►
so-and-so’s son, and hanging around bringing that.
00:28:25 ►
You are at the top of a lineage of beings that goes back four billion years.
00:28:30 ►
Each being had the fortitude, industriousness, and chance to survive to reproduce against
00:28:37 ►
all odds.
00:28:38 ►
You are a miracle machine.
00:28:40 ►
You’re a piling up of billions and trillions and trillions of miracles of chance that you exist
00:28:46 ►
and those ancestors back to the little wiggling worm and even back further they’re yours they’re
00:28:52 ►
in your body they’re they’re written into your body they’re personally yours they belong to you
00:28:59 ►
so in a sense if you think about that that i, inside of me is the gift given to me by the wiggling little thing that wiggled just right to get away from another little thing and found a mate and fell in love and etc.
00:29:14 ►
And all these things that happened, they gave that to you.
00:29:20 ►
Now, it’s sort of still kind of an abstract concept.
00:29:23 ►
So, I kept thinking about this and then I was in South Africa.
00:29:26 ►
And South Africans are really kind of interesting people.
00:29:29 ►
They’re not risk-averse.
00:29:33 ►
So it’s a country of kind of daredevils and stuff like that.
00:29:36 ►
So my South African friend said, let’s go down to the gold mines.
00:29:40 ►
So we go down half a kilometer.
00:29:43 ►
It’s pretty bad.
00:29:45 ►
How people can work in those environments I don’t know.
00:29:47 ►
But down in Gold Reef City
00:29:49 ►
down in this half kilometer
00:29:51 ►
below and we’re walking through and everything’s
00:29:53 ►
dripping and everything and hey
00:29:55 ►
there’s a steam hammer let’s
00:29:57 ►
do something and so they’re hammering
00:30:00 ►
away at the wall and the beams are shaking
00:30:01 ►
and I’m doomed you know because these
00:30:03 ►
South Africans are crazy. And we’re walking along and I’m doomed, you know, because these South Africans are crazy.
00:30:05 ►
And we’re walking along and he said, so do you know anything about the gold reef?
00:30:10 ►
And I said, no, no, I’m just, I’ll be happy to survive getting out of here.
00:30:15 ►
And he said, see, put your finger on the wall, on the cave wall here.
00:30:20 ►
And I said, it’s all black.
00:30:22 ►
That’s gold.
00:30:23 ►
But that’s gold before there was oxygen in the air two billion years ago.
00:30:29 ►
The gold reef was formed by this sea
00:30:32 ►
where little flecks of things were falling over and over and over again
00:30:35 ►
and making alluvial gold.
00:30:37 ►
But there was no oxygen in the air.
00:30:40 ►
If you came back, you’d die in that earth.
00:30:42 ►
Oxygen was made by life forms.
00:30:45 ►
And the oxygen actually caused a huge extinction of life forms.
00:30:48 ►
It was the first time that life caused itself to be massively extincted.
00:30:53 ►
We’re doing it the second time.
00:30:54 ►
We’re doing it by putting lots of stuff in the atmosphere called CO2,
00:30:58 ►
which was there before.
00:30:59 ►
Anyway, long story.
00:31:00 ►
But when I’m in this cave and I’m touching this gold,
00:31:05 ►
the thought comes to me, wait a minute, my genes, I’m trying to picture this whole length of time thing,
00:31:11 ►
my genes are tougher than this reef is because the coding sequences in my genes are older
00:31:19 ►
than Africa as a continent. They have survived and been copied and passed along and passed along and passed along
00:31:25 ►
more reliably than all the continents
00:31:27 ►
and all the oceans. So the
00:31:29 ►
stuff in your body is tougher.
00:31:32 ►
It’s actually the most
00:31:33 ►
persistently surviving stuff in
00:31:35 ►
the universe that has ever been made in the
00:31:37 ►
universe. It’s tougher than a star
00:31:40 ►
because stars have lifetimes
00:31:41 ►
so they kind of change and everything.
00:31:43 ►
But the little coding information sequences in every cell unchanged
00:31:48 ►
in a time capsule called life over 3, 4 billion years.
00:31:54 ►
It’s an amazing thing that you embody this toughness and this long-term survivability.
00:32:04 ►
So another thing came into that picture, which is the wiggling jelly brain that’s coming down.
00:32:10 ►
We think of it, we just hardly think about it because it’s here and we can’t see it.
00:32:17 ►
But if you look at the…
00:32:19 ►
More water coming my way.
00:32:23 ►
If you…
00:32:25 ►
Why is it your brain can create trips that are just beyond belief?
00:32:30 ►
Well, look at how the brain is made.
00:32:32 ►
Look at the numbers.
00:32:34 ►
You can do the math.
00:32:35 ►
Look at all the interconnections.
00:32:37 ►
The number of interconnections in the human brain is bigger than all the particles in the universe.
00:32:41 ►
Countably bigger.
00:32:42 ►
So the number of pathways that signals can take is larger than the entire size of the universe.
00:32:47 ►
And this is probably down to the quark level.
00:32:51 ►
So what nature has given us, and these remarkable primates and our brethren on this planet,
00:32:57 ►
is beings that embody the most survivable form that the universe can create,
00:33:06 ►
almost indefinite survivability,
00:33:14 ►
the miracle of miracles piled up of living beings that somehow survive in this huge ecosystem that’s a giant chance machine.
00:33:17 ►
And it has evolved a complex thing that is larger than the entire universe,
00:33:22 ►
that is able, by me, large, is able to wrap the universe inside it.
00:33:28 ►
So when you’re having a trip,
00:33:30 ►
what you’re maybe doing is expressing a pressing force
00:33:34 ►
that nature has to say, okay, guys,
00:33:36 ►
you can conceive of big structures of the universe.
