Program Notes

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer

LorenzoSashaBruceBM2007.jpg

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

[NOTE: All quotations below are by Bruce Damer]

08:17 Bruce tells about the three-day white out that followed the 2002 Burning Man festival.

15:59 Bruce talks about the problem of dust on the moon.

18:46“We all grew up seeing buried lunar bases and happy astronauts running around mining and other things, it ain’t going to happen. I concluded, after a lifetime of believing this and two years of actually working on this problem, that we’re not going to do this. We don’t have the technology.”

21.52 “How rare are we in the universe? How rare a thing are we?”

24:02 “These solar systems are out there. They’ve been bathed by our radio waves. Are there any receivers? Is there anyone out there to pick up ‘I Love Lucy’? Probably not. Why? Because those solar systems have all the wrong properties for probably our kind of life or any kind of life.”

29:39 “In this chunk of the galaxy we’re the only noisy solar system… . We may be extremely rare. We may be the only ones in our little quadrant. We may be the only ones in our galaxy, or the only one in our local group of galaxies. Life like ours is unbelievably difficult to create. And here we are, our concerns are can we get to the office on time. We don’t even think about the miracle each one of us is.”

31:42 “What I’m trying to build up is a picture of why you don’t need religion. All you need, if you want to be awestruck, is to consider the improbability of you, the improbable miracle that is you.”

35:05 [Commenting on a computer-generated depiction of an astrophysical zoom-out from Earth] “If the universe was at all attempting to find consciousness, for a split-second, a primate brain on Earth had in its little synaptic gaps a picture of the universe. The universe saw itself momentarily.”

BruceDamerBM2007dust.jpg

38:48 “What if the ultimate goal of life, of the universe, was to become fully conscious? And what I mean by that is the entire universe becomes, instead of this jumble of matter and quantum whatever, it becomes a single conscious being?”

42:02 “For life itself to have a chance to expand out into the universe, and populate and infuse the universe, we may be one of its only shots [at this], at least in our area. We’re one of the only chances to do this, and we have a very limited window.”

46:52 Bruce talks about the possibilities ALife might explore should it ever be set free in a quantum computer.

51:18 Bruce tells the story about his vision (during the AlChemical Arts Conference in September 1999) of Terence McKenna’s ‘getaway car’.

1:03:57 Bruce begins a stream of consciousness riff about quantum reality that is packed with mind-blowing concepts and ends … “In the universe you are all participants. So if you think about it you change it. If you try to study it you change it.”

1:08:39 “The next time you have a powerful dream consider that it may have come from the field.”

Lorenzo’s Photos from the 2007 Burning Man festival<…

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24

And I’m here to tell you that it sure is good to be back here with you again.

00:00:29

After we returned from Burning Man last week, I was all charged up and was planning on doing an entire podcast about it.

00:00:37

But now that the dust is beginning to clear, so to speak, the truth is that I’m all burned out with Burning Man right now.

00:00:46

But that said, even though I’d originally planned to podcast a few more of the McKenna-Abraham-Sheldrake

00:00:53

trilogues, the playa just won’t let go of me yet this year, and so I’m going to play

00:00:58

one of this year’s playalogues for you. And it’s the one that Bruce Dahmer led. In fact,

00:01:04

this was the last of the

00:01:05

Plylogs that we held at the Bern this year, but I have a good reason for

00:01:09

playing it first. And that reason is summed up in the one word I love to hear

00:01:14

my friend Queer Ninja say when he opens his podcast, and that word is EASY. As in

00:01:21

easy. But in this case I’m the one who’s taking it easy.

00:01:25

While it would probably make sense to play the ply logs in the order that they were held,

00:01:31

transferring all of that audio onto my computer and then converting it to MP3 format

00:01:36

probably isn’t going to take place for a few weeks yet.

00:01:40

But Bruce, as is his custom, brought his own voice recorder along and placed it in front of our little sound system.

00:01:48

And he then gave me a copy of it in MP3 format.

00:01:51

So I’m going to take advantage of Bruce having already done a lot of the work and play his plialogue right now.

00:01:57

Then for the next few weeks, I’m going to play some more of the McKenna Abraham Sheldke trilogues, just to give us all a little break from Burning Man.

00:02:06

Or maybe not.

00:02:08

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what the muse has to say to me next week.

00:02:13

Now, if you go to the program notes for this podcast,

00:02:16

which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.org,

00:02:19

you’ll see a couple of the pictures that were taken during the talk you’re about to hear.

00:02:23

Bruce actually began this plilogue a little before 5 o’clock on Friday afternoon, and just as he began

00:02:30

to speak, we were in tuned in the most severe whiteout of the week. Now, if you’ve been

00:02:35

to the Playa, you know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t experienced a Burning Man

00:02:40

whiteout, well, my advice is to do it vicariously through photos, video, and now through this

00:02:46

audio recording that was made while the little storm raged.

00:02:50

At one point in our comfy little 30-foot diameter yurt, the dust became so thick that people

00:02:57

sitting just 15 feet away or so from Bruce couldn’t even see them through the thick cloud

00:03:02

of dust that filled our yurt.

00:03:04

from Bruce couldn’t even see them through the thick cloud of dust that filled our yurt.

00:03:10

But then the storm blew a hole in the top of the yurt, and that acted as a chimney and sucked a lot of the trap dust out the top.

00:03:13

But in turn, that created a steady flow of fine dust particles that came up from the

00:03:19

ground, swirled around a bit, and then went out the top of the yurt, just like a steady

00:03:24

stream of smoke.

00:03:25

It was really quite spectacular, I have to admit.

00:03:28

But just talking about it right now brings back the sting of the dust in my lungs.

00:03:33

And I was wearing a breathing mask, as was almost everybody else in the yurt.

00:03:38

Everybody except for Bruce, that is.

00:03:40

Even though he had his breathing mask with him, being the true professional he is,

00:03:52

Bruce chose not to use it because he wanted to be sure that those brave souls who were there to hear him could hear him clearly.

00:04:00

Well, as anyone can hear while sitting in a canvas structure during a gale force wind, it was wild to say the least.

00:04:06

So now I’m going to play the recording that Bruce made with his mp3 recorder sitting on a cushion about two feet away from the only live speaker in the tent. Basically you’re

00:04:12

going to hear this plylog pretty much like we all heard it that day. Hopefully we also got another

00:04:18

recording directly from the board but it’s going to be a while before I get my act together enough

00:04:23

to know for sure. Anyway right after I finish playing Bruce’s plylog I’m going to be a while before I get my act together enough to know for sure. Anyway, right after I finish playing Bruce’s Plylog,

00:04:28

I’m going to describe what happened as he finished.

00:04:31

And believe me, it was so unusual that if it wasn’t for the pictures I took,

00:04:35

I probably wouldn’t believe it happened to myself.

00:04:39

And now for the final Plylog at the 2007 Burning Man Festival, Wind and All.

00:04:45

And as you are about to hear, we started out by hunkering down in the yurt

00:04:49

while Bruce told about the worst storm ever to hit the plyo.

00:04:53

And I guess I should mention that I’ve left this recording essentially unedited

00:04:57

so you can hear a little of the wind in the background

00:05:00

and vicariously experience our moments of concern

00:05:03

as the yurt appeared to be

00:05:05

taking off through it all as we sat wearing our breathing masks and goggles. Bruce, of course,

00:05:12

very stoically sat there and talked. No mask, no goggles, and at times we couldn’t even see him

00:05:17

because of the dust, as I mentioned. Yet he pressed on. Oh, and you’ll have to try to ignore the

00:05:23

background sounds, especially in the last

00:05:26

third of the recording. Besides an art car or two going by, the camp next to us started gearing up

00:05:31

their sound system at about the same time as we were finishing. But if you really want to get the

00:05:37

feel of this event, fill your room or your car or wherever you’re listening to this with as much

00:05:42

dirt and fine dust as the air will hold,

00:05:45

and crank the heat up to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit,

00:05:48

and be sure that you haven’t had any sleep for several days.

00:05:52

Now maybe my children, who are almost all over 40 years old right now,

00:05:57

maybe they’re right.

00:05:58

Only a certifiably insane person could be drawn to something like that.

00:06:03

And maybe so, but it still beats

00:06:06

fighting the traffic on the way to and from a dingy little cubicle that sucked the life

00:06:10

out of me for more years than I care to think about.

00:06:14

Okay, I’ll be quiet for a bit now and play this recording of Bruce Dahmer’s Plylog from

00:06:20

the 2007 Burning Man Festival, which he gave while a bunch of us took shelter with him

00:06:25

in the yurt at the Pod Cluster,

00:06:28

way back in the boondocks of Black Rock City.

