Program Notes
Guest speaker: Erik Davis
In his inspiring 2006 Palenque Norte lecture at Burning Man, Erik Davis takes a peek at what the future may have in store for us. And contrary to so much of the doom and gloom we hear all around us these days, Erik’s message is that there is much hope for humanity in the future. This talk is certainly thought-provoking and is not to be missed.
You might also want to take a look at Erik’s new book, The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape
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Transcript
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3-Dimensional Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects
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Delta Sheldons
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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I know those of you who have been following our misadventures
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and previous attempts to get a decent recording from a Planque Norte lecture at Burning Man are going to find this a little hard to believe,
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but this year we actually did get at least five halfway decent recordings.
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And thanks to Brian, who came up out of the audience after Mark Pesci’s talk,
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we actually got some good recordings
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because Brian had a digital mini-disc recorder with him,
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along with five blank discs.
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And in the true spirit of Burning Man, he offered to let me use his equipment.
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He just said, hey, send it back to me after the burn
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if we miss connecting after the Saturday talks.
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And I think this was Brian’s ninth trip or so to the playa from his home in Seattle, and it really showed.
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Can you imagine somebody leaving their recorder with a stranger at a Britney Spears concert?
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Wow, I have no idea why I just said that.
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I can’t imagine the horror of even going to a concert like that.
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Oh well, I’m still getting the playa dust out of my camping gear,
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so I guess it should be no surprise that there’s still a little left in my brain, too.
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So where was I?
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Oh yeah, thanks to Brian, we all now have a Burning Man gift
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in the form of a clear and complete Planque Norte lecture.
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And it’s only fitting that the first such recording is of the talk that Eric Davis gave on Friday afternoon.
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The big tent at Cantheon Village was packed, the heat was almost unnoticeable, and I don’t even remember there being much dust in the air.
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In short, it was a perfect afternoon on the playa.
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While I can’t remember exactly what I said when I introduced Eric,
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the point I tried to make was that without his support, enthusiasm, and help in organizing the first of the Planque Norte lectures at Burning Man in 2003, this
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lecture series and probably these podcasts would never have gotten off the ground.
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Eric was the first person I contacted after returning from the 2002 burn with an idea
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for this lecture series, and since I was new to the Burning Man community, I thought I’d first
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better ask an expert before trying to organize a theme camp to hold the talks.
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You know, what if no one would come to a lecture in the middle of the afternoon in the middle
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of a desert and during the time normally spent resting up for an all-night party?
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up for an all-night party. Now that I think about it, I’m surprised Eric just didn’t laugh me off, but he didn’t, and to be honest, I really wasn’t surprised. I’d first heard about
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Eric from Terrence McKenna. At the time I was working on my book, The Spirit of the
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Internet, I was asking Terrence about one of the concepts that I was writing about
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when he said,
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before you write another word, you should read Eric Davis’ new book, Technosis.
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And those of you who’ve read my book know that I not only took Terrence’s advice,
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but I also benefited greatly in my research, thanks to Eric.
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And I guess it’s kind of a sad footnote, but I think the last published interview of Terrence,
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at least the last one I ever read, was the final interview in Wired that Terrence gave to none other than Eric Davis.
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Well, I guess that’s kind of a roundabout way of introducing today’s program.
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a roundabout way of introducing today’s program.
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After we hear Eric’s talk, I’ll give you some information about his new book, Visionary State, which he mentions briefly in this 2006 Palenque Norte lecture that he titled
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Pharmacology and the Post-Human Future.
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And we’ll begin with Eric commenting on that first series of Planque Norte lectures in 2003.
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Hey, welcome.
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Yeah, that was a very interesting decision on my part
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because I had been coming to Burning Man more or less regularly since 1994.
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And even though I’m a writer and I did write about the festival in 1995,
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I wrote the first kind of national article for the Village Voice that really kind of introduced the festival to a larger world outside of the super underground.
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festival to a larger world outside of the super underground. I’d always resisted otherwise talking or writing or getting involved in that whole world. I came out here to kind
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of lose myself. So that was a real pivotal year because there weren’t really spaces like
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this for many, many, many years. There were small classes that people would give in their
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camps, but the idea of really having a lecture space was really significant. A lot of things in Burning Man evolve over time, and new forms emerge, new needs emerge
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that are responded to with new technologies, new approaches, and it’s constantly evolving
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and in some ways devolving.
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It’s sort of both are going on at the same time.
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For me, the introduction of these kind of spaces was both an evolution and a devolution.
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It was a devolution because this is a space of reflection, of analysis, of discussion, of talking.
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In a way, it’s a step away from the pure chaos we also seek here.
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Of course, we can have them both.
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But it also represents the maturing of the community,
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the recognition that we’re not just a little bubble, a pure taz out here in the middle of nowhere, but that we’re involved in a larger culture.
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There are very pressing issues, and it’s a great opportunity to come together and connect
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and talk.
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What I’m going to talk about today is something I call the post-human self, and I’ll get to
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it later in terms of exactly what I mean by that somewhat odd phrase, but I wanted to
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start off talking a little bit about visionary art because that’s where we are. It’s something
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that I’ve been fascinated with for many years and have written some about and done a lot
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of studying about. And what I want to reflect on a little bit, I mean, you can see part
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of the attraction here, just even this afternoon and in this Entheon Village, is not just to the reality of visionary art,
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but the fact that there are visionary artists.
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And inevitably, a certain kind of heroism comes into our feelings about the great visionary artists,
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because while we all have a visionary artist inside of us,
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and many of us pursue that artist in our own creative light,
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it’s a much smaller
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group that can speak to many, many, many people in a very strong way.
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There’s still something distinct and different about a strong artist.
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And so what is this appeal?
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Why are we attracted by this image of the visionary artist?
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And what I would offer to you is that the visionary artist represents a very beautiful and interesting
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mixture of two different sides of what we’re about. And one of those sides is a kind of,
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not quite nostalgia, but a deep intuition that there are ways of knowing and being that
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lie outside of the modern world that we grew up with, whether we think about
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it as a return of tribal reality, of a shamanic reality, of a kind of ecstatic religion of
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nature.
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There’s a lot of different ways we have our own stories about what this longing is.
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And in many ways, the visionary artist is a great example of a shaman in the sense that
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not only do they participate in and experience
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these worlds of vision that have been produced by holy men and seers and shamans throughout
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human history, but they bring it back to us in a very obvious, formal way. It’s right
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there to see. You can see it. It’s an object in the community. It becomes
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an object of communication, a way that we understand one another. Because that’s the thing,
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you know, sometimes people forget the shaman doesn’t just go into the worlds just because
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you arrive there and speak to entities and get messages and see the way the deeper levels of
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the mind work. That’s not shamanism. Shamanism is what happens when you come back into the community. But we don’t have a coherent, homogenous tribal community. We have a modern or arguably
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postmodern community. You can say, yes, we’re a tribe, we here at Burning Man, but not really.
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I mean, not if we’re really going to honor what a tribe is, because a tribe is a very, very homogenous unit.
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And what we have here is a chaotic symphony of subcultures. And while there’s a shared resonance,
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and it makes sense to describe that as a tribe in some ways, in other ways we lose something.
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And part of what I’m kind of talking about here is that the other side of the equation,
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not so much the shamanism, the religion of nature, the return to tribalism,
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the return to some idea of a purely integrated self or purely integrated society,
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but instead the way in which we are still part of the modern world
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and still part of, or the postmodern world, of the technological, western, hyper-developed juggernaut that’s flowing
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towards the future.
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And so one of the things that’s great about visionary art is you see this too, because
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we don’t think of the visionary artist as a religious figure.
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They don’t paint icons, you know, like you go into Byzantine churches and there’s all
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these icons. I mean, like you go into Byzantine churches and there’s all these icons.
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I mean, remarkable works of art.
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But all the artists there don’t think of themselves as artists.
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They are following, in some ways, very, very prescribed rules about what image making is.