00:33:42 ►
And what’s being sent in there may be this kind of random pattern for that.
00:33:47 ►
I’m going to roll back and say, okay, why is there life?
00:33:52 ►
We think of the universe as this big inanimate matter thing and then there’s this one little
00:33:56 ►
planet with green fuzz on the top and it’s evolved this complex thing called life which
00:34:00 ►
can broadcast I love Lucy to the stars and things like that. And that’s kind of the silly version of why are we here.
00:34:10 ►
But in a sense, there’s a bigger picture here, which is the panspermia theory.
00:34:16 ►
Have you heard of the panspermia theory?
00:34:18 ►
We kind of think of Earth was here and bubbling black smokers bubbled and G cells formed.
00:34:25 ►
Well, it may not be so simple because at the early Earth,
00:34:30 ►
you’d have really a lot of bad hair days because incoming asteroids were constantly pounding the Earth.
00:34:36 ►
If you go to the other planets, you see the evidence.
00:34:39 ►
It’s like this was a bad time to be around.
00:34:41 ►
So they’re pounding.
00:34:42 ►
And when they hit the Earth, they blow a part of the crust off.
00:34:46 ►
And that part of the crust goes into the solar system.
00:34:49 ►
Now, the solar system is moving in this zone around the galaxy.
00:34:52 ►
And bits of this detritus are trailing the solar system all the way around.
00:34:56 ►
Now, the solar system, there’s a concept emerging in astronomy or astrobiology about galactic habitable zone.
00:35:06 ►
It’s like if the Earth was way farther out, it would be a frozen ball of gas.
00:35:11 ►
If it was farther in, it would have no atmosphere and it would be all baking.
00:35:14 ►
So there’s a solar system habitable zone for our brand of life.
00:35:17 ►
There may be such a thing for the entire galaxy, for every galaxy.
00:35:20 ►
There’s this potentially green belt that goes around the galaxy.
00:35:24 ►
Every galaxy, there’s this potentially green belt that goes around the galaxy.
00:35:30 ►
And maybe other planets that had life also had asteroid impacts,
00:35:34 ►
and there’s all this crud floating with long-lived bacteria that are floating that our solar system just happens to be bathed in constantly,
00:35:38 ►
and there’s stuff coming in with the formation of the solar system.
00:35:41 ►
These rocks that preserved for millions of years bacteria,
00:35:46 ►
were flooded in life.
00:35:50 ►
So any solar system that’s in this path is going to get it, any place.
00:35:53 ►
So it’s an enormous seed bank that’s constantly out there.
00:35:56 ►
So that’s another thing to think about. But the chance, the galactic habitable zone, panspermia theory,
00:36:03 ►
which is that light came from outside.
00:36:07 ►
That’s a reset.
00:36:10 ►
Now, also, the chance of the solar system.
00:36:14 ►
You’re a miracle.
00:36:14 ►
Every person here is a miracle of cosmic proportions.
00:36:19 ►
But the solar system, as the solar system orbits the galaxy,
00:36:23 ►
it’s passing through the spiral arms.
00:36:24 ►
solar system, as the solar system orbits the galaxy, it’s passing through the spiral arms.
00:36:30 ►
It’s done about 60 or 70 crossings of spiral arms in its lifetime.
00:36:31 ►
Spiral arms are dangerous places.
00:36:36 ►
They’re full of star nurseries, supernovae, and really high radiation environments.
00:36:41 ►
We’ve missed every single grim reaper that would have killed us.
00:36:47 ►
And certainly other solar systems would have had a terrible fate of being next to a supernova and wipes out everything, just simply radiates and fakes the whole place.
00:36:51 ►
So our solar system was trucked along, gone in this habitable zone, emerged complexity
00:36:57 ►
all the way up without being knocked off.
00:37:00 ►
We could be knocked off at any time.
00:37:02 ►
But it’s a phenomenal thing when you think about it.
00:37:05 ►
This engine was made to make this possible,
00:37:10 ►
but to cull out all the other,
00:37:13 ►
really almost like a random strike to knock out a whole bunch of it.
00:37:17 ►
And those things that emerged were extremely built on this pile of miraculous fortune.
00:37:23 ►
So why is life doing all this?
00:37:26 ►
Why is life making all this happen?
00:37:30 ►
Then the thought occurs that if the total picture of the universe is made out of nothing,
00:37:37 ►
if the universe is expanding now and one day it turns around and starts to contract and come back together,
00:37:43 ►
guess what happens?
00:37:44 ►
When it gets together, it disappears.
00:37:46 ►
Maybe that random fluctuation will never happen again.
00:37:49 ►
Maybe it’s a one-time deal.
00:37:50 ►
So what does the universe have to do?
00:37:52 ►
It has to create a means to stop its own destruction.
00:37:56 ►
Now, what can it do?
00:37:57 ►
What are its tools?
00:37:59 ►
Well, the laws of physics don’t help it much because they’re kind of preset.
00:38:03 ►
And, gee, Mr. Gravity, can you help me?
00:38:06 ►
I’m sorry, that’s my job.
00:38:08 ►
I’m going to collapse you.
00:38:11 ►
And the only thing that the universe has is consciousness
00:38:15 ►
to stop the ultimate disappearance of everything in this random difference field.
00:38:22 ►
Now, the only way the universe can stop its destruction
00:38:27 ►
is if the entire universe became conscious.
00:38:30 ►
So consider this. Picture this.
00:38:32 ►
Now, how can you even conceive this?
00:38:34 ►
We’re little bits of consciousness here and there.