00:06:36

I would like to now introduce my good friend Bruce Dahmer,

00:06:40

who, I don’t know, how many of you have heard Bruce

00:06:43

on one of the podcasts or something? Okay, a few of you have heard Bruce in one of the podcasts or something?

00:06:46

Okay, a few of you have, so you know a little bit about Bruce.

00:06:50

Bruce came into my life through Terrence McKenzie.

00:06:54

You might want to just hang on for a minute here,

00:06:56

so maybe Bruce can not have to breathe all this dust.

00:07:04

Even the playa gods know when Bruce comes, they’re going to laugh.

00:07:11

Did anybody see in the paper in July in USA Today and a whole bunch of other papers

00:07:19

that NASA now is taking on a new mission, one that finally makes sense,

00:07:25

is to be able to move an asteroid out of the way that’s coming our way

00:07:31

or bring one into orbit and mine it for precious metals or resources.

00:07:37

And it’s a brand new, a whole new direction for NASA

00:07:41

to finally accept this.

00:07:44

And it’s getting dark dark isn’t it?

00:07:49

Maybe I shouldn’t be talking about these things.

00:07:51

Is there another E-Depth schedule for today?

00:07:53

We’re in it!

00:07:55

Wow!

00:07:57

Pardon me?

00:07:59

While this is going on, so that you know this isn’t too bad, why don’t you tell the story

00:08:04

of the 2000 and, was it 2003 or 2003 or 2002 whiteout after the work?

00:08:10

I’ll introduce Bruce the rest of the way in a minute,

00:08:13

but as long as we’re enjoying this,

00:08:14

let’s hear what it was really like when it was bad.

00:08:17

Yeah, right after the festival ended on Monday in 2002,

00:08:26

we’re usually in the staff area in the center camp,

00:08:31

so we just sort of hang out with people at the end.

00:08:34

And we were sitting there.

00:08:37

It was a beautiful morning, about 11 o’clock in the morning on Tuesday,

00:08:40

and we looked down toward Gerlach,

00:08:42

and there was a black wall of dust a thousand feet

00:08:48

high coming toward us not one of those little pillars but a wall and because I work with NASA

00:08:55

on Mars exploration we were doing a lot of simulations of Mars and mapping its surface

00:08:59

and putting vehicles on it virtual vehicles I said, that looks just like artists’ conceptions

00:09:05

of Mars dust storms, like planet-wide dust storms.

00:09:10

So I got Galen into the motorhome,

00:09:13

and I turned the motorhome into this thing

00:09:15

as it was coming in, and it hit with an 80 mile an hour

00:09:19

wallop, hit us, you know, front on,

00:09:23

and it went for three days 80 miles an hour I think it

00:09:27

peaked at a hundred miles an hour and it was it was unbelievable in whiteouts

00:09:33

like this you’ll see people riding their bikes around and everything if you were

00:09:38

in this if you’re outside in this it would blow you right off your bike or if

00:09:43

you held your your bare skin

00:09:45

up you’d see little pock marks of blood little little beads of blood where the

00:09:49

grains are going subcutaneous like this and center cap tent was totaled and hard

00:10:01

structures were torn apart and we saw a burn barrel traveling at 30 miles an hour.

00:10:08

And rangers came by, basically they locked down the playa,

00:10:11

you couldn’t leave.

00:10:13

Washoe County and Pershing County police

00:10:15

evacuated their officers.

00:10:18

And it was called Condition Alpha,

00:10:21

and it’s the highest state of weather emergency.

00:10:24

And I asked them, what happens if Condition Alpha happens during the festival?

00:10:30

Right?

00:10:32

And it’s the bullet that we’re always dodging out here.

00:10:35

And they said, well, the man would be matchsticks.

00:10:38

It would be destroyed.

00:10:39

It wouldn’t be ours.

00:10:40

It would be Mother Nature coming down, picking it up, shaking it apart,

00:10:45

and throwing it down to the blow fence.

00:10:49

It would basically be very severe.

00:10:51

There would be dozens or a hundred people in fatalities.

00:10:57

There would be several thousand people who met medical needs.

00:11:02

So I wrote up a whole website all about this experience

00:11:05

and submitted to the organization still waiting for them to include in the

00:11:08

survival guide book

00:11:10

but uh… i’ve been about

00:11:12

we’re in the word first campus here so i’m gonna grab larry at some opportune

00:11:16

point and say

00:11:17

conditional strategy

00:11:20

and if you guys are ever if you ever find yourself

00:11:23

where the blow is so severe

00:11:25

or there’s a weather condition where there’s a lot of rain and you can’t move,

00:11:29

that’s the other condition alpha, you actually become a block parent,

00:11:34

which means, say if a blow is very intense, people can’t even stand up.

00:11:40

You look around your area that you can see, which might only be 20 feet,

00:11:45

and if somebody’s walking through your camp, you take them in.

00:11:50

If you can, you go and do like an astronaut’s EVA,

00:11:54

walking outside to look for people in a certain perimeter

00:11:57

that might be lying down prone on the fly-on, and take them in too.

00:12:04

We actually rescued a couple that were a hundred feet from

00:12:07

us and they took an hour to find us and one man the man was going into diabetic

00:12:13

shock so we took him in and we hydrated him and kept him from getting worse. He

00:12:19

was almost blacked out and without this block parenting strategy there’s no way to save the

00:12:27

festival the festival would be terminated by that kind of an event so

00:12:32

I’ve got a website off of off of my home page that actually talks about surviving

00:12:37

condition alpha and it talks about the kinds of like industrial strain for

00:12:41

breathers like she’s got hip boots so when you’re trying to tear a camp down

00:12:47

that’s been broken apart by the wind.

00:12:49

Sand dunes are up to five feet high on any obstruction.

00:12:52

So there are sand dunes covering everything.

00:12:55

The blow fence, center camp, the baristas area

00:12:57

is all big sand dunes overrooting.

00:13:01

But it’s condition alpha.

00:13:04

Hopefully this isn’t it. I doubt if this is it.

00:13:07

I don’t think it’s it.

00:13:09

There you go, creative.

00:13:15

Don’t worry about the top of the tent because the worst that will happen is it will all blow off

00:13:20

and we’ll just get a little more dust.

00:13:22

I think John went out to see if any of the troopers want to try to get up on the ladder,

00:13:26

but I don’t advise that myself.

00:13:32

Letting the air through.

00:13:33

Yeah, I think it’s in the best place rather than the side.

00:13:38

So now all of us are sharing this little experience together.

00:13:42

We need to all exchange e-mail addresses and have a reunion every five years of the dust storm

00:13:53

I thought five o’clock by five it would be died down and it was but we tracked

00:13:59

in our camp in first camp if you see there’s a building with a tower on it

00:14:04

with a dish on it,

00:14:05

that’s the network operations center, and we’re part of that team.

00:14:09

And so we look at the weather maps,

00:14:11

and there was a storm system flowing just over here all day,

00:14:16

and we were tracking it coming over.

00:14:19

And if you need e-mail access or voiceover, internet phone, come to us.

00:14:24

Look for that look that building

00:14:27

and we do the webcast too and there’s a robot cameras there’s several robot cameras that scan

00:14:33

the playa and and bring you burning man virtually

00:14:42

yeah okay

00:14:47

It’s just performance art. What’s that?

00:14:48

It’s just performance art.

00:14:49

It says, yeah, this is all prearranged and it’s a beautiful yurt.

00:14:57

We’re thinking of finding the designer and maybe getting a yurt made in the future for

00:15:04

a future event here

00:15:27

Ah, the miracles workers. Miracle workers.

00:15:54

So Lorenzo, what do you want to do through this period? If you want to start your talk, I think it might be interesting to do a little preamble

00:16:00

about dust and the moon and what if we’re not on the moon well let’s go to the dust

00:16:07

issue did you know that if you look out in the universe the primary thing that you’re seeing

00:16:12

the universe is actually made up of is dust dust dominates life uh if there’s life scattered extend

00:16:20

amongst the cosmos it may be that’s not on. It may be around little grains of dust.

00:16:26

When you look at the Milky Way, you’re seeing dust.

00:16:29

So dust is the most difficult material for human technology to manage,

00:16:36

for what we build.

00:16:38

And over the last two years, we were involved in a program at NASA

00:16:42

designed rovers to go to the moon and drill for water ice.

00:16:46

Kind of like me on the fly.

00:16:48

I’m looking for Camp Arctica.