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And these are images that are designed not simply to represent or symbolize spiritual reality,
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but to actually generate it, to channel it,
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so that by going and communing with an icon, it works as a portal,
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the way that many of these paintings work as portals into other dimensions,
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into other levels of the self.
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So in some ways, the traditional Byzantine icon is a work of visionary art,
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but those artists are not thinking of themselves too much.
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Always, of course, there’s a little bit of ego involved,
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but they’re not thinking of themselves as being primarily individual pursuers
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of their own individual vision.
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But, of course, that’s what we see with visionary art.
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There’s commonalities, there’s similar languages,
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but if it all looked the same, it would just be clichéd.
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In fact, we know clichéd visionary art because, okay, the mandala, the fractal, got the fractal.
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You know, you can do interesting stuff with it occasionally, but mostly it’s a dead language.
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Why?
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Because like modern art in general and like modern culture, we’re involved in a constant process of novelty generation, of innovation,
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and there’s a tremendous emphasis on the individual artist.
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So while we may recognize that the visionary artist in some ways reboots up the shamanic archetype,
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it also very much comes out of the strain of Western art.
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There’s a 150-year-old tradition of bohemian, avant-garde, drug-taking, wife-swapping maniacs
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who are trying with a kind of passion that in many ways is lost in the contemporary art world,
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but that we see in visionary art to just intensely manifest some specific vision,
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often with tremendous religious and mystical implications.
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You know, we think of abstract modern art as maybe being a kind of alienating and cold
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and sort of away from the rich, juicy world that so much visionary art talks about.
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But almost all of the early abstractionists, the first ones who moved away from realistic imagery,
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following Impressionism, started just drawing lines and dots and squiggles and explosions of color,
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were meditators.
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They were mystics.
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They were theosophists.
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So there’s a longstanding strain of a kind of modern spirituality that’s open-ended
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and probing and changing that goes into visionary art.
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and changing that goes into visionary art. And so a lot of what we see now is as much about our modern culture,
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our modern Western culture, as it is about the return of some kind of shamanic reality.
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And, of course, it’s always changing.
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I just wanted, because it’s in here, I just wanted to point out this Oliver Vernon piece
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as a really, particularly one to the left there,
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as a really exemplary piece in a number of ways.
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One of the things that’s happening now in the art world, and then I’ll move on to my main topic,
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is the sort of injection of street culture and street imagery and graffiti art into more and more mainstream art context.
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So we’re talking about how to get visionary content into the media,
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how to get visionary content into the larger culture.
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This is one of the vectors.
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And you’ll see in his work, he combines some classic psychedelia,
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the weird spheres in the middle there.
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It’s very much like Rick Griffin’s famous flying eyeball from the 60s.
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in the middle there, is very much like Rick Griffin’s famous flying eyeball from the 60s.
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It’s like this very sort of 60s comic book kind of spheroid.
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But at the same time, you get these weird glyphs that are kind of like graffiti,
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kind of like some alien language coming through with some kind of information,
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coming through with some kind of data. So there’s a data density there that I think is really remarkable.
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And then the final point is just the way that it mixes different dimensions.
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The sphere is a very obviously three-dimensional object,
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but the letters are a little unclear. There are a series of planes
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that kind of break the plane. And it introduces, just as its
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language, this multidimensionality. Multidimensionality is a lot
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of what we’re talking about here.
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How do you create visual spaces?
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How do you create environments?
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How do you create an environment like Burning Man, where it’s this constant splitting off
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of different dimensions, different portals, different ways of constructing and feeling
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reality?
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So I’ve been thinking a lot about visionary art and visionary culture because I just finished
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a book called The Visionary State, of all things,
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A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape.
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And it’s an overview of the art and architecture
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in the spiritual and religious movements in California.
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One of the main impulses that drove me to write this book and to research California,
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because we all know that California is nuts and has been nuts for decades and decades. And so much
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of what, whether we are Californians or not here, so much of
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what we participate in and feed off of was born or nurtured in
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the Golden State in the 20th century in many, many ways.
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And so I was fascinated with this. I wanted to know where it came from. And a lot of it came from here. It came from
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Burning Man. Where did this come from?
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The talk I gave at Palenque Norte in 2003 was called The Cults of Burning Man.
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And what I was talking about was different dimensions of the festival
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and showing how they all came out of ancestors, of different groups, different subcultures,
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different activities in the 60s, in the 50s, even before,
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that sort
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of foreshadow this remarkable experiment.
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So that was really what I was looking for in the book.
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And I’m happy to say that I hooked up with an incredible photographer who photographed
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a lot of the architecture.
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Hey, there’s an incredible photographer who photographed these environments,
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these Zen temples and Hindu temples and crazy Babylonian ziggurats and ISIS temples
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and pagan places and sacred mountaintops that make up this topography of the imagination,
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very much like what we have here, a topography of the imagination, a map, a geography,
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a festival of portals and an interdimensional world,
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a thousand theme parks butting heads.
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And in many ways, that was the kind of spirit of the book.
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But there’s sort of a deeper question behind that, and this brings me lengthily to my main
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topic, which is really what all this stuff is about.
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Is all this sort of, particularly in a spiritual or alternative religious context,
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is all the sort of grasping after new spiritual forms of meditation, of yoga, of cults, of gurus, of masters,
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of psychedelia, of mind-body practices, holotropic breathing, esalen, self-help groups,
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that whole sort of sense of reconstructing the human spirit. Is it ultimately really about religion? No. No, I think this is a
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modern phenomenon that leaves aside the homogeneity and the authority structures of traditional
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religion. But is it even really about spirituality? I mean, we throw that word around, but what do we
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really mean by it? And what I came to see is that while there are certain, obviously this is, you
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know, about spirituality, what is spirituality about? What is spirituality about in a historical
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context, meaning where are we now and where are we going? Is it just about replugging in with the
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nature or the cosmos or the goddess
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or the god that we feel is missing from the modern world? Or is something else going on
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with this? And I think something else is going on. And this is where we get to the prophetic
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dimension of visionary culture. And I’ll talk more about prophecy later. Because what I
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think is being prophesied in this experimentalism, which we can
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talk about in terms of the history of California or the history of New Age or new religious
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movements, and we can certainly talk about here, the tremendous emphasis on invention, on creativity,
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on can-do, on technologies of perception. this is all pointing towards something that I think is on the horizon,
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and this is what I call the post-human self,
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that there’s something going on inside the self
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and inside the way that we experience ourselves
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and the way that we perceive ourselves that is already happening
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and will continue to happen more so.
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And so even if we leave aside global warming, potential catastrophe,
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the takeover of the machines, global war,
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all the myriad of fearful scenarios that lie on the horizon,
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that I think we face another kind of apocalypse.
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And I use that word very, very gingerly
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because I don’t mean a discrete moment in time when everything changes.
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I mean something more like the original term means, which is revelation.
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And we have certain revelations about the self that are on the horizon and coming down the pike.
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And they’re not necessarily so easy to take down.
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And I’ll get to that in a little bit. So what’s happening to the self?
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There’s two main ways I think about imagining or understanding how we’re transforming our sense
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of subjectivity of who we are, how we feel on a day-to-day basis. And those are media, particularly electronic media and pharmacology.
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In the media space, one of the things that characterizes the modern world,
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and people don’t usually think about it in these terms,
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is that it made a pact with electricity.
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In the pre-modern world, you know, they tended to organize nature
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in terms of maybe four elements, sometimes five, air, earth, fire, and water.
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And these were imagined to be the kind of animating spirits behind all the different kinds of matter one would encounter, including the human body, including the temperament.
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Our own personality tendencies, our own temperament was seen as a kind of elemental operation in sort of in alchemy and in traditional medicine.
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And then something comes along, the sort of capturing and use of electricity.
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And in my view, electricity is as fundamental as one of these elements in terms of the way
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that it feeds in and transforms our sense of material reality.
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that it feeds in and transforms our sense of material reality.
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And just to give you a little bit about that,
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electricity in its nature has a kind of cosmic dimension.