00:38:37 ►
There’s consciousness at Burning Man,
00:38:38 ►
and there may not be consciousness elsewhere in the U.S.,
00:38:40 ►
but, you know, they’re little bits.
00:38:41 ►
You know, there’s…
00:38:43 ►
The matter is… If you consider it unorganized you know there’s that matter is if you
00:38:45 ►
consider it unorganized or less organized as conscious matter it’s like
00:38:49 ►
maybe a tiny fraction of 1% of all matter in the universe and energy is
00:38:53 ►
organized and into consciousness well maybe it’ll grow maybe the whole point
00:38:58 ►
of all this is to and we’re what we’re an experiment in how gee can these
00:39:02 ►
primates grow more conscious matter and energy in ways we don’t know?
00:39:08 ►
So the universe is saying, okay, you try, you try, you try, you try,
00:39:12 ►
and hopefully someone will have enough of this ready in time.
00:39:16 ►
So picture 100 billion years from now, the universal cloud, there’s no more galaxies.
00:39:22 ►
Everything is starting to collapse in.
00:39:22 ►
The universal cloud, there’s no more galaxies.
00:39:24 ►
Everything is starting to collapse in.
00:39:30 ►
Entities that were civilizations eons ago have fought all their wars.
00:39:31 ►
They’ve stopped all the stuff.
00:39:36 ►
They’ve basically come to the collective consciousness that the whole thing is ending.
00:39:38 ►
All their culture will be lost.
00:39:43 ►
Everything’s going to be lost, their gadgets, their museums, their memories,
00:39:46 ►
which are all preserved through time because you can look back through a telescope and see the past, but you can’t get it.
00:39:50 ►
But all that will be lost, too, because time’s going to go, too.
00:39:53 ►
So it’s the ultimate in gamut.
00:39:56 ►
So these conscious civilizations, which are becoming, which are maybe more than 50% of
00:40:02 ►
all of the content of the universe, have to come to an agreement about saving the universe as it’s coming.
00:40:08 ►
It’s collapsing in.
00:40:09 ►
This great ball is coming in.
00:40:11 ►
They don’t have much time.
00:40:13 ►
So they communicate.
00:40:14 ►
The only way that they can create the conscious universe is if they commit themselves to a new being that’s born.
00:40:21 ►
They have to conceive collectively and throw everything they have
00:40:25 ►
into this new being called the conscious universe that will be like a little baby.
00:40:31 ►
Where’s the baby going? Outside. Like the little baby, but the baby will wake up
00:40:37 ►
and not know about it, who made it. The risk they take is they’re throwing everything in,
00:40:45 ►
and this baby, this universe will suddenly wake up.
00:40:49 ►
Ah, I’m alive.
00:40:51 ►
That’s the whole universe that’s alive, every bit.
00:40:54 ►
There isn’t a single bit that’s not alive.
00:40:57 ►
Now that baby is produced by effort,
00:41:00 ►
not only the effort of surviving little worm-like things,
00:41:04 ►
all the brains, everything went into creating that baby.
00:41:07 ►
It’s the ultimate creation.
00:41:09 ►
The baby will be one.
00:41:12 ►
It will be in a wonderful state.
00:41:14 ►
It’s everything, right?
00:41:15 ►
That’s what every baby thinks that they are.
00:41:18 ►
I’m everything in the beginning.
00:41:20 ►
But the baby has to come to the realization that it’s doomed in time.
00:41:25 ►
So the baby has to learn.
00:41:27 ►
The baby’s being compressed, being compressed by gravity.
00:41:31 ►
This giant ball is being pulled in and pulled in.
00:41:34 ►
It can feel its body compressed, but it actually probably thinks,
00:41:38 ►
hey, I’m being, I think we’re losing our dinner,
00:41:43 ►
I’m being compressed and I feel good. I’m being brought I think we’re losing our dinner. I’m being compressed and I feel good.
00:41:46 ►
I’m being brought in as a whole.
00:41:48 ►
But what is actually happening is death is coming.
00:41:51 ►
Death’s coming really quickly.
00:41:53 ►
So the baby has to come to a higher and higher level of consciousness quickly.
00:41:57 ►
And what the baby has as its tool is time.
00:42:00 ►
Not time in the future, because that’s very short, but time in the past.
00:42:03 ►
The baby can look out in the
00:42:05 ►
cosmos and it is the eye but all time back to the beginning of the universe is visible to it
00:42:11 ►
all civilizations and cultures and stars and events are visible so it can look out and and
00:42:17 ►
see and know its entire past and put together the picture of wait wait a minute, I was brought together and in the last moments
00:42:25 ►
there was this intent to create me, but why? And work out the fact that it is disappearing.
00:42:35 ►
And the only solution, and this is sort of the conundrum, does the baby work out the
00:42:42 ►
laws of gravity and physics and say, you know, I’m being crunched in by this force that neither hates me nor loves me.
00:42:51 ►
The embrace that I feel is just the embrace of the reality of my own collapse.
00:42:57 ►
If I spin my body, I can spin it fast enough and I can create a kind of oblong shape.
00:43:07 ►
Now, interestingly enough, when you look at a blastula,
00:43:11 ►
when there’s a new being form in an embryo,
00:43:14 ►
it becomes an oblong shape.
00:43:16 ►
It becomes sort of like a spoon-shaped thing before it creates a new body.
00:43:21 ►
So it goes from a ball, which is a perfect form,
00:43:24 ►
but it’s not really very good to build a body,
00:43:27 ►
and it creates an oblong shape.
00:43:30 ►
So could this whole universe baby start to spin itself?
00:43:34 ►
If it starts to spin itself, pieces
00:43:36 ►
will start to orbit each other.
00:43:39 ►
And in fact, it momentarily defeats gravity
00:43:43 ►
from collapsing to one ball.