00:16:50

And I discovered through this whole thing, we got to work with people who actually walked on the moon.

00:16:57

Jack Schmidt, I hired him at $400 an hour to look at what we did.

00:17:02

And I concluded through all this well many of

00:17:05

you how many of you remember the Apollo moon landings so there’s quite a few

00:17:10

people in the room did you know that when they landed and yes I believe that

00:17:15

they went to the moon when they landed they landed on the moon you’re because

00:17:24

there’s no atmosphere and the moon just sits out there and it bakes.

00:17:27

It bakes and freezes and bakes and freezes and bakes and freezes.

00:17:30

So when you look at the moon tonight, it’s just come off the full moon.

00:17:34

The surface temperature is 250 to 350 degrees of the rocks

00:17:39

that you’re seeing right now that’s facing the earth, the lit side.

00:17:43

that you’re seeing right now that’s facing the Earth, the lit side.

00:17:52

As that terminator comes over, it will plummet down 200, 250 degrees below zero to touch.

00:17:57

So everything on the moon is about what’s called thermal cycling, up, down, up, down, up, down.

00:17:59

So what did the Apollo guys do?

00:18:04

They landed when it was only 50 degrees Fahrenheit to 65 on the surface. So they’re walking along.

00:18:05

They don’t have big refrigerator units on their, you know, where they’re contacting them.

00:18:10

The boots would be melting.

00:18:12

You know, the suits would be getting all this heat.

00:18:15

And they certainly left after about three, four days.

00:18:17

Two, three days, really, most of them.

00:18:19

Because to not do so would be to be freeze-dried eventually.

00:18:24

When the Russians sent a lunar rover to the moon in the 70s

00:18:28

that was automated, was driven by joystick,

00:18:30

they had to shut it down when the sun went down

00:18:32

and try to keep its electronics cool and warm,

00:18:36

and then it would come back to life.

00:18:37

And they drove it for a year, a couple of them for about a year.

00:18:40

So actually the moon is a harsh mistress.

00:18:43

It is a tough place to go.

00:18:45

And we all grew up seeing buried lunar bases

00:18:49

and happy astronauts running around, mining, doing all those things.

00:18:54

It ain’t going to happen.

00:18:56

I concluded after a lifetime of believing this

00:18:59

and two years of actually working on this problem

00:19:03

that we’re not going to do it.

00:19:04

We don’t have the technology.

00:19:06

If we don’t have the technology to keep something going on the plow with this dust,

00:19:11

the lunar dust is worse.

00:19:13

It’s like this little ninja knives that are made by being smashed.

00:19:17

The moon’s being smashed by asteroids for billions of years,

00:19:20

and it’s made these little sharp grains that get into everything.

00:19:24

They cut fiber down.

00:19:27

The suits were cut.

00:19:28

Several layers were sawn off by this dust.

00:19:32

So you’ve got the thermal cycling, the dust.

00:19:35

You’ve got a lack of water probably.

00:19:38

Jack Schmidt who walked on the moon in Apollo 17 doesn’t believe there’s water ice anywhere.

00:19:43

And so the moon is actually kind of a tomb it’s a harsh mistress so you asked how do people how are people

00:19:49

ever going to go out and settle in the solar system or is this a pipe dream or

00:19:53

this is impossible well guess what the when you saw the Perseid meteor shower

00:19:59

you know a few weeks ago all those streaks in the sky came from objects that came from the birth of the solar system,

00:20:08

the very beginning of the solar system.

00:20:10

And when they come in, they have all these colors, right?

00:20:13

They burn up and have all these colors.

00:20:15

Why do they have the colors?

00:20:16

Because all kinds of good elements in there.

00:20:18

There’s organics in there.

00:20:20

There’s water in there.

00:20:21

All kinds of goodies.

00:20:22

And they’re old.

00:20:23

They’re 4.7 billion years old.

00:20:26

That’s a comet tail that you’re seeing that’s

00:20:28

coming in in the meteor shower.

00:20:30

There’s another one after the burn or around the burn time.

00:20:33

There’s a big meteor shower.

00:20:35

Those are where we came from, all those objects.

00:20:40

And they’ve tracked about a million of them

00:20:42

in the inner solar system, inner solar system objects that pass across the Earth’s orbit.

00:20:48

And they are what we are made of.

00:20:50

After the Earth-Moon formed, the comets and material coming in gave us our oceans.

00:20:56

Because if you’ve got a plain, virgin planet that’s just a cooling lava ball,

00:21:01

it doesn’t have oceans on it. They came in later.

00:21:04

They came in from comets coming in. And occasionally a comet or an asteroid comes in like in Tunguska in

00:21:09

the early 1900s that comes in and blows up and spreads its material everywhere. And so

00:21:16

we’re made out of that stuff. That is the green biosphere of the solar system is that

00:21:22

material. That’s probably our future we

00:21:25

have to learn how to go out and and get that stuff mine it turn it into fuel

00:21:30

water etc etc build our structures out of it and if one of them is coming

00:21:35

toward us like the seven mile wide object that destroyed the dinosaurs we

00:21:40

have to learn how to deflect that but to learn how to deal with those guys.

00:21:49

And this leads on to the next thing, which is you can say,

00:21:54

well, gee, how rare are we in the universe?

00:21:56

How rare a thing are we?

00:22:04

If you go over next to Brad Templeton’s camp where you see all the panoramas,

00:22:05

there’s a dome next to that,

00:22:06

and Carter Emmert from the Rose Center from the Hayden Planetarium in New York City

00:22:10

is doing a show every night where he, from his laptop,

00:22:15

goes from the Earth-Moon system and uses a software called Uniview

00:22:19

that they run on the dome in New York to pull back from the Earth

00:22:22

and pull back and show you all of the known solar

00:22:26

systems that we’ve discovered in the last eight, nine years.

00:22:30

Solar systems that have planets, you know, that stars have planets around them.

00:22:34

And then he superimposes a sphere showing where the radio waves have reached from the

00:22:39

1920s, about 70 years or so. So these planets, these exosolar planets have been bathed by signals from our civilization

00:22:50

that we know of.

00:22:53

And then, of course, he pulls back to the entire galaxy and shows that tiny little piece

00:22:58

of the galaxy we see in the night sky, that our constellations are these minute, this

00:23:03

is minute corner of the galaxy.

00:23:04

sky that our constellations are these minute this is my new corner of the galaxy and then he pulls back and shows you the whole universe all the way to

00:23:09

the cosmic background radiation it’s really a quite a show and he’ll do it

00:23:14

every night several times but I do that as an augmentation to this talk but so

00:23:21

those those those solar systems that we’ve now seen…

00:23:27

Wow, this is something.

00:23:29

Should I keep going?

00:23:31

This is a blast, okay.

00:23:35

You’re a stripper, bro.

00:23:38

Okay.

00:23:39

It’s like we’re hardcore here.

00:23:41

Is that your hardcore?

00:23:43

Do you need a mask? I’m okay. I’m okay so far.

00:23:53

I’m fine. I’m fine.

00:23:56

So here’s a scary thought.

00:23:59

So all of these exosolar systems are out there.

00:24:03

They’ve been bathed by our radio waves.

00:24:05

Is there any receivers?

00:24:06

Is anyone there to pick up I Love Lucy?

00:24:09

Probably not.

00:24:10

Why?

00:24:11

Because those solar systems have all the wrong properties

00:24:15

for probably our kind of life or any kind of life.

00:24:19

Why is that?

00:24:20

Because instead of having in the inner solar system

00:24:23

this nice little serene

00:24:25

parade of little planets and little ice balls and things that are happily

00:24:30

moving around in circular orbits they have the nightmare scenario the infernal

00:24:34

scenario of a giant Jupiter close to the star and it’s hot and it orbits the star

00:24:40

some of them orbit their parents are in three days these giant Jupiter’s they’re

00:24:44

even bigger than our Jupiter.

00:24:45

And they’re going around and going around.

00:24:47

They’re like a little heat engine.

00:24:49

And there’s no small planets that would be able to have life with that.

00:24:53

So you look at our solar system, we have this M-class star that’s very stable.

00:24:59

It sits there and it cooks away for almost 5 billion years with the same temperature.

00:25:04

No variation, no problems, no internal little digestive problems in our sun, this really

00:25:10

rare little sun.

00:25:11

And then we have this beautiful serene garden, if you will, of inner solar system planets,

00:25:17

all protected by a sentinel called Jupiter.

00:25:20

It’s a cold gas giant.

00:25:22

And it’s out there saying, I’m happy being out here.