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It ties us to the cosmos in a more direct way than even the elements do, although, of course, the elements are ultimately products of vast stellar activity.
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By using your toaster in the morning,
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you’re tweaking particles on the far end of the universe.
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That’s what they tell us.
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So even the most mundane uses of this, in many ways very mundane technology,
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electricity does not hold the enchantment for us now that it once did,
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we’re participating in a kind of cosmic reality.
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But I think in making that pact, electricity has certain plans for us,
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plans that are sort of coming online, have been coming online,
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things like the collapse of space and time,
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things like the weaving of a collective intelligence,
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things like the incredible speeding up of our inventiveness,
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our possibility spaces, our abilities to envision.
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So that rather than just talking about the computer,
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you can see all of electrical and electronic media
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as kind of an expression of this pact, this elemental pact with the spirit.
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The way that we think of air, earth, and fire as having spirits,
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like in a pagan ritual. Electricity has a spirit,
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but it’s not necessarily an easy one. It comes with some
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difficulty, because it tends to undermine our rooted
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animal nature, our sense of being, living in a
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world of four elements.
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For the vast majority of human life, 99.99999% of it, we’re running around where most of the things we encounter,
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almost everything we encounter is nature, some form of nature or another.
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The weather, the food, the rocks that we’re hunkering behind.
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Yes, we make little primitive shelters or have very simple forms of culture,
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but we’re mostly swimming in nature.
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And now we’re swimming in culture, in largely electronically mediated culture.
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And that this process, this feedback loop, is going to intensify and intensify.
00:22:59 ►
And the kind of dislocation and sort of fluidity, multiplicity that one can experience in visionary states
00:23:08 ►
where images and patterns and sounds and lights all sort of feed into this kind of virtualized,
00:23:16 ►
hyper-dimensional experience is going to increasingly become the reality of media.
00:23:23 ►
And Alex talked a little bit about computer graphics and the ways in
00:23:28 ►
which these allow for an incredible intensification of our ability to actually simulate visionary
00:23:34 ►
experience, not just reflected in some kind of, you know, this sort of visionary art expressive
00:23:40 ►
cultural gesture, but actually capture it in a way that perhaps can actually trigger the brain without any kinds of compounds.
00:23:49 ►
So there’s a psychedelic quality, if you will, to electronic media that is going to intensify and that is already intensifying.
00:23:57 ►
And what it does is it creates this very dislocated sense of self.
00:24:03 ►
It’s an exuberant one in many ways because it’s about connection.
00:24:07 ►
It’s about a kind of virtual communion. It opens up the possibility space of the different
00:24:15 ►
kinds of images, different kinds of worlds we can encounter. But it also has a price.
00:24:21 ►
And a lot of the crass media that you see now is not,
00:24:25 ►
you can’t just say, oh, that’s just about, you know, the corporate structure
00:24:29 ►
or it’s just about the dumbing down of America.
00:24:31 ►
It’s about what happens when you take a feedback loop,
00:24:34 ►
which is essentially what electronic media does.
00:24:37 ►
You have a human idea, you do human practices, you put it into an artifact,
00:24:41 ►
the artifact spits it back into a consumer or someone who’s using the media.
00:24:45 ►
And that creates these feedback loops of human ideas, human culture, and technological invention.
00:24:53 ►
And reality TV, the horror of reality TV, is an inevitable outcome of the linking of this feedback loop to our lower selves,
00:25:05 ►
of the linking of this feedback loop to our lower selves,
00:25:09 ►
to our unevolved selves, to our egos that don’t want to die,
00:25:14 ►
that have immortality projects, that are dominated by greed and lust and lust for fame, a desire for a certain kind of presence,
00:25:18 ►
which becomes evanescent the moment you’re there.
00:25:22 ►
That’s the trick of the media.
00:25:24 ►
I want to be on screen, I want to be on screen, I want to be on screen,
00:25:26 ►
and then I’m on screen and I’m emptied by the screen.
00:25:29 ►
This is something that a lot of actors have to deal with.
00:25:31 ►
They’re emptied by their process.
00:25:33 ►
But from the outside, it looks like they’re full.
00:25:36 ►
So it’s like the hungry ghost realm that Dale Pendell mentioned earlier,
00:25:40 ►
where we start chasing images of some kind of real life,
00:25:44 ►
some kind of authenticity, some kind of real power.
00:25:46 ►
And you can see that in the media.
00:25:48 ►
I mean, I had a very disturbing visionary experience,
00:25:53 ►
one of the more prophetic ones in the sense that I didn’t feel I was dealing with personal material,
00:25:58 ►
but really a glimpse of a kind of future world.
00:26:01 ►
And it was sort of like a hell realm of television, where we’re just in that
00:26:07 ►
space, and everyone is constantly seeking to occupy a place that looks like it has some kind of power,
00:26:14 ►
and some kind of essence. And ever since I had that experience, it was like this great sort of
00:26:19 ►
death star that I was like locked in in, and I was like swimming in it for like hours. It was horrible.
00:26:31 ►
And then finally I escaped and I was like surfing on a wave in like the Polynesian Isles and there was this Rastafarian and he was going,
00:26:33 ►
oh, you’re still trying to stick with nature.
00:26:35 ►
Come on, hold on, hold on.
00:26:37 ►
And we were flowing.
00:26:37 ►
We’re in the flow.
00:26:38 ►
It was beautiful.
00:26:38 ►
And then this looming death star of lowbrow electronic media descended once again
00:26:44 ►
and there I went for another hour.
00:26:47 ►
And the weird thing is that ever since that point, I can’t watch TV.
00:26:52 ►
I mean, I really can’t watch it.
00:26:54 ►
I mean, it makes me kind of woozy.
00:26:58 ►
I mean, I can do it.
00:26:59 ►
I can watch Star Trek reruns and stuff, but it just doesn’t really happen.
00:27:04 ►
You can watch Star Trek reruns and stuff, but it just doesn’t really happen.
00:27:10 ►
And there’s a line from an early Tuxedo Moon song, a San Francisco freak band, Par Excellence.
00:27:14 ►
We laugh at the TV set, calling it the eye of hell.
00:27:21 ►
And there’s a kind of hell realm that we’re bringing on realm, or a kind of purgatorial realm that we’re bringing online.
00:27:28 ►
And one of the things that I think is happening is that all of the ways that we’re used to feeling like we’re alive,
00:27:30 ►
and by we I don’t mean us here, but human beings,
00:27:34 ►
a sense of power, a sense of domination or whatever,
00:27:38 ►
is being eroded in some sense by this electronic situation.
00:27:41 ►
We’re creating a place where we don’t really know who we are anymore.
00:27:44 ►
We don’t know who’s making the decision. We don’t know who is really behind this desire or this thirst.
00:27:49 ►
And so that knowledge becomes part of this endless feedback loop, this endless circulation,
00:27:55 ►
and it creates a very anxious culture.
00:27:59 ►
And we see that in a larger sense.
00:28:00 ►
So a lot of the lowbrownness of the media, and of course it really has been going down in a general way,
00:28:07 ►
even in the 15 years that I’ve been working inside magazines and newspaper and media,
00:28:12 ►
there’s really been a tremendous dumbing down.
00:28:14 ►
And it has to do with the fact that we are increasingly bringing online our own human subjective, our own self, but that self is in crisis because it’s being transformed
00:28:26 ►
by the very technology that’s bringing us online.
00:28:31 ►
Another way into this that’s a little bit more concrete is pharmacology.
00:28:38 ►
And so what new neuropharmacology offers you is entirely different stories about who you are.
00:28:46 ►
We usually think about it in medical terms.
00:28:48 ►
I have a condition.
00:28:49 ►
I’m going to treat my condition with a medicine.
00:28:52 ►
That’s the dominant story.
00:28:53 ►
So, for example, to take a personal example, I have anxiety.
00:28:57 ►
I’m often very anxious.
00:28:59 ►
It’s often unpleasant.
00:29:00 ►
So where does that come from?
00:29:02 ►
How do I engage anxiety as an individual?