00:43:44 ►
Now there are two balls orbiting each other.
00:43:46 ►
You’ve got your eggs out of one basket.
00:43:48 ►
So this baby is doing this.
00:43:50 ►
But here’s the conundrum.
00:43:53 ►
The baby is now going to split itself in two.
00:43:56 ►
It’s no longer going to be one, one perfect being.
00:44:00 ►
It has to break up and create an other.
00:44:03 ►
It has to start the cycle again of having separation,
00:44:08 ►
leaving this perfect union of completeness. Will it do it? Will it say, I will split myself, and
00:44:16 ►
now there’s another, and the other has its own path, and those others are now collapsing.
00:44:23 ►
They have to spin their bodies. They have to create. They have to spin their bodies.
00:44:25 ►
They have to create, they have to fight the force of gravity
00:44:28 ►
and create more orbits and more orbits and more orbits
00:44:31 ►
until the universe now is a community as it was before.
00:44:37 ►
But it’s a community hell-bent on its own survival.
00:44:40 ►
It has to form a structure that can, it’s like a structure like this
00:44:44 ►
that can keep gravity from collapsing and killing all of the parts.
00:44:49 ►
So that could be the ultimate in irony.
00:44:54 ►
That if we all as a species, when you go on a group mind trip or something like that, all the species we’re trying,
00:45:00 ►
this has been put into us through time in the recesses of the universe that be one.
00:45:08 ►
Come your separate beings walking around the ply or kind of uncertain and make an eye contact.
00:45:13 ►
But you really want that group mind.
00:45:15 ►
You want to look into people’s eyes and not feel uncomfortable and stuff.
00:45:18 ►
We want that.
00:45:19 ►
Why do we want that?
00:45:20 ►
Because it’s programmed into the universe to want that for its survival.
00:45:23 ►
It’s programmed even now.
00:45:24 ►
that because it’s programmed into the universe to want that for its survival. It’s programmed even now. That message is coming from the time when it, that message is reverberating
00:45:29 ►
back through time. Be one. Start being one because it’s the only way we’ll survive. So
00:45:35 ►
this is coming from your future. And everything driving our species and driving Burning Man
00:45:41 ►
has come together as one. It’s hard to do, but they need us to do it.
00:45:45 ►
But the ultimate irony is we’ll survive by being one, but it can only be for a moment.
00:45:52 ►
The ultimate achievement of the entire creation of the universe and all this stuff is to be one,
00:45:58 ►
to be that one baby for that one moment when it was a single being, and then it has to give it up.
00:46:05 ►
Now, what happens in the future rendition of the universe, which is now all consciousness,
00:46:10 ►
it’s all community, it’s all multiple beings, there isn’t anything that isn’t consciousness,
00:46:15 ►
it’s all the same things, disagreements between bits of the universe, but the universe managed
00:46:21 ►
to spin itself from this random quantum fluctuation,
00:46:25 ►
create all this explosion of stuff,
00:46:28 ►
and it spun itself into consciousness and created this one thing,
00:46:33 ►
which for one moment, and that moment is the defining moment of oneness.
00:46:38 ►
It projected that back to the past, and it now lives, projects it back into the future,
00:46:45 ►
as the universe is now a community of consciousness.
00:46:48 ►
And the universe then will evolve into another cycle, a life cycle,
00:46:53 ►
like a chrysalis, like a worm going into a chrysalis,
00:46:58 ►
and then coming out as a butterfly in another cycle.
00:46:59 ►
So the entire universe is now, and we can’t see there.
00:47:02 ►
We can’t understand that.
00:47:03 ►
It’s all consciousness.
00:47:04 ►
What comes? What’s. It’s all consciousness. Where do you go?
00:47:05 ►
What comes?
00:47:06 ►
What’s the universe of all consciousness?
00:47:09 ►
But I think for our species, if we see these trips,
00:47:13 ►
and we see our desire not to be alone and love as the force,
00:47:18 ►
that love is the force that is coming from that incredible, urgent desire and demand for survival of what this thing is,
00:47:29 ►
it is the universe, and it’s coming into us and it’s shooting in from all angles
00:47:33 ►
and it’s trying to get its way in because it needs every bit that it can get for that survival.
00:47:38 ►
It is reaching back into your minds and pulling on you and saying, please, please help.
00:47:45 ►
It’s the big project.
00:47:48 ►
So anyway, that’s kind of what got all put together.
00:47:54 ►
So I think that’s about all I can say.
00:47:57 ►
Thank you.
00:48:08 ►
Any questions?
00:48:12 ►
Is love a catalyst for consciousness or a symptom?
00:48:22 ►
I think love is the survival mechanism of the entire thing, in a sense. It’s that when you say that sound in your trip and you have that tendril,
00:48:28 ►
it’s the survival threat that is through everything.
00:48:32 ►
It’s the single threat of survival. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
00:48:37 ►
Now, this is very, very interesting because the debate between those who believe that there’s an inflationary model and there’s going to be a guess inflationary model is the collapsing model.
00:48:47 ►
And then there’s a model where there’s an end point to the universe in the expanding model, too,
00:48:52 ►
because what happens is the universe is if it’s expanding ever faster,
00:48:57 ►
there comes a point when everything’s so widely separated and traveling so quickly that even matter doesn’t exist.
00:49:02 ►
It’s just simply energy going out. And it’s doom, too.
00:49:06 ►
So in a sense, either model creates a problem in the long run.
00:49:15 ►
I’ll just put a little note in.
00:49:17 ►
One of the interesting things, if you think about this kind of thinking,
00:49:22 ►
it’s actually not something in the future.
00:49:24 ►
It’s actually something that’s occurring all along the chain.