00:25:25

And in fact, I’ll do you a favor and I’ll keep that asteroid belt at bay.

00:25:29

I’ll pull the asteroids out.

00:25:31

I’ll protect you.

00:25:33

And I protected you from comets.

00:25:35

And you just got enough comets that you need for your ocean.

00:25:38

You know, remember the comet that impacted Jupiter about 10 years ago?

00:25:42

The impact spot was the size of the earth

00:25:45

right on on Jupiter as those fragments came in the comet broke up as it was

00:25:51

coming into Jupiter and the biggest spot the pimple was the size of Earth so

00:25:56

Jupiter’s doing us a favor every day you know do we appreciate it so there’s an

00:26:02

asteroid belt of either a broken- planet whatnot between jupiter and mars and

00:26:06

it’s held at bay those pieces of our chunks like series is 30 kilometers across that’s a big chunk

00:26:12

if that hit us it would sterilize everything on the planet so jupiter sort of keeps that away from

00:26:17

us and yet we’ve had some impacts we had one in the permian that killed 80-90% of life. We had another one

00:26:25

in the KT boundary that killed all the dinosaurs. We’ve had just enough impacts to vacuum out

00:26:34

life and let it start again. Vacuum it out and let it start again. And I think that that

00:26:39

is a process that is essential for the development of complex intelligence.

00:26:45

And we’ve probably had them before that.

00:26:47

We don’t even know.

00:26:47

There’s this theory that the Earth was an ice ball.

00:26:50

It was frozen over, completely frozen over at one point because of various things.

00:26:55

And then gradually the atmosphere got more CO2,

00:26:57

and gradually a greenhouse effect came and the oceans melted again.

00:27:01

So there’s been all these mass extinctions over and over and over again.

00:27:05

So look at it this way.

00:27:07

There’s another way to see this.

00:27:10

Here’s the solar system.

00:27:11

We’re not just static.

00:27:12

We’re not just sitting here.

00:27:14

We’re orbiting the galaxy.

00:27:15

We’re going around and around and around.

00:27:18

And we orbit our mother galaxy in about 250 million years.

00:27:23

And as we’re orbiting, we’re crossing through these zones we’re

00:27:25

crossing through those spiral arms and in those spiral arms is dust like this but the dust is

00:27:32

crammed with star nurseries and they’re bright spots you can actually see them in the milky way

00:27:36

you see little bright patches here and there and that’s star nurseries uh not far from us and each

00:27:43

star nursery the stars are being born the solar

00:27:46

systems are being born and they’re full of radiation they’re unbelievably

00:27:49

dangerous places and yet our solar system has never passed close enough to

00:27:54

one of those suckers to sterilize the life on earth there’s also supernovas

00:27:59

that go off the flashes every once in a while that put out more energy than the

00:28:03

entire galaxy does.

00:28:06

And those are sterilizers.

00:28:07

Never had one of those.

00:28:14

If you look at it, you start to sort of think, wow, Drake’s equation,

00:28:17

Drake was this fellow who wrote this equation saying,

00:28:20

here are all these terms, and if you fill in the numbers,

00:28:23

it should tell you the number of intelligent, sentient civilizations.

00:28:30

His equations, I think, are vastly underestimate the difficulty of having intelligence. You need like five or six more terms.

00:28:32

And a friend of mine, Rob Tao, we were talking about this one day recently, and he said,

00:28:37

Here’s the killer. Look up in the night sky.

00:28:41

If we’re emitting, admitting i love lucy i love lucy and hitler speech at the

00:28:47

nineteen thirty six olympics is out there seventy some years

00:28:51

if we’re admitting all that where’s everybody else’s transmitter

00:28:54

where the other

00:28:56

you know what if a civilization’s been around for a thousand years or ten

00:28:59

thousand years and it’s been

00:29:01

doing media

00:29:03

you will see noisy solar systems,

00:29:05

solar systems with all kinds of spectra, noisy, crazy solar systems

00:29:09

full of ads for alien tonic waters and stuff like that,

00:29:14

alien vacations and alien mortgage refinance problems and stuff like that.

00:29:19

We’d see all that.

00:29:21

And there are none.

00:29:23

You scan this guy, a friend of mine seth shostak at the seti

00:29:26

institute he they have this two million channel scanner that’s looking for any kind of pattern

00:29:32

any kind of signal nothing no noisy stars we’re at at least in the area that in this chunk of the

00:29:39

galaxy we’re the only noisy solar system so you think wow if it could be and this

00:29:48

sort of goes back to when you go back to religions a lot of religions assume that

00:29:52

we’re alone we’re the sole creation effect or the center of the universe

00:29:56

what if we’re coming full circle or discovering we may be extremely rare we

00:30:02

may be the only one in our little quadrant we may be the only

00:30:05

one in the in our galaxy or the only one in our local group of galaxies that life

00:30:11

like ours is unbelievably difficult to create and here we are we go our date

00:30:18

you know our concerns are you know can we get to the office on time we don’t

00:30:22

even think about the miracle that each one of us is.

00:30:26

There’s another way of looking at it.

00:30:29

Each cell in your body, the trillions of cells in your body,

00:30:33

is information that is coded and has been copied and copied and copied and copied

00:30:37

faithfully since you were a little worm in the bottom of the ocean

00:30:41

with a little spinal cord.

00:30:43

Or before that, when you were a single-celled thing,

00:30:46

each one of those little critters that go back through primates, mammals, tetrapods, fishes, worms, all the way down,

00:30:55

each one of those is your ancestor, directly your ancestor.

00:31:01

You carry their information, their hopes and dreams for the for the future their families their their fights their struggles for

00:31:07

survival each one of them reproduced was successful was a success against all

00:31:12

odds and they’re your personal ancestor and you have a personal chain that goes

00:31:17

back that’s different from any other human being even though we share

00:31:21

ancestors at some point you diverge from my my paramecium diverges from Lorenzo’s paramecium somewhere back there.

00:31:29

So I have a unique chain.

00:31:31

And those beings, the miracle piling up upon miracle of each one of them surviving and reproducing and against all odds to make me.

00:31:39

That’s another profound thing.

00:31:41

What I’m trying to build up is a picture of why you don’t need religion.

00:31:46

All you need, if you want to be awestruck,

00:31:48

all you need is to consider the improbability of you,

00:31:52

the improbable miracle that is you,

00:31:55

the improbable miracle that is all of this,

00:31:59

and you’re awestruck.

00:32:00

At that point, the only religious texts you can read

00:32:04

are the very abstract ones that kind of touch on this, the very wise texts.

00:32:09

But those fellows didn’t have the ability to look out into the solar system and telescopes and whatnot.

00:32:16

So here’s another thing. Then you say, what do you do about this? So we’re so rare. So what?

00:32:23

Let’s just continue to be our human selves and blow it.

00:32:27

You know, we’ll have a nuclear winter.

00:32:28

We’ll have all our mortgages foreclosed.

00:32:32

We don’t care.

00:32:33

We’re going to eat ourselves silly.

00:32:34

We’re going to have conflict over energy.

00:32:36

We’re going to just destroy everything.

00:32:38

So what if we’re unique?

00:32:39

You know, to heck with it.

00:32:40

You know, we’re made by this emergent process that has gifted us the

00:32:46

the rare rare quantity of intelligence to understand that we’re unique so perhaps the

00:32:52

universe is this massive machine that doesn’t know where it’s going it just came out of a random

00:32:58

quantum fluctuation anyway and it sort of expanded and maybe there’s more than one universe and in

00:33:03

the very rare instances maybe if there are multiple universes,

00:33:07

there’s only a very few that make a creature that goes and says,

00:33:12

we’re rare, we emerged from this jumble mass and we’re rare.

00:33:17

And that’s the whole point.

00:33:20

Like, thank you, you’ve been recognized.

00:33:22

But what if, when you go to see Carter’s show tonight,

00:33:25

if it’s not blowing like crazy,

00:33:27

if you go to see Carter’s show, think of it this way.

00:33:29

Eric Davis talked about co-creation.