00:29:06 ►
Is it something that I’m karmically linked to?
00:29:10 ►
Is it a demon I must wrestle with and come to embrace?
00:29:15 ►
Or is it really just an imbalance of my neurons, of the bath that my brain swims in?
00:29:29 ►
Is it simply a random or unintentional,
00:29:33 ►
unnecessary artifact of our meat bodies that we’re gaining increasing amounts of control over?
00:29:37 ►
That’s a very different story.
00:29:40 ►
It’s a very different story.
00:29:41 ►
Because when I’m dealing with anxiety as a karmic link, as a familial link,
00:29:47 ►
I can see the, oh, through the mother, through the grandmother.
00:29:52 ►
When I’m dealing with it as an artifact of consciousness trying to stay sane in our insane world,
00:29:59 ►
I must deal with anxiety as a source of meaning.
00:30:02 ►
It’s a wrestling with meaning.
00:30:04 ►
What does this mean
00:30:05 ►
for me? How can I extract meaning from suffering, from my own suffering? And the alternative
00:30:10 ►
model says, dude, that’s just, what are you doing? You’re putting your head up your ass.
00:30:14 ►
There’s no reason to, don’t mess with it. Just medicate it. Just deal with it and then
00:30:18 ►
you can move on to better things. And you can tell by the way I framed it which way I lean, but I don’t lean that way in a rigid stance by any means.
00:30:30 ►
I use pharmacological substances on occasion, and it’s more about that given the option, one wrestles with meaning rather than simply medicating. But I honor and respect a more transhumanist position,
00:30:48 ►
which says that intelligence is now offering us the ability to overcome things
00:30:53 ►
that we have inherited as monkeys, essentially,
00:30:58 ►
and that the world that we’re facing, the world that we need to deal with,
00:31:01 ►
doesn’t need those monkey energies running the show anymore.
00:31:05 ►
And I think we can all see how it’s causing a lot of problems on the big scale.
00:31:10 ►
Those, you know, and I don’t want to insult the monkeys, but I think you know what I mean.
00:31:15 ►
Emotion unchecked, emotion without identity associated with it.
00:31:20 ►
But at the same time, once you go down this road, and I think more or less all of us are on some level down this road, it just gets weirder and weirder and weirder.
00:31:32 ►
Because where does it stop?
00:31:34 ►
Where does the you stop?
00:31:36 ►
Where can I go and say, well, okay, anxiety is not mine.
00:31:40 ►
Depression isn’t mine anymore.
00:31:42 ►
But, you know, my love for my children is mine
00:31:46 ►
I think
00:31:47 ►
the pleasure I experience when I see a great film
00:31:51 ►
that’s me
00:31:52 ►
but the film is sort of doing it to me
00:31:55 ►
so you start to run into the situation
00:31:58 ►
where our awareness about the variety of technologies
00:32:02 ►
that produce different states
00:32:04 ►
states of anxiety, produce different states,
00:32:08 ►
states of anxiety, states of pleasure, states of understanding,
00:32:10 ►
states of visionary consciousness,
00:32:13 ►
you know, looking into a sound and light machine and suddenly entering into another dimension,
00:32:15 ►
that those technologies also amputate the naive idea that we are those things.
00:32:24 ►
Marshall McLuhan talked about the idea that we are those things.
00:32:28 ►
Marshall McLuhan talked about the way that technologies are prostheses,
00:32:32 ►
meaning that I lose my leg, I get a false leg.
00:32:34 ►
Is that my leg or is it not my leg? Yeah, it’s my leg.
00:32:35 ►
I walk around on it.
00:32:36 ►
I care for it.
00:32:37 ►
I care what it looks like.
00:32:38 ►
I want to put a nice shoe on it.
00:32:40 ►
It’s my leg, the way that I don’t have my glasses on now,
00:32:42 ►
but the way my glasses are my glasses, as Pesci mentioned earlier.
00:32:47 ►
But McLuhan said something else, is that prostheses are also amputations.
00:32:52 ►
There’s also a rupture, a kind of undermining of a naive ability to simply, in a kind of organic, holistic, natural, emotionally satisfying way, simply be that thing, be that emotion,
00:33:09 ►
be that pleasure, be that experience.
00:33:12 ►
And so pharmacology sets up a situation where, and this is its story, not necessarily its
00:33:18 ►
reality.
00:33:19 ►
Obviously, there’s a lot of great power in these compounds, the abilities to change our
00:33:24 ►
state, but they’re also, in their own way, snake oil.
00:33:27 ►
They come with a story.
00:33:29 ►
And when you take them, when you go into that world, you’re going into a story.
00:33:33 ►
It’s like there’s a different shaman on the block.
00:33:36 ►
He’s got a little white coat, and it’s like, don’t worry about all that other stuff.
00:33:40 ►
This is the thing that’s going to set you free, or this is the thing that’s going to work for you.
00:33:44 ►
But it’s another story, but it’s a powerful one.
00:33:46 ►
It’s a powerful one and one that I think we have no way out of.
00:33:51 ►
But it creates a very difficult situation, a kind of crisis, a kind of apocalypse,
00:33:57 ►
where all of the concepts of the self are suddenly online.
00:34:02 ►
They’re all part of an ability to manipulate. So we can be
00:34:07 ►
instrumental about our own selves. What are we going to choose? What are you going to choose?
00:34:12 ►
Suddenly the consumer is involved in your own most intimate sense of self because the consumer,
00:34:19 ►
do I want to take that way? Do I want to take these new range of stimulants that are coming down the lines
00:34:25 ►
in order to be more productive? Do I want to take this in order to stop having anger fits that fuck
00:34:31 ►
up my family life? We start making, we start expanding this range of decisions, but in so doing,
00:34:39 ►
and this is a tricky point, in so doing, we are highlighting or making clear the part of us that is aware of ourselves without necessarily fully being ourselves.
00:34:52 ►
The chooser, the one who goes, I am not that.
00:34:57 ►
I am not that emotion.
00:34:59 ►
I am not that physical situation.
00:35:02 ►
What is it then?
00:35:04 ►
What is it then what is it and it’s not it’s a purely like streamlined road to
00:35:10 ►
the deepest metaphysical spiritual questions about Who am I and the question Who am I has
00:35:19 ►
this great viral quality because it tends to undermine your naive ideas if you’re really wedded to it.
00:35:26 ►
It undermines the simplistic notions you have about who you think you are. And that can be
00:35:32 ►
incredibly liberating, but it’s also very scary because we ballast ourselves, we feel okay
00:35:40 ►
by relating with our given personality, with our inherited personality, with our emotional body.
00:35:47 ►
And obviously those things are delicious, and I’m not talking about a kind of schizophrenia,
00:35:51 ►
but I am talking about an increased degree of self-awareness
00:35:55 ►
that has remarkable, productive, spiritual, liberating qualities,
00:36:01 ►
but it’s also a very difficult one.
00:36:04 ►
I don’t think it’s too difficult
00:36:06 ►
for the people here. I have faith that the kind of crisis that I’m seeing, and I’m just
00:36:13 ►
emphasizing the crisis side of it because I think it’s under-talked about, not because
00:36:18 ►
I think it’s the whole story. I have faith that you have the tools for that, but when
00:36:22 ►
I look at the world outside, reality television just being a kind of obvious example
00:36:28 ►
of the way you plug in, quote-unquote, primitive, unreflective emotions
00:36:32 ►
into an intensely aggressive kind of technological circulation,
00:36:39 ►
those same kinds of things are going to happen and are already happening with pharmacology.
00:36:43 ►
And you ain’t seen nothing yet.
00:36:45 ►
Ten, five, ten years, remarkable new compounds are going to come down the pike
00:36:50 ►
that are going to allow us to more and more finely finesse our ups, our downs,
00:36:56 ►
our ability to communicate with groups.
00:36:59 ►
Do we want to eradicate shyness?