00:49:27 ►
The chain’s all alive through time, if we believe in some of the more esoteric theories of reality.
00:49:33 ►
So everything you’re doing now is part of that process.
00:49:37 ►
It’s not something we’re putting off until next year’s budget.
00:49:40 ►
It’s actually you’re contributing to that overall pool right right now through through time
00:49:48 ►
It’s just a sense and you have to get a question
00:49:57 ►
If we believe there’s a perfect I agree with you and it’s in a sense it sounds like an engineer talking like got a project
00:50:00 ►
No, gotta do something about it. You know, but
00:50:12 ►
in a sense this stuff I wanted to bring this stuff to you because I thought it’s sort of when you’re out in the world and you worry about the government or you worry about all sorts of things in life. If you feel I think the reason people are in spiritual practice is they feel really connected to a bigger thing.
00:50:18 ►
If you feel connected to an even bigger thing than Christianity or an even bigger thing than Islam or well maybe not Buddhism, maybe Buddhism is this.
00:50:27 ►
In fact, the knowledge we have about the size of where we live, it’s amazing, it’s miraculous
00:50:33 ►
stuff.
00:50:35 ►
If you encapsulate that with your mind, you can’t stay within the confines of religion.
00:50:40 ►
It’s almost like a new way to say, I’m part of a bigger thing, but it’s bigger than a
00:50:47 ►
church, it’s bigger than any spiritual practice.
00:50:50 ►
It’s this whole massive thing I’m part of.
00:50:52 ►
So in a sense, I think why I thought it was important to try to synthesize this was so
00:50:57 ►
you can feel actually tied into the entire universe.
00:51:00 ►
I think it’s a bigger high anyway.
00:51:07 ►
I think that it may be that what we have to do is look back at the evolution of our own
00:51:14 ►
planet because I think models of complexity emerging are the same.
00:51:18 ►
So in a sense, the Earth we know really started with a lot less complex organization of molecules,
00:51:24 ►
whatever you define consciousness as, and the universe, it’s a hypothesis, the universe
00:51:29 ►
started off kind of disorganized stuff.
00:51:32 ►
It was Big Bang.
00:51:33 ►
It was actually, here’s another little weird point.
00:51:37 ►
In the Big Bang, there was a phase in which you have protons and things, electrons, and
00:51:43 ►
you have hydrogen.
00:51:44 ►
The universe is a giant gas ball.
00:51:46 ►
And the primary means by which the universe organized itself was through sound.
00:51:51 ►
So the Big Bang was a big sound.
00:51:53 ►
It was a big voice.
00:51:54 ►
And a friend of mine who came to the verge of shale as an embryologist
00:51:57 ►
is kind of the leader of this idea that embryos, human embryos,
00:52:03 ►
and every embryo, when they’re just balls,
00:52:06 ►
there’s actually a tremendous amount of sound waves traveling.
00:52:10 ►
And that, in fact, the sound waves are the mechanism by which cell differentiation is started in the embryo.
00:52:17 ►
That’s what the Hindus say about a bomb.
00:52:19 ►
In Christianity, at the beginning, there was the word.
00:52:24 ►
And in my trip, how I survived through sound.
00:52:26 ►
So maybe sound is in the music, you know what it does to us.
00:52:30 ►
So maybe sound is the organizing principle here.
00:52:34 ►
And in fact, the new map mission that has been launched
00:52:37 ►
is looking for all the structure of the background cosmic radiation.
00:52:41 ►
And that’s all made by sound waves.
00:52:43 ►
So it’s like a huge sound installation called the universe.
00:52:47 ►
And the universe, again, will be a sound and when enough stuff is
00:52:52 ►
because sound doesn’t propagate through vacuum, but when enough stuff is
00:52:54 ►
close together again, the voice will come back.
00:52:56 ►
The sound installation with the artist.
00:52:59 ►
I think maybe the oh, gosh, it’s a hard one because I read the beginning of this.
00:53:04 ►
You’re asking the first question on this.
00:53:08 ►
I would say find your voice.
00:53:12 ►
I survived that trip and came to this path by finding that I had a voice.
00:53:17 ►
I speak on nerdy things, but that doesn’t count.
00:53:22 ►
But I’m really scared to do this because it’s a real voice thing.
00:53:27 ►
Find your voice and use it.
00:53:29 ►
Don’t ever feel, oh, I can’t express something.
00:53:33 ►
And your voice might be Alex and Allison painting, or it might be song or something.
00:53:37 ►
But your whole life, if it’s to embody what the universe is, if it’s to give to this future,
00:53:44 ►
is if you just let go and
00:53:45 ►
halt and holler just your whole life just put it out put it out there as much
00:53:51 ►
as you can and get around self-limiting because the self-limiting is like the
00:53:55 ►
gravity that’s constricting to death you stop breathing you die you you hunch up
00:54:00 ►
like this and you die you know know, your baby self, which knew everything,
00:54:05 ►
when you were a baby, you came out of the womb screaming
00:54:09 ►
because that’s the trajectory the universe puts you on.
00:54:13 ►
And you kind of end up in this pool of human culture.
00:54:16 ►
And if we lose our voice, we lose our contribution
00:54:19 ►
and our connection to the whole thing, I guess.
00:54:23 ►
Well, it’s interesting because as we were walking over here today,
00:54:27 ►
I was upset that we were going to be late to hand this little thing here
00:54:32 ►
to be able to record the graves, and we were fighting.
00:54:36 ►
And then it’s like, I can’t even do this presentation if we’re fighting.
00:54:41 ►
It’s like she and I are a team.
00:54:43 ►
We’re a life team.
00:54:44 ►
And it’s like the civilizations I are a team. We’re a life team.