00:33:33

Carter’s show, at one point, he shows the surveys of galaxies

00:33:39

and the surveys of galactic clusters

00:33:40

shooting out from the Southern Observatory in Australia,

00:33:44

and there’s this wedge of known galaxy and clusters way out to the southern observatory in australia and there’s this wedge

00:33:45

of known galaxy and clusters way out to the cosmic background quasars and there’s another one up here

00:33:50

and he can rotate this on his laptop of the joystick that’s the genius of what carter’s

00:33:55

achieved it’s all real data and you’re actually like parrot burning man looking at this patterns

00:34:01

of things well guess what those patterns of things are the rendering of the universe now that the rendering from our point of view

00:34:08

they’re looking billions of years in the past but in your little primate brain is

00:34:14

a renderer running saying well that’s a cool pattern of things and it’s fairly

00:34:19

low res as far as the universe is concerned but it’s real but so the if

00:34:23

you’re thinking consciously about that,

00:34:25

and then you look at the night sky and you say,

00:34:27

oh, wow, that’s just one of the galaxies that I saw,

00:34:30

and then if you pull back, it’s like you’re a space traveler already.

00:34:34

You’re already, because through the miracle of what he has done,

00:34:39

you can say, oh, that’s a galaxy.

00:34:41

And when he pulled back, there was a bunch of them.

00:34:43

There was something called the Orion Cluster,

00:34:44

and it had a whole bunch of galaxies that were colored red just because you

00:34:48

wanted to identify them they’re not red but so your little brain just traveled billions of light

00:34:54

years virtually and rendered parts of views of the universe now if you believe in co-creation you

00:35:01

could think what in the heck does this mean what means that if the universe was at all attempting to find consciousness for a

00:35:09

split second a primate brain on earth had in its its little synaptic gaps a

00:35:15

picture of the universe the universe saw itself momentarily now what is this what

00:35:21

does this mean think about that if you’re rendering it, the universe is awake.

00:35:28

It’s self-recognized a little bit, a little bit, a little bit.

00:35:32

And what if there’s another creature, there’s only two,

00:35:36

what if there are only two sentient races,

00:35:39

and there’s a Hayden Planetarium with budget problems

00:35:42

somewhere in another galaxy that is doing the same

00:35:45

rendering they’re going to be seen so they’re aliens of seven eyes so they’ll

00:35:49

have different types of computer displays and everything but some Carter

00:35:52

Emmert of Barbie he’s known on the planet some other Barbie is out there

00:35:57

rendering another view and there’s another Burning Man I’m improbable as it

00:36:02

may seem and aliens the Burning Man and there’s another playa,

00:36:05

and the playa is all swamps, right? For them they’re like desert, and swamp is like hazardous,

00:36:10

and you’re in water for a week? Are you crazy? You know? And so they’re in this water, and they’re

00:36:16

like, whoa, you know, radical self-expression, and so there’s this underwater displays, and they’re

00:36:24

looking, and they’re like, hey, this dude is, you know, their eyes are on little underwater displays and they’re looking and they’re like,

00:36:25

hey, this dude is, you know, their eyes are on little poles and they’re like,

00:36:29

well, this guy is actually able to render the night sky.

00:36:32

And they’ve drawn back the veil of dust that surrounds our planet.

00:36:36

And we learned how to make water lenses and we’ve done all this.

00:36:39

And so now they have a rendering of some being is like seeing that,

00:36:44

but they’re seeing it from a different perspective.

00:36:45

But what if somehow their mind now connects with the mind of you that rendered it?

00:36:50

Well, the universe is a little bit more.

00:36:53

It’s a little bit more collective consciousness.

00:36:56

Now here’s the last little piece to this.

00:37:00

And there’s a book out by Seth Lloyd called Programming the Universe.

00:37:03

Since I’m a software guy, I love programming anything,

00:37:06

like hacking the universe, programming the universe.

00:37:08

And Seth Lloyd’s book was a mind blower.

00:37:10

I read this the first chapter before coming here.

00:37:13

And Seth Lloyd’s thesis is that the universe is a computation device.

00:37:17

What does it do?

00:37:19

It computes the next moment at every moment.

00:37:22

And it computes this at the quantum level.

00:37:29

And this guy is a serious guy. he’s not a flaky guy he’s actually made little tiny quantum mechanical computational systems at work you put a thing in it

00:37:35

solves the thing and it comes out well okay this is really interesting

00:37:40

understand that atoms and molecules and all the stuff that were made out of if

00:37:44

the lowest level if you tore yourself apart tore all your

00:37:48

molecules asunder whatever you just be a pile of quantum mechanical effects

00:37:53

particles and waves you’ve that’s all you’d be in so would that rock and so

00:37:58

would a little piece of space somewhere it’s all the same it’s all one field and

00:38:01

in fact at the very beginning of the universe that’s all it was molecules got together out of all of that that stuff but the

00:38:08

ultimate communication mechanism is the quantum mechanical effects so we say to

00:38:14

ourselves oh my goodness this is like this is like a communications medium if

00:38:19

you can get in a little box somehow in the lab you can get, in a little box, somehow in a lab, you can get, instead of chemistry,

00:38:27

we all understand chemistry because we’re made out of chemistry.

00:38:30

We drink water and chemical reactions happen and we live on chemistry.

00:38:34

But what if you can get little quantum mechanical things to happen

00:38:39

down below the level of chemistry?

00:38:41

Well, let me take this.

00:38:43

Something comes of this.

00:38:48

level of chemistry well let me take this something comes with this what if the ultimate goal of life of the universe was to become fully conscious and what I

00:38:53

mean by that is the entire universe becomes instead of this jumble of matter

00:38:58

and quantum whatever it becomes a single conscious being because hey that’s what

00:39:03

we all want to do right we see each other in the pile we come out here because we get this group

00:39:07

contact high talking about kind of class we love each other more we open up and

00:39:12

we the greatest fear in human existence is that to die alone or to be alone

00:39:17

right we’re social beings and what if the greatest fear of a civilization that

00:39:24

is arisen is to die alone?

00:39:26

Right?

00:39:26

The greatest possible fear.

00:39:28

We want contact.

00:39:29

We crave contact.

00:39:31

And it overrides everything else.

00:39:33

Even, you know, of course, when there’s scarce resources, maybe we don’t want contact.

00:39:37

But we want contact within our group, at least.

00:39:39

And, of course, what was Star Trek all about?

00:39:41

What are all these things all about?

00:39:42

It’s this craving for contact and

00:39:45

maybe for eternal life or eternal life through contact. And we find out we’re incredibly rare.

00:39:52

We’re incredibly rare and we’re just come out of nowhere and there’s no gods to thank and there’s

00:39:57

no nothing to thank. We’re just here by happenstance. It’s like we carry the responsibility

00:40:03

to do something about it. And the universe

00:40:05

isn’t sort of, there is no God that’s sort of adding up the points. Well, they, you know,

00:40:10

they’re not going to be, they’re going to be in heaven and hell because they got conscious

00:40:13

and then they didn’t do a damn thing with it. They went and they spent it all at Walmart

00:40:17

and they didn’t pay any attention and nobody cares. And so they’re going to the hell of

00:40:22

in or to be like Douglas Adams where

00:40:25

they the cosmic bulldozers are coming to blow away the earth to build the bypass

00:40:29

you know it probably isn’t there is no one running the show but it’s so you’re

00:40:35

left with the with the sole responsibility that you became

00:40:38

conscious so one of my my thesis is is that computer networks will continue on universe thank you very much

00:40:46

through entropy here the universe uh created us with 10 digits like little fingers most tetrapods

00:40:56

have usually five and five some six and whatever and you could say to yourself well we’re pretty

00:41:02

you know we if we evolved out of bonobos,

00:41:05

we’d be lying around having free sex and never have invented buses and cars and radios and stuff.

00:41:10

But we evolved out of really kind of uptight primates.

00:41:14

So nature chose the uptight primate and especially uptight the Europeans

00:41:19

and especially the northern European primate, which is the Native Americans.

00:41:24

When Europeans came ashore,

00:41:26

the Italians came ashore, they were like,

00:41:27

hey, how you doing?

00:41:29

And the French ones came ashore.

00:41:31

It’s like, yeah, we could deal with these people.

00:41:32

Then the Anglo-Saxons came.

00:41:34

And the New England First Nations people were like,

00:41:38

these people have a problem.

00:41:39

Look at the scowls of their faces.

00:41:42

We have a problem here.

00:41:43

So it wasn’t just Puritans, all Anglo-Saxons.

00:41:46

So nature chose this kind of primate.

00:41:50

And we’re driven.

00:41:51

We’re constantly driven, driven, driven.

00:41:52

We’re driven to build technology, to make money,

00:41:55

to consume all resources on the planet, to do something.

00:41:58

And what is it?

00:42:00

Well, if the universe itself, or life itself,

00:42:04

had a chance to expand out into the universe

00:42:06

and populate, infuse the universe, we may be one of the only shots, at least in our area.

00:42:10

We’re like one of the only chances to do this, and we have a very limited window.