00:37:02 ►
Is shyness a disease or is it a temperament? In the old,
00:37:06 ►
you know, four elements world, these things are temperaments. They’re like gods you’ve come into
00:37:10 ►
the world with. It’s like I came in with a lot of mercury. I’m not getting out of mercury. He’s my
00:37:16 ►
god and my tormentor. But suddenly these elements are just kind of up for grabs, we lose that sort of stability.
00:37:31 ►
And this is where I think another side of visionary culture comes in and plays a potentially really important role.
00:37:35 ►
And what I mean by that is that the kind of relationship one develops with pharmacology
00:37:42 ►
inside of visionary culture has a very interesting quality to it
00:37:46 ►
that can illuminate this larger situation
00:37:50 ►
about the pharmacological self
00:37:52 ►
or the post-human self that I’m talking about.
00:37:54 ►
The self that can no longer organize itself
00:37:58 ►
with the old human stories,
00:38:00 ►
whether those are modern human stories
00:38:01 ►
or pre-modern human stories.
00:38:03 ►
There’s another story going on here, a kind of cosmic story, a kind of technological story,
00:38:10 ►
something else that’s happening, and that’s what I mean by the post-human.
00:38:15 ►
Now, visionary compounds are very interesting things when you start talking about neuropharmacology
00:38:20 ►
because there’s a really cool paradox that I believe, I don’t know,
00:38:30 ►
but I believe will end up being another route that visionary culture enters into and is already entering into the mainstream.
00:38:33 ►
Okay, so now you have all these neurologists and neuropharmacologists,
00:38:38 ►
and they’re like, they’re the king cheese now.
00:38:40 ►
What physicists were in the middle of the 20th century,
00:38:44 ►
the brain guys are now, because they know they’re getting close to the seat of it all.
00:38:50 ►
But as they need to account for all of these mind states, they have to account for visionary mind states as well.
00:39:01 ►
They have to account for dreams.
00:39:03 ►
They have to account for lucid dreams. They have
00:39:06 ►
to account for those weird dreams you have when you’re going to sleep and you get stuck and these
00:39:11 ►
weird creatures come at you. And you got to start to pay attention to the whole range of neurological
00:39:18 ►
phenomenon, including visionary, spiritual, religious, and psychedelic states. So you get this weird paradox where the materialists,
00:39:29 ►
the people who say, oh, it’s all just your brain,
00:39:31 ►
it’s all just neurons and chemicals and we can tweak it,
00:39:35 ►
have to confront inevitably the full reality of the visionary experience
00:39:42 ►
and account for it.
00:39:43 ►
And so you already see that.
00:39:44 ►
There’s people saying, yes, we can do certain kinds of electrical stimulation on the brain
00:39:48 ►
and produce senses of presence, produce a sense that there’s a god there,
00:39:53 ►
produce visual phenomenon that resembles psychedelic phenomenon.
00:39:57 ►
You know, all this stuff is in our brain.
00:39:59 ►
You know, the shamans back in the day were just figuring out ways to tweak their brains
00:40:03 ►
in a way that would create a kind of dimensionality
00:40:05 ►
that let them leave the ordinary human world and into another kind of world of imaginal construction.
00:40:14 ►
But so in their attempt to undermine the spirituality of these states, they have to take them as real. And so then the reality
00:40:28 ►
of these things enters into the culture. You can’t deny it anymore. You have to account
00:40:35 ►
for it. So if these states themselves are healing, if these states themselves are productive
00:40:42 ►
of the sort of next stage of evolution, which I think
00:40:46 ►
in some ways they are, though not always in the way that people think, then those things
00:40:51 ►
are going to flow into the culture. It’s like they’ve let in exactly what they’ve wanted
00:40:58 ►
to keep out. And they may tell you, well, that’s just because I’m stimulating a part
00:41:02 ►
of your brain. But then you’re having the experience. And as we know, there’s a noetic quality, a quality of reality to these experiences
00:41:10 ►
that spills far beyond, far beyond the contracts that we can possibly imagine with our own ordinary
00:41:17 ►
heads. I’m not making any argument about whether they are ultimately in our brains or not. But
00:41:21 ►
that’s beside the point. That’s the point, is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore. As we bring these things into consciousness, into culture,
00:41:31 ►
into media, into technology, they enter into this increasingly chaotic world where the self,
00:41:39 ►
the human self, the subjective sense of reality, the sense of perception are all kind of up for
00:41:44 ►
grabs.
00:41:45 ►
And there’s all these very low forces that are attempting to capture them,
00:41:49 ►
things like right-wing talk radio, a remarkable vampiric technology
00:41:55 ►
that manages to feed off of fear and resentment
00:41:59 ►
and some of the less noble aspects of the masculine temperament
00:42:05 ►
and turn it into this massive political force.
00:42:09 ►
That’s a use of technology to hold on to subjectivity.
00:42:12 ►
It’s not about the content.
00:42:14 ►
If you listen to talk radio, it’s all opinion.
00:42:17 ►
Well, I think the immigrants are coming here and they need to follow the law.
00:42:21 ►
Yeah, law, law.
00:42:22 ►
And they give you all the Republican talking points.
00:42:23 ►
Yeah, it’s all about following the law.
00:42:24 ►
But what’s really going on is affect.
00:42:27 ►
It’s all just emotion.
00:42:28 ►
It’s not an argument.
00:42:29 ►
It’s not an idea.
00:42:30 ►
It’s a way to capture lower emotional energies and kind of keep a tap on them.
00:42:38 ►
But this is going to continue to undermine.
00:42:41 ►
And these different technologies that we see here, light technologies,
00:42:45 ►
music technologies, visionary art, are sort of vehicles for a more subtle way of dealing with
00:42:51 ►
this. Because what visionary culture teaches you how to do is to develop a relationship with a
00:42:57 ►
compound as if it were a kind of spirit, not one who is your God, but one who is potentially your
00:43:03 ►
teacher, perhaps a pal, perhaps
00:43:05 ►
one of those friends you don’t exactly trust, but enjoy their company. Perhaps the ones that you
00:43:11 ►
feel like you have some karmic relationship to. So there’s a kind of relational way of dealing
00:43:17 ►
with substances inside visionary culture that gives us clues, deep clues, for the question of how do we deal with this larger
00:43:26 ►
issue that’s going to happen in the culture at large and in our own lives when we’re dealing
00:43:31 ►
with non-visionary states, with our own decisions we make about our own personality structures.
00:43:37 ►
So there’s an incredible opportunity there for this kind of raising up of the intelligence and the communicating
00:43:48 ►
intelligence that enables us as a community and as individuals to be able to navigate
00:43:53 ►
these spaces. And I think those navigational skills will become increasingly necessary
00:43:58 ►
and translated out of a specific visionary context. And that’s the thing that has to
00:44:04 ►
happen is that you’re not going to have everybody, you know,
00:44:07 ►
you don’t want everybody flying down to Iowa.
00:44:09 ►
There’s already too many people flying down to Peru,
00:44:11 ►
hanging out with the Iowa Scaros.
00:44:13 ►
What you want is an ability to communicate the central truths of those experiences
00:44:17 ►
to larger people, to give them the ability to know
00:44:20 ►
that you can move safely between different mind states.
00:44:23 ►
You can have relations with compounds that go for a while and may go kind of a little awry,
00:44:30 ►
but you can come out, or at least mostly come out, generally come out.
00:44:33 ►
Overall, there’s an intelligence about these things, and there’s no reason to deny that side of it.
00:44:40 ►
So in that sense, that’s the way I mean that visionary culture has a kind of prophetic role to play.
00:44:46 ►
But this is very different than a lot of the kinds of prophecy that we associate often with these compounds.
00:44:52 ►
And I want to sort of offer a counterbalance.
00:44:56 ►
It’s not a negation, but it’s a counterbalance to a tendency in the visionary culture community
00:45:03 ►
towards a certain kind of what I’ll call religion,
00:45:07 ►
a certain kind of religion.
00:45:09 ►
And this is the idea that there’s some kind of transformation just around the bend
00:45:15 ►
that’s going to change everything.