00:54:47 ►
And it’s like the civilization’s at the very end of time.
00:54:52 ►
If any one of them are fighting and throwing shit to the fan or whatever,
00:54:53 ►
they’re all doomed.
00:54:55 ►
They have to say, you know what?
00:54:56 ►
Time is out.
00:54:59 ►
And, you know, when you’re a couple, say you have an accident or someone is gravely ill in your family,
00:55:03 ►
if the family, this person is lying there,
00:55:06 ►
and the family literally has to bury the hatchet,
00:55:08 ►
every single erg of energy has to go in to help that person live
00:55:13 ►
and overcome cancer or some chaotic thing taking them over.
00:55:16 ►
And as nations, you know, of course, the earth is,
00:55:19 ►
if our nation is invading other nations and creating animosity,
00:55:24 ►
when the big challenges come in the mid-21st century,
00:55:27 ►
we’ll have frittered away all these resources and time,
00:55:30 ►
and we’ll be like, oh, now we’re shit-canned because we actually have to cooperate,
00:55:33 ►
but now we only have 10 years left instead of 50 to actually, you know,
00:55:38 ►
because we’re not very efficient.
00:55:40 ►
And I think at the end of the universe, because beings are procrastinators,
00:55:45 ►
they will leave it to the last minute.
00:55:47 ►
But they will have to bury the hatchet.
00:55:49 ►
And I think that the message is going forward,
00:55:53 ►
the natural whole trend of the universe is resolve,
00:55:56 ►
is bury your hatchet and build a hole that is bigger
00:56:00 ►
and leave that stuff behind.
00:56:03 ►
It’s survival and it’s the reason the universe exists anyway.
00:56:07 ►
I also think what’s interesting is that you can, here you choose,
00:56:12 ►
just that this is obvious, but that we can choose, that’s lovely,
00:56:18 ►
individually or collectively or both, what kind of a note to pluck.
00:56:22 ►
Because Burning Man feels to me like a really good note.
00:56:26 ►
I really like the note that we’ve all decided we’re going to pluck here together.
00:56:30 ►
And I think we all feel that way.
00:56:32 ►
And I think what’s moving about Burning Man is that it’s an exercise in co-creation in the present.
00:56:44 ►
And everybody’s very aware of that.
00:56:46 ►
So what you’ve talked about, which is maybe kind of abstract,
00:56:54 ►
well, here we are all doing that, practicing it,
00:56:58 ►
figuring out what it’s like to be finding our voice and being one at the same time.
00:57:04 ►
And it feels like creating a new thing.
00:57:07 ►
And it feels like creating a new thing with a very present sense of consequence
00:57:12 ►
because we could either choose to create something that doesn’t feel good,
00:57:19 ►
like a lot of the lives that we’ve left behind, for example,
00:57:22 ►
or we could choose to create this, which feels really great.
00:57:28 ►
I haven’t had a bad conversation since I got here.
00:57:30 ►
In fact, everybody I’ve talked to is wonderful.
00:57:34 ►
You know, it’s just anything, like,
00:57:36 ►
this is terrific, and, you know, great,
00:57:39 ►
I can play dress-up, and it’s, like, that’s cool.
00:57:42 ►
You know, whatever it is, is it’s and that’s a wonderful
00:57:47 ►
way for us to learn to be with one another this is all very obvious but it’s just if that is true
00:57:53 ►
thank you for helping me create a really great note together with you that um makes me feel like it is possible to create a new world in the present together
00:58:09 ►
that can feel like a good one.
00:58:11 ►
Everybody talks about why you come here.
00:58:12 ►
Well, it’s because of the hope that you get, right?
00:58:14 ►
You look around and you say, well, wait a minute.
00:58:19 ►
So this is quite real.
00:58:22 ►
It seems very real to me, and we made this together just because
00:58:26 ►
we all decided to do that. We all showed up, and I try to explain to my dad, who’s an artist
00:58:30 ►
who’s going blind, he says, well, what’s Burning Man like, and why do you keep going? And I
00:58:37 ►
try to explain because everywhere people, my father’s very big on, well, okay, Galen,
00:58:42 ►
you made that, but did you get paid to make that?
00:58:46 ►
That kind of recognition.
00:58:47 ►
And I keep saying, people come out here and they just do it for love because they can.
00:58:51 ►
And it’s incredible what they do.
00:58:53 ►
And nobody’s getting paid, Dad.
00:58:55 ►
And not only that, they’re not concerned about,
00:58:58 ►
are they going to keep it or get, they’re going to burn it.
00:59:03 ►
I’m trying to explain to him, Dad, there’s this temple and, you know, and it’s all going to go up in smoke and the whole idea is
00:59:10 ►
we’ll all put ourselves into it and we’ll all burn it. You know, these are pretty radical ideas
00:59:15 ►
to bring to a culture. The last thing I want to say is that it’s really important what images
00:59:20 ►
you choose to give yourself and what images you choose to transmit to the world.
00:59:25 ►
Because information is really transmissive, and we’re a very transmissive group.
00:59:30 ►
And here’s what I mean by that.
00:59:32 ►
Do you remember the mausoleum a couple years ago?
00:59:35 ►
Well, here’s what I thought about that.
00:59:37 ►
If you were here a few years ago, just my feeling about it,
00:59:41 ►
but there was this unearthly beautiful building that was called the Mausoleum
00:59:45 ►
that was the predecessor to the temple that’s out there now. And the day that it was to
00:59:53 ►
burn, the wind came up and it kept disappearing and then appearing. And all week, everybody
00:59:58 ►
had been, you know, I mean, this is such a carnival, but all week long, people had been
01:00:04 ►
going in and there’d be this filtered, beautiful light.