00:42:15

Nature has whacked the planet several times and knocked out,

00:42:19

let’s knock out those crustaceans in the Permian.

00:42:22

You know, that trilobite, it’s ruling the roost and it’s arrogant and whatever let’s knock it out with a big impact on

00:42:27

Antarctica oh no you know big lizards they’re totally self-centered you know

00:42:32

they’re really wonderful but they never study the night sky let’s whack them

00:42:35

whack them out okay mammals you know the mammals were there before they’ll become

00:42:40

we’ll leave some dinosaurs called birds and they’ll be food for these mammals

00:42:44

and let’s give these mammals a chance.

00:42:47

And there’s like only 250 million years left

00:42:49

before the sun is too hot.

00:42:51

We talk about global warming.

00:42:53

To have 250 million to 400 million years

00:42:55

before there’s no plants on land, period.

00:42:58

It’s just too hot.

00:42:59

Oceans will start to get hot and boil off and whatever.

00:43:02

We’re past middle age.

00:43:03

Earth is past middle age.

00:43:04

So if we don’t do it, the universe

00:43:06

will whack us again and give arachnids a chance

00:43:12

and leave mammals around for giant arachnids

00:43:15

to feed on or whatever.

00:43:17

But consider that the bacteria are calling in these airstrikes.

00:43:22

These bacteria are everywhere in the universe,

00:43:24

but they can never get complex. So evolve complex things and then they get bored and wipe them

00:43:28

out. Anyway back on track so we’re here what are we here to do we’re here to

00:43:35

reproduce create our offspring and families are driven to do that we can’t

00:43:39

stop doing that. The greenest thing you can do of course is not have babies

00:43:42

because every baby you have creates a massive future impact on the planet.

00:43:47

Or you raise the baby to grow its own food, it might be better,

00:43:50

but each baby is like a massive impact on the planet.

00:43:54

But we’re still driven to do that.

00:43:55

But we’re driven to do something else.

00:43:57

A few odd people, normally people that look kind of like me or crazier,

00:44:03

have this idea that technology is the place to reproduce life and

00:44:07

We started a project called biota

00:44:09

We’ve had four conferences one of them was up at the verge of shale where we ticked all these overweight

00:44:14

paleontologists who sit behind microscopes and computer screens up to the verge of shale where you find Cambrian creatures with six

00:44:22

550 million year old creatures with flaps and weird eyes and you know

00:44:25

They look like the aliens I was talking about earlier and that’s our ancestors and and that’s when creatures got bodies and shapes

00:44:34

And so the biota group believes and we’ve had four conferences with Richard Dawkins and Douglas Adams and all this mixture of weird people

00:44:41

But the theme of biota is what if all of technology is

00:44:45

about providing a channel for life to find a way out find a way out into the

00:44:51

solar system or having read Seth’s book an aha went off on my head is for 25

00:44:57

years I’ve been thinking of how do you create self reproducing life forms that

00:45:02

can live off outside of the earth in a hard vacuum on ice balls and whatever

00:45:10

to produce a green solar system,

00:45:13

a solar system rife with life,

00:45:14

not just bacterial life in rocks,

00:45:16

but complex life, a little simple.

00:45:18

We can make something like a slime mold

00:45:20

or something like an insect, but really simple

00:45:22

because we’re not going out there.

00:45:24

We’re totally unbuilt to survive in the solar system.

00:45:27

So we have to actually seed the seed space with life so that we can then go out there

00:45:31

later and hopefully they’ll open the door and let us in or they’ll be producing resources

00:45:37

we’ll harvest that we couldn’t have settled continents.

00:45:40

We can’t go to Antarctica and settle it because there’s not enough life or biota there to

00:45:44

support human settlement.

00:45:47

We can’t go into the solar system without biota.

00:45:50

And if the goal is to, say, let humans persist and our planet persist,

00:45:55

we need to create life forms that will undo the mess that we’ve created,

00:45:59

hopefully not make it worse, scrub the atmosphere and things like that.

00:46:04

And then, so it struck me then, is that our legacy? not make it worse, scrub the atmosphere and things like that.

00:46:05

So it struck me then, is that our legacy?

00:46:08

Say for instance, we created a whole bunch of self-reproducing nano robots that could

00:46:13

live in uncountably large numbers on the surface of icy objects floating in space and the whole

00:46:19

system of sources kind of goes green and then we snuff ourselves out.

00:46:23

Well, at least we’ve left behind this thing that isn’t just bacteria

00:46:27

that is the communicates by radio that reproduces and can live natively

00:46:32

outside of a gas bubble of a planet.

00:46:34

And that’s like, OK, you guys go on and do the job we we couldn’t do.

00:46:38

Go settle the galaxy and do all that.

00:46:40

It then struck me that, gee, that’s a long way. That requires lots of funding.

00:46:45

For a wacky project, nobody would fund.

00:46:47

And it’s very technically difficult.

00:46:50

And is it even possible?

00:46:51

And then when I read Seth’s book, I was like, wait a minute.

00:46:55

If he says that you can program real simple stuff in the code of the universe,

00:47:01

in quantum mechanical fields,

00:47:03

what if you did your simulation of A-life in the code of the universe in quantum mechanical fields, what if you did your simulation of a life in the computer

00:47:07

and you injected that into a quantum mechanical computer

00:47:11

that you built in the lab to get the quanta to wiggle the way

00:47:15

that you would want to make self-reproducing little

00:47:18

critters out of quantum mechanics?

00:47:22

Now, think that for a moment.

00:47:24

There’s one thought that came to me, which

00:47:27

was, well, if you did that and they’re able to reproduce this momentarily, you couldn’t

00:47:31

stop them. You couldn’t build any container that would contain that. In fact, there’s

00:47:38

all kinds of crystal lattices that have very predictable things. You couldn’t contain it

00:47:42

because it’s lower than the level of atoms. It would just spread, spread like a wildfire.

00:47:47

It would spread like the Genesis effect.

00:47:49

It would just sweep everything.

00:47:52

It would find consumable things, which

00:47:54

were quantum mechanical fields and energy levels,

00:47:57

and it would sweep out.

00:47:58

But it would be more like sort of a pond scum

00:48:02

taking over the whole pond, just going and going.

00:48:05

The pond is very big.

00:48:06

And so then what you have is sort of a cheap and dirty way, if this would work,

00:48:13

to actually infuse the entire matter of the universe,

00:48:17

matter and energy of the universe, with something that is of us,

00:48:21

of what we have learned about us, which is make code, make it self-reproduce,

00:48:26

make it change, make it get more complex, give it communication and whatever.

00:48:31

But from the earth, instead of a few footprints on the moon and a few little complex organisms

00:48:38

that we could do in our short time, out from the earth explodes not just I Love Lucy,

00:48:49

but the explosion of life itself, just bam.

00:48:51

It’s spreading everywhere.

00:48:54

And you could tell, it would be like one of those Greg Baer novels,

00:48:56

you know, Blood Music, I think, was the one,

00:48:58

where everything turned to gray goo, including us,

00:48:59

and we all became happy gray goo.

00:49:03

But what you would see, because it’s quantum mechanical,

00:49:09

say you had a piece of pizza that was infused with this kind of quantum mechanical life,

00:49:11

it would suddenly start looking different.

00:49:17

It would have different properties because instead of atoms and molecules being the organizing principle,

00:49:22

life would be the organizing principle and everything, the color would change, the smell would change.

00:49:26

It would smell like ice cream or something or it would start shimmering and changing shape.

00:49:31

Because at the very lowest level, life is now the organizing principle,

00:49:34

not the ordinary Newtonian mechanics stuff.

00:49:41

Our universe may be built just right to allow life to overcome all that chaos and become the organizing principle.

00:49:43

So then what you have is what you guys experience

00:49:45

on your trips.

00:49:47

When you have a heroic dose trip, how many of you have had,

00:49:50

and I went to the center of the universe trip?

00:49:54

OK.

00:49:55

So think of it this way, and this

00:49:58

is from a previous talking talk, was

00:50:04

you go to the center of the universe, what do you see?

00:50:06

Let’s start passing around, let’s get some input from the microphone.