00:45:17 ►
Or there’s some kind of transformation just around the bend that’s going to totally change me,
00:45:22 ►
and I’m going to be integrated once again.
00:45:24 ►
around the bend that’s going to totally change me, and I’m going to be integrated once again. I’m no longer going to be a fragmented, conflicted, modern person that we all are a lot of the time.
00:45:33 ►
And this dream that there is some kind of transformation is part of the visionary experience.
00:45:39 ►
It’s an inevitable outcome of the things that one sees, the things one reads about,
00:45:43 ►
the discussions and communications
00:45:45 ►
one has. But I also think that it’s a danger because it absorbs the energy that is better
00:45:51 ►
spent bringing back into the mix, back into the mess, back into this somewhat fragmented,
00:46:01 ►
somewhat self-undermining, somewhat anxious modern or post-modern or post-human condition that electronics are bringing to us,
00:46:09 ►
that the breakdown of the world is bringing to us, that pharmacology is bringing us.
00:46:14 ►
So that in a way, it’s like, forgive the masculinist analogy,
00:46:21 ►
but it’s like a temptress where the game is to keep the seduction
00:46:26 ►
in play, where you keep the energy alive, whereas if you go, you break the field, where what’s really
00:46:34 ►
going on is a certain kind of dance, a certain kind of tension. And that visionary experience
00:46:39 ►
has, as its temptress, this kind of crude prophetic function
00:46:45 ►
where it’s like, yes, there’s a transformer just around the bend.
00:46:48 ►
It’s a new culture.
00:46:48 ►
We’re going to transform.
00:46:50 ►
It’s all going to change.
00:46:52 ►
And I think that really takes us away from what we’re actually doing,
00:46:56 ►
which is bringing in pieces, fragments, glimpses, particles,
00:47:00 ►
and weaving them together.
00:47:01 ►
And in that weaving, in a very human world,
00:47:03 ►
in the sense of being in our ordinary world,
00:47:06 ►
using technology, using machines, using communication,
00:47:09 ►
we’re trying to see what all that stuff does
00:47:11 ►
when we include intelligence, when we include rationality,
00:47:16 ►
when we include science in the modern sensibility.
00:47:19 ►
So the idea that there’s something going to happen
00:47:22 ►
at some certain date and it’s all going to change.
00:47:26 ►
It looks like it’s an escape from modernity, but it’s not.
00:47:30 ►
It’s the most modern thing you can do.
00:47:32 ►
One of the fundamental things about the modern world is the idea of revolution.
00:47:37 ►
Revolution.
00:47:38 ►
That you have an old order, the monarchy, and then you transform it and you bring in the people,
00:47:43 ►
you bring in democracy, you change the world.
00:47:47 ►
The shamanic peoples, prudent peoples, whatever you want to call them,
00:47:50 ►
first peoples, did not think about massive transformations
00:47:54 ►
that are going to utterly change human structure and the planet.
00:47:58 ►
They’re about continuity and return, continuity and return.
00:48:03 ►
And that’s what I’m talking about,
00:48:07 ►
is return, return to the situation, not to fall into the trap of religion in that sense.
00:48:13 ►
And so for me, the kind of model
00:48:17 ►
of the visionary community in its full prophetic mode
00:48:24 ►
is not necessarily these great visions of a goddess or a god or a form or a figure or alien language.
00:48:33 ►
This stuff’s great, but it’s also kind of like science fiction.
00:48:36 ►
It’s kind of like, you know, watching cool movies.
00:48:40 ►
And we come back.
00:48:41 ►
And we come back.
00:48:51 ►
For me, a better example than the kind of, you know, this sort of guru model is Arrowit.
00:48:53 ►
How many of you guys here know Arrowit?
00:48:54 ►
Arrowit.com.
00:48:57 ►
We’ve got about two-thirds of you, three-quarters.
00:49:01 ►
No, but three-quarters of you.
00:49:01 ►
Thank you.
00:49:06 ►
Anyway, it’s a psychoactive information site online.
00:49:10 ►
And most people appreciate it because it’s extremely useful.
00:49:12 ►
It’s pragmatic.
00:49:14 ►
It’s not visionary.
00:49:17 ►
It’s not giving you a line. It’s giving you what information we can bring together from science,
00:49:22 ►
from people’s personal experience, from people’s own visionary experiences.
00:49:27 ►
But it does it in a way that is extremely useful.
00:49:32 ►
Now, that’s mostly how we deal with it.
00:49:34 ►
But there’s something much deeper going on there that is part of what I mean about this sort of prophetic function,
00:49:39 ►
which is there’s a profound ethics of information and communication that go on there.
00:49:45 ►
Because it’s not about imposing a single point of view.
00:49:49 ►
It’s about drawing the user into a community of intelligence and information that educates them
00:49:56 ►
and makes them part of a larger collective, but dialogue-rich, full of controversy, full of bullshit, full of, you know, moves that are not necessarily from the best motivations.
00:50:26 ►
community that gives us a glimpse of the kinds of ways we need to be involved with each other to mediate and survive the transformation that I’m talking about.
00:50:32 ►
That it’s through our communication with one another,
00:50:35 ►
through sustaining an open community where dialogue occurs,
00:50:39 ►
where science is fed into personal experience,
00:50:42 ►
that we are able to develop ways of thinking and being
00:50:45 ►
with one another that will create the kinds of, you know, whatever you want to call it,
00:50:49 ►
harmonic fields or whatever, that will enable us to go through this tremendous transformation.
00:50:57 ►
So I urge you, if you haven’t checked out Arrowhead, to go into it and also just to
00:51:04 ►
reflect a little bit more about it,
00:51:06 ►
because people who use it love it, but it’s sort of just like, yeah, it’s an information source,
00:51:10 ►
something that helps me out, or whatever.
00:51:12 ►
But if you start to really go into the way that it’s been enabled,
00:51:16 ►
tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people to increase their intelligence
00:51:21 ►
in relationship to the kinds of compounds that are modeling for us,
00:51:29 ►
simulating, if you will, this transformation or this kind of opening in the future
00:51:34 ►
that’s going to be incredibly intense.
00:51:37 ►
It’s going to be a very wild ride.
00:51:39 ►
And just because I can’t help pitching, I wanted to let you know that if you use Arrowhead at all,
00:51:49 ►
it operates on a shoestring budget.
00:51:54 ►
They’re not out there with trust funds.
00:51:58 ►
They’re not out there getting government grants.
00:52:00 ►
They’re doing work that a government should be doing, or not the government as we have it now,
00:52:04 ►
but that should be part of a rational state, which is not what we have.
00:52:10 ►
And so if you at all, what’s that? E-R-O-W-I-D dot org.
00:52:17 ►
But I’m not just doing a pitch. I’m doing it because by going deeper into that community, I think you begin to participate in a form of information exchange,
00:52:28 ►
a form of understanding that models the kinds of skills that we need to develop in order to take on an increasingly chaotic
00:52:38 ►
and self-undermining process that has a liberational quality but has a lot, a lot of traps.
00:52:42 ►
mining process that has a liberational quality but has a lot
00:52:44 ►
a lot of traps
00:52:44 ►
and so I think with that note
00:52:48 ►
I will end and I
00:52:50 ►
think we have about
00:52:51 ►
10-12
00:52:54 ►
minutes for questions I really like
00:52:56 ►
the question and answer part so I hope I’ve been
00:52:58 ►
stimulating and
00:52:59 ►
thank you.
00:53:18 ►
Yeah, Robert asked a question about the computer and its relationship to visionary experience.
00:53:22 ►
And he used the example, I probably were talking about, I don’t know what it’s called.
00:53:23 ►
It was the Cubetronics last year.
00:53:27 ►
But does anybody know the name of it with the ping pong balls and the flashing? The big, what’s that?
00:53:30 ►
The big round Cubitron.
00:53:31 ►
The big round Cubitron. Yeah, yeah, that’s it.
00:53:34 ►
And obviously those patterns are generated by computer.
00:53:37 ►
I suspect that the structural design of the Belgian waffle is a computer device.