01:00:07 ►
And there would be people gently weeping and writing the names of somebody that they loved and holding one another.
01:00:12 ►
And, you know, it was a space of real, it was a very safe place to grieve.
01:00:18 ►
That’s pretty precious in a community.
01:00:20 ►
We don’t give each other that very much.
01:00:22 ►
I know.
01:00:23 ►
I’m sure you all do, too.
01:00:22 ►
We don’t give each other that very much. I know.
01:00:23 ►
I’m sure you all do, too.
01:00:24 ►
But I’ve lost people who died.
01:00:26 ►
And getting a safe place to be able to grieve for them in a community that could respect that and have a ritual, a participatory ritual about that and support each other, that’s huge.
01:00:38 ►
And that’s mostly missing from this culture.
01:00:40 ►
And we all got that.
01:00:42 ►
And we gave that to each other.
01:00:44 ►
It disappeared. It came back. Then suddenly it was time to burn this. culture and we all got that and we gave that to each other it disappeared it
01:00:45 ►
came back then suddenly it was time to burn this and we all went out and the
01:00:51 ►
wind started to blow just as the fire down there’s the wind and we’re all
01:00:55 ►
getting coated in this gray ash and the wind just blew and blew and but I looked
01:00:59 ►
around and everyone’s just covered in gray with these red-rimmed eyes like this race of tribal
01:01:06 ►
elders and suddenly the wind stopped and the fire bearers go in and the thing goes up and I started
01:01:14 ►
to I felt this grief like a hand rip open it didn’t have to do with my individual grief I was
01:01:20 ►
just screaming I felt some primal grief, some huge.
01:01:28 ►
And I looked around, and other people were screaming and weeping.
01:01:30 ►
And I looked up, and there was the full moon.
01:01:34 ►
And I thought, okay, now what do we as a species need to understand about collective, shared, witnessed, public grief?
01:01:38 ►
And it has to do with a burning building and gray ash coming down
01:01:43 ►
and everybody being coated and weeping and
01:01:45 ►
screaming and people dying.
01:01:47 ►
And it’s so important that we understand something about this image as a planet that just like
01:01:52 ►
the spirits say that the whole universe is going to collude with you, the Indians, the
01:01:57 ►
wind was blowing, the full moon was there.
01:01:59 ►
The whole planet wanted us to get the message, this group of people.
01:02:03 ►
Well, that was September 4th, 2001.
01:02:07 ►
Remember 9-1-1? Remember a little burning building? Remember, okay, and remember that image playing
01:02:13 ►
back again and again and again, that burning building and the people covered, I mean,
01:02:19 ►
the point is that was a huge, huge shocking image for the planet. And we all took it in and we mainlined it.
01:02:27 ►
And it was about terror and grief and panic.
01:02:31 ►
And we better kill each other before all of that.
01:02:34 ►
Think how this planet took that in.
01:02:36 ►
Think what America did with that, for example.
01:02:39 ►
But think about this thing that I saw,
01:02:41 ►
that we all saw that was this burning building that was beautiful,
01:02:44 ►
Think about this thing that I saw, that we all saw, that was this burning building that was beautiful,
01:02:52 ►
that was about transcendence and transformation and coming together and community.
01:02:58 ►
Think about that as an image that we saw that we can go out and transmit to people. There can be a way to burn a building together, and you can make art and danger beautiful.
01:03:07 ►
to burn a building together and you can make art and danger beautiful. You can make life
01:03:14 ►
and exercise and celebration and beauty and joy and we can give each other a place to grieve safely and we don’t have to hurt each other. It feels so much better when you do
01:03:19 ►
this than when you do that. It’s really simple. This just feels better.
01:03:26 ►
You know, we’re creatures of very enlightened self-interest.
01:03:29 ►
But as you all know, you know, this makes me feel,
01:03:33 ►
I hope it makes you feel better, but it makes me feel a lot better.
01:03:36 ►
It’s a very selfish act, really, and then your whole face opens up,
01:03:39 ►
and I think, oh, thank you, I feel much better now.
01:03:43 ►
That’s such basic knowledge.
01:03:45 ►
That’s the kind of thing we teach each other here.
01:03:47 ►
And it’s amazing.
01:03:48 ►
It’s like we don’t get any reinforcement for that in this culture.
01:03:52 ►
Or very little.
01:03:54 ►
Maybe in private family spaces.
01:03:56 ►
You get it with your lover or your mother.
01:03:58 ►
If you’re lucky, your best friend.
01:04:00 ►
We all give it to each other.
01:04:01 ►
That’s a great thing.
01:04:03 ►
So remember the power of image.
01:04:08 ►
Remember what you see here and shine with it.
01:04:10 ►
Find your voice.
01:04:12 ►
Go home.
01:04:13 ►
Shine with it.
01:04:14 ►
Transmit it.
01:04:16 ►
And I think that’s how a new universe gets born.
01:04:32 ►
Maybe only one thing to leave you with.
01:04:38 ►
I think it’s sort of all of us, and it’s the basis for a lot of things, is when you die.
01:04:41 ►
There’s a time when you’re going to die, you’re not going to exist. But almost all of the beliefs of the people who have been
01:04:47 ►
close to death and come back and have done these things is
01:04:54 ►
that all of those traditions sort of show this light, this
01:04:57 ►
glowing tunnel of light.
01:04:59 ►
And maybe what is that?
01:05:01 ►
Maybe that is the whole collective pulling you back.
01:05:06 ►
And that’s just a final thought.
01:05:09 ►
Lighten up your day a little bit.
01:05:12 ►
Thank you, Bruce and Galen.
01:05:14 ►
And thank you all very much.