00:50:14

Because we’re recording this, we have to…

00:50:18

Because I want to…

00:50:19

Why I’m doing this is because if you’re in your own mind,

00:50:22

I’ll finish up my part of the spiel,

00:50:24

and I’d love to hear your experiences and your reflections on this if in your own mind

00:50:29

in the most wide open brain you have which is on some kind of either assisted or unassisted

00:50:35

center heroic trip and where your brain is completely scrambled or reorganized and you

00:50:41

experience uh going toward the light or doing something like that and

00:50:48

you’re enveloped and you feel like you’re melted in the whole universe and it’s all

00:50:51

collapsed into one thing and everything’s communicating and it’s all about love. And

00:50:55

that’s what Terrance’s last words were. Terrance McKenna’s last words were, it’s all about

00:51:00

love and keep breathing. People, keep breathing. Remember that?

00:51:06

So you experience that.

00:51:09

Terrence’s brain dissolved, let’s face it.

00:51:13

He had a mushroom-shaped cancer in his brain.

00:51:15

He thought it was very ironic.

00:51:17

Mushroom-shaped.

00:51:20

I’ll tell you a little bit of a Terrence story because we have to evoke his spirit.

00:51:24

Since his archive

00:51:26

is now totally destroyed, thank you Quismo’s sub shop, the archive in Monterey where in

00:51:34

the back of the Esalen offices there was burnt up. Terrence’s materials are all gone. Fire

00:51:39

broke out at a Quismo’s sub shop in Februarybruary i think went through the firewall and burned up all of terence’s

00:51:45

stuff so if you have terence tape and and you know get him to lorenzo terence only exists in

00:51:51

cyberspace and in his books there are no other notes nothing so this is this is appropriate

00:51:58

because during alchemical arts in hawaii which is the last conference that Terrence was at, we all sat and we laid down like you are in this room and we had we pointed our bodies toward Mr.

00:52:09

McKenna and he was lying in the room and this is a man whose brain is now

00:52:13

dissolving into a mushroom and but he’s quite quite competent and talking gets

00:52:19

very tired at that time and I we all tried to do something individually we

00:52:24

tried to co-create some vision

00:52:26

for Terrence and what came clearly to me was Terrence there was this crystalline Fabergé egg

00:52:33

vehicle with nice plush seats kind of like you have out in the playa it was nice and clean no dust

00:52:39

and it came down and Terrence was got in somehow and he was carried up and it was all shiny and

00:52:45

everything and I told this to him later and he said, ah, the getaway car.

00:52:51

So in a sense, for me, I committed Terrence to cyberspace.

00:52:58

So he’s out there somewhere and there’s some rain. Concluding the thought is that if in your brain, in your primate brain,

00:53:09

you can render a bit of the universe,

00:53:12

and if on a heroic trip brain you are actually seeing

00:53:16

the complete co-creation of the entire conscious universe,

00:53:21

maybe it is already happening, or maybe it is in the future, and it is going to happen,

00:53:29

and that the universe is pointing to you and saying,

00:53:32

help make this happen, because I’m expanding.

00:53:36

I’m going to evaporate.

00:53:37

If you don’t do something, you’re it.

00:53:40

You’re the ones.

00:53:43

I made sure that there was one M class

00:53:45

star one year it you go and get going on the project or when the what it whatever

00:53:51

it is but it’s actually showing you that we’ll say for instance in a lot of

00:53:55

beliefs in modern physics those things that are happening in the future already

00:53:59

happened and you can see everything that’s happened in the past and that

00:54:03

maybe the quantum mechanical level is a communication grid

00:54:06

like an Internet that links it all together.

00:54:08

So when you open your mind and your mind is reorganized,

00:54:11

what it sees is this massive project of unifying the grid.

00:54:17

And so you’re a part of that.

00:54:19

And when you see that unification of the universe,

00:54:21

you’re actually putting a little bit into that.

00:54:24

And that in our lifetimes, I don’t know if this has anything to do with 2012 I don’t I don’t like dates and

00:54:29

predict dates because that’s like a project deadline and those these projects always slip

00:54:33

but it may be when when you do your next excursion out into the space think of it that way and if it’s all about love if Terrace is right and it’s all about love

00:54:47

Love maybe the the the thing that you draw on to make this thing happen. Maybe that is the carrier wave

00:54:54

Maybe that’s that’s the plug-in because when your love is you soften your walls break down

00:55:00

You connect with other beings right the whole point of the universe is one is to connect the whole thing.

00:55:07

There’s only one protocol, internet protocol, and it’s the love protocol,

00:55:12

the L-I-P, the L-U-P, the love universe protocol.

00:55:17

And so maybe that’s the thing that’s given to you as the mechanism.

00:55:21

So I’m just riffing here as all this is coming out.

00:55:23

So that maybe is why you’re sitting in this room,

00:55:27

because you were plugged in for an instant.

00:55:29

You know, Matt was talking about going out here and come back,

00:55:33

and go on here and come back.

00:55:34

But maybe what you’re actually doing in some sense

00:55:37

is that this grand purpose of the universe is here,

00:55:40

you could call it God or whatever,

00:55:42

and you’re going closer to it and pulling back,

00:55:44

and closer to it and pulling back, and you’re starting to exist in the

00:55:47

middle a little bit and if you realize maybe what it is which is love

00:55:53

connectedness not dying alone purpose whatever whatever that thing is out

00:56:01

there you’re helping that process along. And some future nerd will post something on Slashdot in the future and say,

00:56:10

I’ve done it.

00:56:11

I’m not telling you people anything.

00:56:13

I’m going to push the button tomorrow and you’ll see everything change.

00:56:16

And suddenly pizza will all smell like ice cream.

00:56:20

And you’ll all be part of the biggest trip in the history of everything.

00:56:25

You’ll all be part of it. So in the history of everything. You’ll all be part of it.

00:56:26

So that’s the end of the spiel part, and I hope we can pick up.

00:56:32

Thank you.

00:56:41

Okay, questions.

00:56:44

Wow, Bruce, that was…

00:56:45

I was expecting to hear a mind-blowing Mark Healy talk,

00:56:48

but I think you were even more mind-blowing

00:56:50

than what Mark was going to come up with.

00:56:52

But you were calling for responses at one point,

00:56:57

just before the end,

00:56:59

just something about the grandiose cosmic mystical LSD trip or whatever.

00:57:04

I don’t want to go there, but I just want to mention a really great book

00:57:08

that summarizes an angle of what you’re talking about is Biospheres by Dorian Sagan.

00:57:14

I just found this paperback.

00:57:16

I thought I knew all this shit for years.

00:57:18

I just stumbled across this paperback.

00:57:19

And he basically, you know, he’s talking about the Gaia hypothesis

00:57:23

and, you know, the notion that the Earth behaves as if or really is a living being.

00:57:29

And in a number of different ways, it has its own metabolism.

00:57:32

But the one thing people haven’t been able to demonstrate is, well, if it’s a living being, all living beings reproduce, right?

00:57:37

Well, what is the reproductive mechanism of the planet Earth?

00:57:40

He argues that it’s experiments at creating self-contained ecosystems, like the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona,

00:57:47

the small biospheres you can buy in a glass ball

00:57:50

that just have a few species that just kind of reproduce endlessly

00:57:54

with only input of sunlight.

00:57:56

And then he also says what you said,

00:57:59

that technology may be,

00:58:02

even when we think that we’re being the most destructive,

00:58:05

we’re messing the fucking planet up technologies and from Bailey nation from

00:58:09

nature all of this stuff that you know there’s a not and you know an

00:58:13

understandable response that we’ve had to the way things have been going that

00:58:17

that’s all just part of a process of nature’s creating these mechanisms for

00:58:22

exoskeletons that to project these spores of

00:58:25

and not just humans but the whole samples of the whole ecosystem

00:58:30

into space spread so I’m just repeating what you said in different words really

00:58:34

but it was really great that just read that book and I had a lot of these

00:58:39

thoughts and pieces in on flashes and revelations and bits of information but

00:58:43

really you know congealed it was written back in 1990 yeah I didn’t even know about the

00:58:48

biota things that you’ve been doing this on that’s really cool anyway that’s just

00:58:52

my my sort of appendage to your thanks thank you very much yeah there’s a whole

00:58:57

body of great work out there that’s emergent of course yeah okay and thank And thank you for sitting through this.

00:59:08

It’s a…

00:59:11

Oh.

00:59:19

Okay, gotcha.

00:59:22

I would just like to talk about what you were saying about Terrence McKenna and his last minutes of him saying it’s all about love.

00:59:31

I remember one of my trips, it was just on nods.

00:59:35

I took nods and my brain went into this weird thing where I just found the answer and it was all about love.