00:53:46 ►
That’s one of the other things that computers let us do is not just create remarkable virtual images,
00:53:51 ►
but to design buildings in ways that are extremely difficult to do otherwise.
00:53:55 ►
So, you know, like Frank Gehry buildings are absolutely products of the computer.
00:54:03 ►
So what you can see is that the existence
00:54:05 ►
of the computer gives us these new languages that bring us closer into what I think of
00:54:10 ►
ultimately as a kind of electronic consciousness. The fractal is another great example. The
00:54:16 ►
fractals are incredibly simple mathematical things. They’re just little, tiny, reiterative
00:54:22 ►
functions. But in order to generate a fractal, you need to do
00:54:25 ►
that equation
00:54:27 ►
so many freaking times
00:54:30 ►
that a human being would never
00:54:32 ►
discover this pattern.
00:54:34 ►
Only a computer can discover the pattern.
00:54:36 ►
So this icon
00:54:38 ►
of early electronic
00:54:40 ►
psychedelic visionary culture,
00:54:43 ►
which is so rich
00:54:44 ►
in so many ways, scientifically,
00:54:46 ►
as an allegory of mathematics and the mind. I mean, the fractals are incredible. It is a gift,
00:54:51 ►
if you will, from the computer, not to mention all the virtual graphics, definitely.
00:54:59 ►
Other questions? Yes? Good. That’s a great point. That’s a great point.
00:55:04 ►
Yes? Good. That’s a great point. That’s a great point.
00:55:15 ►
Actually, I’ve heard a number of names. There’s Ucrania and Message from the Future are both things that I’ve heard.
00:55:25 ►
So none of the initial, like all the cantilevers are just evolved? They don’t have any structural logic behind them?
00:55:27 ►
Oh, yeah, definitely.
00:55:31 ►
So there’s very much a reiterative function to what they’re doing as well.
00:55:34 ►
Yeah, I didn’t want to imply that, I mean, it’s kind of false to say,
00:55:39 ►
oh, the computer’s given us this new thing as if the computer is sort of like this alien intelligence,
00:55:42 ►
but one of the things it does is gives us these deep natural patterns, these abilities to be organic and replicate
00:55:45 ►
organic logic in a different way. Yes?
00:55:49 ►
Right. No, this is a very good question. He asked about Kaczynski and the sort of really
00:55:54 ►
dark side view of the combination of technology and the state. And, well, my position on that
00:56:01 ►
is that I deeply respect those positions and have spent time in them in the sense of I feel like I really get it.
00:56:09 ►
And that position being that it’s just not working out very good, that we’re not capable of controlling these things
00:56:19 ►
and the sort of ideas that they’re programmed with, the extent of the power, the way they link with capital,
00:56:26 ►
the way that all these sort of larger bodies like a corporation begin to kind of take over
00:56:30 ►
and dictate the direction of things is just creating an extraordinary crisis that’s completely unsustainable
00:56:36 ►
and there’s nothing we can really do about that.
00:56:39 ►
And in many ways, my desire not to inhabit that position is a sort of ethical, existential act.
00:56:48 ►
It’s not because I believe that that’s necessarily a wrong view.
00:56:52 ►
And in a way, that’s also an answer to the question of how do you increase intelligence
00:56:56 ►
or the good kind of human intelligence or community or communication
00:57:01 ►
that could potentially help shift things in the proper direction.
00:57:05 ►
And I don’t know the immediate answer for that, and this might sound a little bit like a cop-out,
00:57:11 ►
but when I think about the Bardo realm, it’s like we get these glimpses of the Bardo,
00:57:15 ►
we’re going to die, and we’re going to see all the forms of all of our fears and desires.
00:57:19 ►
Well, I don’t know about you, but I think the Bardo is going to be a pretty rough ride for me.
00:57:24 ►
Well, I don’t know about you, but I think the barter is going to be a pretty rough ride for me.
00:57:30 ►
The chances of me making it out of there on my own, pretty thin.
00:57:36 ►
And I’m not involved in any particular – I don’t have, like, my Tibetan master who’s given me the juju moves or anything. So I kind of – I call it, you know, just holding out for the angels.
00:57:41 ►
holding out for the angels.
00:57:44 ►
And I don’t mean that in a flip way,
00:57:49 ►
but that there’s some kind of descending pattern,
00:57:54 ►
some kind of crystalline ability to move through these spaces that we have inside of us, but we don’t experience or see.
00:57:58 ►
And in a way, I think one of the great things we can do now
00:58:02 ►
is to model on many different levels,
00:58:06 ►
inside the self, inside small, isolated communities off the grid,
00:58:12 ►
inside larger cultures, inside of things that are flowing through the media,
00:58:16 ►
inside environmental technologies, and all these different ways.
00:58:20 ►
We’re like modeling solutions because the thing that we don’t really know is as information
00:58:28 ►
and pattern and communication become more and more tightly coupled with the material world,
00:58:34 ►
when the breakdown between the virtual and the material occurs more and more, when suddenly there
00:58:40 ►
are RFID devices in all of our objects when already the GPS breaks down the difference
00:58:47 ►
between physical space and virtual space in a way, that there’s some kind of bridging
00:58:52 ►
of the material structure, all of these institutions, all of these structures, all of these technologies,
00:58:59 ►
and the virtual, let’s call it.
00:59:01 ►
And that by creating these seed crystals of solutions, of clarity,
00:59:08 ►
of open community, there’s this potential, and this is where the angel comes in, that
00:59:15 ►
it spreads in a way that we cannot anticipate.
00:59:17 ►
So it can be so frustrating and so disheartening to feel the powerlessness that so many of
00:59:24 ►
us feel now when we watch this kind of monstrous juggernaut go forward.
00:59:28 ►
But I really believe that in all these different ways, and it’s hard to know where the lever is.
00:59:33 ►
It might be in just simply getting into environmental technology as quickly as we can,
00:59:37 ►
ignore all the spiritual stuff.
00:59:38 ►
It’s a trap.
00:59:40 ►
And it might be the opposite.
00:59:41 ►
It might be that in developing personalities that are able to deal with our condition in a full way,
00:59:46 ►
to register them with clarity and love and be able to direct human creativity in these proper directions,
00:59:52 ►
we actually create a kind of crystal that’s able to spread in a way, in some way that we can’t see.
01:00:00 ►
And so that’s sort of the way I confront that issue.
01:00:03 ►
But I recognize the dark picture.
01:00:05 ►
I see it and, you know, honor it.
01:00:10 ►
Yeah, that’s a great question.
01:00:12 ►
So Mark was asking about how do you relate with media?
01:00:20 ►
He was talking about he moved to Australia, and just by getting outside of the United States
01:00:23 ►
and moving to a culture that, even though it’s modern and developed, is much less mediated,
01:00:28 ►
he felt like he gained some space, and a sort of pressure got off of him.
01:00:32 ►
And I think we all experience that pressure, and we react
01:00:36 ►
to it in different ways, and some of us just escape from it, and some of us just
01:00:39 ►
accept it. But I think that as with pharmacology,
01:00:44 ►
there is, with technology technology a kind of practice.
01:00:48 ►
It too is a field of practice, the way that one practices a spiritual practice or practices
01:00:53 ►
an art. And that practice with media involves being aware of the pacts that we’re constantly making with these things and being willing to issue manual overrides that cut off these communication lines for periods of time,
01:01:12 ►
maybe very temporary, maybe for weeks at a time,
01:01:16 ►
that we recognize that they’re left to their own devices.
01:01:22 ►
They just want to weave us in and make us a node.
01:01:21 ►
They left to their own devices.
01:01:24 ►
They just want to weave us in and make us a node.
01:01:33 ►
And that’s not necessarily bad entirely because some of it, that some of that is what we need in order to communicate,
01:01:37 ►
given the historical and technological realities that we live in. But at the same time, it has a vampiric kind of quality.