01:05:15 ►
And all of you who are here today, I thank you.
01:05:19 ►
Pretty amazing, huh?
01:05:20 ►
How about that advice Bruce gave near the end of his talk?
01:05:23 ►
How about that advice Bruce gave near the end of his talk?
01:05:30 ►
I’m thinking about the part where he said that the only way for intelligence in the universe to survive, ultimately,
01:05:38 ►
is if what we call intelligent life first buries the hatchet between its own warring factions.
01:05:45 ►
I sure wish those fascists in Washington would give that a shot, but hey, who cares about those assholes, huh? I’m heading to Burning Man. And on the playa, the rest of the world simply
01:05:51 ►
ceases to exist. At least for one glorious week, that is. And I really like Galen’s comments
01:05:58 ►
about Burning Man, where she called it an exercise in co-Creation and talked about creating a new thing with a definite sense of consequence.
01:06:09 ►
And I do agree with Galen that we come to Burning Man largely because of the hope it gives us.
01:06:15 ►
And if you’ve been there, you know exactly what I mean.
01:06:18 ►
And if you haven’t been there, well, I’m sorry, but I’m just not capable of putting into words that major feeling of
01:06:27 ►
hope that you get when you drive up to the gate and those greeters say, welcome home.
01:06:32 ►
I know it sounds corny, but hey, you’ve got to be there. And I intend to take to heart
01:06:38 ►
what Galen said about how important the images are that we hold of ourselves and transmit to the world.
01:06:50 ►
So I promise to be as totally outrageous on the playa this year as I know how.
01:06:55 ►
I certainly don’t want to be transmitting to the world that I’m normal.
01:07:02 ►
And my guess is that with the exception of a few narcs who tune into these podcasts, the rest of you aren’t so normal yourselves.
01:07:05 ►
And that, my friends, is a very comforting thought, don’t you think?
01:07:10 ►
I wish I had more time tonight because I’d really like to tell you the story about a visit by the ghost of Terrence McKenna one night
01:07:18 ►
when I was sleeping on the floor in the room at Bruce’s house where he had first introduced Terrence to the world of virtual reality.
01:07:27 ►
It’s a great story already, but we’ll have to let that one age even a bit more
01:07:32 ►
because I want to be sure to take the time to mention the latest edition of the Entheogen Review
01:07:38 ►
before I sign off.
01:07:41 ►
Now, for those of you who are looking to dig a little deeper
01:07:44 ►
into the literature of the psychedelic community,
01:07:48 ►
I think you should probably just jump right up to the grad school level and subscribe to the ER.
01:07:54 ►
Their masthead reads, The Enthusian Review,
01:07:57 ►
The Journal of Unauthorized Research on Visionary Plants and Drugs.
01:08:02 ►
Basically, it seems to me, if you want to keep up with some of the inside buzz
01:08:06 ►
about what’s going on in this community, then the ER is truly essential reading for you.
01:08:13 ►
Now, if you ask around, you’re likely to hear that the ER is too heavy on scholarly articles
01:08:19 ►
about plants and chemistry. And while it’s true, ER publishes a lot of articles that are Thank you. For example, the issue that just came in the mail the other day has a story titled,
01:08:45 ►
10 Post-1980s Psychedelic Non-Electronica Instrumental CDs for Neo-Shamanic Use That You Should Know About.
01:08:55 ►
And I guess you can tell it’s kind of a nerdy scholarly journal with titles like that,
01:09:00 ►
but it’s really a cool little publication, and the good folks who put it out several times a year have been doing it for a long time now. Thank you. taking place during these dark ages of America’s war on freedom of consciousness.
01:09:26 ►
So you might want to check it out.
01:09:27 ►
You can find them at www.entheogenreview.com.
01:09:33 ►
E-N-T-H-E-O-G-E-N-R-E-V-I-E-W.
01:09:38 ►
All one word. Dot com.
01:09:41 ►
Well, I guess I can’t put off my packing for Burning Man any longer,
01:09:46 ►
as much as I’d like to just kick back and listen to another one of these interesting talks.
01:09:52 ►
But the playa beckons, and I’m sure I’ll be seeing some of you there.
01:09:56 ►
So be sure to stop by and say hello.
01:09:59 ►
From Wednesday through Saturday, noon till six,
01:10:02 ►
you’ll find me near the stage in the main tent at Entheon Village.
01:10:07 ►
I’ll be the emcee of the MAPS Palenque Norte lectures again this year.
01:10:12 ►
And if you want to check out our schedule, just go to our homepage at matrixmasters.com
01:10:18 ►
and click on the link for the 2006 Burning Man lecture schedule.
01:10:24 ►
And while you’re on our site,
01:10:25 ►
why don’t you also click through to our WikiChill space?
01:10:28 ►
We’re just getting that started now,
01:10:30 ►
and we’d love to have you add your comments,
01:10:32 ►
particularly about some of these podcasts, if you want to.
01:10:36 ►
And on our podcast page, where this talk is listed,
01:10:39 ►
you’ll also find links to Bruce and Galen’s personal websites.
01:10:43 ►
You’ll also find links to Bruce and Galen’s personal websites.
01:10:50 ►
Bruce’s is www.damer.com and you’ll find Galen at www.virtualgalen.com
01:10:55 ►
And if you’re like me, you’re probably going to find a whole lot of things on those two sites
01:11:01 ►
that are guaranteed to keep you up surfing late into the night. And in fact, now that I think about it, I think I’m going to take a quick look
01:11:11 ►
at the 2003 Burning Man photos on Bruce’s site right now, just to kind of get myself
01:11:17 ►
into the packing mode. So, for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:11:25 ►
Be well, my friends.