01:01:42 ►
And so, you know, media fasts are the simplest way of talking about it
01:01:46 ►
because you institute even the simplest media fast through your cell phone, you know, take it with you
01:01:52 ►
for a weekend or whatever it is. You immediately begin to see the way that the technology has
01:01:57 ►
already infused your own life, your sense of space, your sense of time, your sense of communication.
01:02:04 ►
own life, your sense of space, your sense of time, your sense of communication.
01:02:09 ►
And if you lose the thread of that kind of self-awareness, if you don’t put breaks into the circuit, which is, you know, a lot of ways why we like altered states is because
01:02:14 ►
they’re breaks in the circuit of our habits, of our normal construction of reality, that
01:02:19 ►
you can approach those breaks as well, in many ways, incredibly brilliantly with media.
01:02:24 ►
And you can doiantly with media. And you can do
01:02:25 ►
it with media. It’s not just about escaping from media, but it is about keeping a certain intensity
01:02:30 ►
of self-awareness and a kind of relationship. That’s really what I’m talking about here is
01:02:38 ►
not believing that we can all just melt into a puddle of unity, that actually sustaining the relationship
01:02:46 ►
where we’re engaged in dialogue and discourse and difference
01:02:51 ►
is the way that we go forward.
01:02:55 ►
And to keep that relationship with your machines as well,
01:02:58 ►
these little sprites that, if left uncontrolled,
01:03:03 ►
will have their way with you
01:03:05 ►
is only part of this larger dialogic process
01:03:09 ►
that I think is a real key to where we’re going.
01:03:13 ►
So thank you very much for your attention.
01:03:15 ►
I really appreciate it.
01:03:20 ►
And we really appreciate you, Eric.
01:03:23 ►
Thank you so much.
01:03:23 ►
And we really appreciate you, Eric.
01:03:24 ►
Thank you so much.
01:03:30 ►
I really like that idea of Eric’s about taking a media fast.
01:03:36 ►
I know that my life has improved considerably since my wife and I dropped our cable subscription and are no longer watching U.S. television,
01:03:40 ►
which, after all, is nothing more than propaganda aimed at increasing both unnecessary consumption and unnecessary fear.
01:03:48 ►
So I highly recommend giving it a try yourself.
01:03:52 ►
Why not start with a media-free day each month, or better yet, maybe even each week?
01:03:58 ►
Just see if you can go for a full 24 hours without checking email, surfing the net, or even listening to a podcast.
01:04:07 ►
Don’t let these machines run your lives.
01:04:10 ►
In fact, if you want to take a real break from the mainstream media,
01:04:14 ►
maybe you should think about going to Burning Man next year.
01:04:18 ►
Of course, even there you’re going to find over a dozen FM radio stations,
01:04:22 ►
what passes for a mainstream newspaper, and of of course, the ever-popular alternative daily, Piss Clear.
01:04:31 ►
You know, doing a media fast isn’t easy, even at Burning Man, but it sure is a healthy way to live.
01:04:38 ►
By the way, speaking of media, on a non-fast day, you can also hear the 2003 Palenque Norte lecture that Eric referred to in this talk.
01:04:49 ►
You old-timers here in the salon heard it a year ago or more in our third podcast.
01:04:55 ►
And it’s still available online.
01:04:57 ►
Just go to matrixmasters.com and click on the podcast links that take you to our archives.
01:05:04 ►
And you should be able to find it without too much trouble.
01:05:08 ►
Also, I probably should mention that the incredible photographer that Eric mentioned,
01:05:13 ►
the one whose photographs grace the pages of their new book, Visionary State, is Michael Runner.
01:05:20 ►
And you can find a link to this interesting and beautiful book on the main page of our Amazon store.
01:05:26 ►
And that link can also be found on the main matrixmasters.com homepage.
01:05:33 ►
Also, I hope you take to heart Eric’s warning about not making a religion out of the combination of entheogens and some of the indigenous teachings we like so well.
01:05:44 ►
and some of the indigenous teachings we like so well.
01:05:48 ►
Waiting for some magical, mystical transformation to take place without exerting any effort on your part is losing proposition, in my humble opinion.
01:05:54 ►
A lot of people I know seem to think that even without personal effort and involvement,
01:05:59 ►
their lives will somehow magically improve overnight.
01:06:02 ►
Well, that would be nice, and I really won’t rule out that
01:06:07 ►
possibility myself, but I wouldn’t count on it if I were you. My personal plan is to be
01:06:13 ►
off the grid and as detached from the system as possible by the winter solstice of 2012.
01:06:20 ►
That way, even if nothing external to my life takes place around that time,
01:06:29 ►
a wonderful transformation in how I live will already have taken place.
01:06:33 ►
Like Reverend Ike used to say in his television sermons,
01:06:35 ►
you’ve got to put legs on your prayers.
01:06:39 ►
Of course, he was implying that you should send him some money,
01:06:41 ►
but I think you get the point.
01:06:45 ►
So, what are your plans for transformation?
01:06:49 ►
Are you just sitting around waiting for things to get better?
01:06:54 ►
Or are you doing whatever you can, no matter how insignificant it may seem,
01:07:00 ►
to help this beautiful planet turn into a really nice place for you to return if you decide you want to reincarnate here again someday?
01:07:04 ►
You know, one thing that you might want to think about doing
01:07:07 ►
is something that came up several times during this year’s Blanque Norte lectures,
01:07:12 ►
and that is to begin taking a few small steps to come out of the psychedelic closet, so to speak.
01:07:20 ►
And so I’ve come back around to using the word psychedelic in my everyday conversations,
01:07:25 ►
particularly when I’m around the just-say-no crowd.
01:07:29 ►
It’s time we feel as free to talk about these sacred medicines
01:07:32 ►
and how important they may be to the future evolution of human consciousness
01:07:37 ►
as we feel about talking about sex around the water cooler or coffee pot at work.
01:07:44 ►
Now, I’m not suggesting that you confront
01:07:46 ►
people about these issues but isn’t it time to at least speak more freely about them? And once you
01:07:52 ►
begin down this road what I suspect that you’ll find is that there are a lot more people who
01:07:58 ►
think like we do than you ever dreamed possible. The psychedelic community is everywhere, everywhere on this planet, and it’s time that we
01:08:07 ►
begin making ourselves heard. You know, we are changing the culture. Maybe it’s only one person
01:08:13 ►
at a time, but the tide is turning, and you actually happen to be on the leading edge of
01:08:19 ►
this cultural shift. So press on. The world needs your ideas and energies. Plus, I’ve got to admit this, I guess,
01:08:28 ►
it’s also a lot of fun to irritate the powers that be by speaking up about issues that are
01:08:34 ►
important to us. At least that’s what I think. Well, that’s about it for today. I hope you take
01:08:41 ►
Eric’s advice to heart and lend your support to Arrowwood.org.
01:08:45 ►
As I’ve mentioned many times before, Arrowwood is the very first place to go before beginning any, as in any, psychedelic voyage.
01:08:56 ►
No matter how experienced you are, it’s vitally important to get all your facts straight before venturing into the uncharted realms of cyberdelic space.
01:09:07 ►
And again, thanks to Jacques, Cordell, and Wells, better known as Chateau Hayouk,
01:09:12 ►
for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:09:16 ►
I really appreciate it, you guys. Thanks again.
01:09:19 ►
And thanks also to Darren, Mark, Michael, and the rest of the crew from Inpeon Village
01:09:24 ►
who worked so hard to provide the infrastructure
01:09:28 ►
for this year’s talks. Without your help and Brian’s loan
01:09:32 ►
of this mini-disc recorder I’m using right now, we wouldn’t be hearing
01:09:35 ►
Eric’s presentation from this year. And Eric, thank you
01:09:40 ►
not only for the new thoughts you’ve stirred up in me after hearing your talk, but
01:09:44 ►
thank you again for your help and support in starting the Palenque Norte lectures
01:09:48 ►
and in keeping them going.
01:09:50 ►
I can’t wait to hear what you’ll have to say at the Bern next year
01:09:53 ►
when we’ll be back on the playa once again.
01:09:57 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:10:02 ►
Be well, my friends.