00:59:43

thing where I just you know found the answer and it was all about love and when I heard you talk about on one of the podcast I was thinking myself you

00:59:47

know maybe you is because I was close to death and I got a little you know

00:59:53

insight or or something like that but I think really on the other side is my

00:59:59

opinion that it is all about love and how it all ties in and also another podcast with the ayahuasca podcast

01:00:07

member we went to you know had ayahuasca for the first time he was talking about how his insight

01:00:12

was you know everything’s going to be okay and it is you know again all about love and you know we

01:00:17

shouldn’t push you know our insights on people so much um and just in general everything and I just just like to say

01:00:27

that you know I think that there’s a correlation between all that and I do

01:00:32

have that insight and that’s why we and everybody here knows I mean if you’re in

01:00:38

a loving state you know how it changes everything around you you know it

01:00:43

totally changed everything around you.

01:00:47

It’s what the bleep is about, the film.

01:00:52

And to his credit, I mean, Terrence, if you knew Terrence,

01:00:55

I mean, Terrence would say, I’m not a love bug.

01:00:59

You know, he was very cerebral, very cerebral.

01:01:03

Terrence’s diet, you wouldn’t want to, I mean, this is a Scotch, okay,

01:01:07

so it’s greasy bacon and eggs in the morning. Greasy, greasy bacon and eggs.

01:01:10

Sorry?

01:01:13

The dirty truth comes out.

01:01:15

I mean, this is a guy who is about ideas and about formulating ideas.

01:01:20

And at the end, when everything is dissolving, he says,

01:01:23

the whole psychedelic movement is about the heart.

01:01:27

I’m coming to realize that it’s all about love.

01:01:30

It’s nothing else.

01:01:31

Everything else is superfluous.

01:01:33

So people who use these insights and like,

01:01:36

well, it means that this thigh bone is connected to the hip bone.

01:01:40

Well, that’s a nice insight,

01:01:42

but really it’s all about engendering love and openness and connectedness.

01:01:46

So even the ultimate head case, you know, which we who we love to listen to found found that.

01:01:53

But in order for him to find that he had to have his half his brain dissolved because he’s such a head case because he’s so good at words.

01:02:00

Right. But in the end, it worked.

01:02:03

And I think in this sort of sense, you know,

01:02:06

people ask, well, why was he taken from us at this time? Well, it really comes down to

01:02:11

what did the man need? I think in his life, if you saw him in the last two years of his

01:02:16

life, he was getting very, very pale and drawn. He was very tired. That’s why we went to Hawaii

01:02:20

to do an avatar event at his house because he’s getting very tired of traveling.

01:02:25

It was partly because of the cancer coming on, but partly because he was just worn out.

01:02:29

He was karmically worn out going and speaking.

01:02:32

He said, I get on a jumbo jet and speak to audiences of 33 people, and then I come back.

01:02:39

He needed something else, and in a sense, internally, by getting the cancer before he achieved the ultimate

01:02:47

which was it was all about love.

01:02:50

In order for him to achieve that it had to dissolve all his structures and his resistances.

01:02:54

This is a man who understood trips and how to use them but when it came down to it the

01:02:59

universe said Terrence the only way for you to get this insight is to dissolve everything.

01:03:11

So I feel that, in a sense, he left us because there was an inner need that he had,

01:03:14

and he got it satisfied, and I’m very grateful for that. And if he’s in that Fabergé getaway car, off he went, and God bless him.

01:03:20

Our universe bless him.

01:03:23

And now his voice is mixed

01:03:25

into a thousand trance you know it’s blended everywhere and rip mix and burn

01:03:30

Terrence McKenna and and his cohorts thanks to Lorenzo in the psychedelic

01:03:35

salon you know when you were talking about not dying alone and I was thinking

01:03:39

about Mother Earth wouldn’t want to die alone and it all of a sudden gave it

01:03:44

Terrence’s find the others came to mind it’s like Mother Earth wouldn’t want to die alone. And all of a sudden, Terrance’s find the others came to mind.

01:03:47

It’s like Mother Earth is saying, send those probes out.

01:03:50

Find the others so I don’t have to die alone in a billion years.

01:03:54

Yeah, and here’s the funny thing.

01:03:57

This changes kind of everything in that if your brain has

01:04:01

a vision of Terrance in a crystal and Fabergé egg,

01:04:05

it’s rendered that image.

01:04:07

That’s done by biochemistry in the brain and a little wiggling molecules.

01:04:12

They’re all driven by quantum mechanics to create that effect,

01:04:16

and that’s a renderer at the lowest level of the universe.

01:04:19

So every thought that you have engages the quantum mechanical level

01:04:23

and creates the quantum mechanical level and creates the quantum

01:04:25

mechanical level has to be a party to this it’s like oh now he wants let’s see

01:04:32

this guy named Terence McKenna is is passing on and this guy is lying on the

01:04:37

floor and quantum mechanical stuff is starting to happen you know biochemical

01:04:43

stuff is starting to happen neurochemical stuff starting to happen. You know, biochemical stuff is starting to happen. Neurochemical stuff starting to happen. His store of images are starting to come in. But this guy’s never

01:04:50

seen a crystal Faberge egg, right? He doesn’t have any way to put it together. So how did

01:04:55

you see the crystal Faberge egg? Now, of course, I read that Terrence always had these things

01:05:01

on DMT trips and he had the elves and everything else, but how did he, you know, how was I or me,

01:05:07

an inexperienced person who had never done DMT,

01:05:10

in fact, I can’t do DMT, it has no effect on me.

01:05:13

Ask me why later.

01:05:15

But I, it’s a crazy thing.

01:05:20

But, so I can only sort of imagine it.

01:05:23

But what I saw when I closed my eyes and was in that room

01:05:27

was generated probably a little bit from the other minds,

01:05:31

probably a little bit taken from Terence’s little database and his little brain,

01:05:34

because it’s all coming down to that quantum mechanical level.

01:05:37

Everything’s wiggling and everything’s communicating.

01:05:40

So, of course, I see the Faberge egg that I’ll never see on VNT ever because I can’t.

01:05:46

So, whoa, wait a minute, what does that mean?

01:05:49

Well, that means that something bigger than my little brain

01:05:53

came in to generate the image of this thing moving up carrying Terrence.

01:05:56

It could be called dreams or visions or whatever that you’ve never had.

01:06:01

You don’t know what this looks like and yet it comes into your mind.

01:06:03

you’ve never had. You don’t know what this looks like and yet it comes into your mind.

01:06:10

So in some sense, everything you do is engaging everything down to the lowest level and so is everybody else engaging down to the lowest level. So when you see in movies like talking

01:06:16

about water patterns changing or when you feel love, your body changes. Well, maybe

01:06:21

you’re changing other people’s bodies. By changing your own body, you’re changing other people’s bodies by changing your own

01:06:25

body you’re changing down to the quantum mechanical level and there’s some kind

01:06:29

of so all of this stuff with parapsychology and ESP and weird

01:06:33

coincidences and all this stuff may be explainable this way it may be that the

01:06:37

quantum computer that this universe is saying route these packets over here and

01:06:42

you know it’s kind of a dumb router it It’s not designed, but the stuff is shimmering out there,

01:06:49

and we can’t measure it because you can’t put a packet tester

01:06:52

onto the quantum mechanical level and say,

01:06:54

show all traffic going between one place and the other

01:06:57

because you change the nature of it.

01:06:59

Every time you look at that, you change its nature

01:07:01

because you’re a participant, not a spectator.

01:07:03

There are no spectators

01:07:05

in the universe you’re all participants so if you think about it you change it if you try to study

01:07:10

it you change it it’s a slippery kind of a thing so of course you can lie on the floor and get

01:07:16

imagery that you could never come up with if you have no mental model for and so therefore you can

01:07:22

tap this unbelievable thing so therefore you can say

01:07:25

huh you know there is a there’s a reason for the muse if i open my mouth and start singing

01:07:30

which i can’t um but galen can galen are you here you know she probably was there she is

01:07:40

oh no that’s not going with mary anyway um she can open her mouth and sing in Bulgarian.

01:07:47

So she hears Bulgarian grandmothers singing in that beautiful ethereal thing,

01:07:52

and she can just reproduce it.

01:07:53

And then the Bulgarian grandmothers burst into tears,

01:07:55

and how can she possibly do this?

01:07:59

So you think about all the things that come into your head.

01:08:02

Instead of saying, I don’t know where they came from, and deny them or i must be going crazy or whatever there may be an open channel there may

01:08:12

be open sockets always going in and out and if you acknowledge that there are and you you’re empowered

01:08:18

by them um you know there may be an explanation for them and it may be that in the 21st century, our next great realization as a civilization is how to tap into that

01:08:29

and how to distinguish the spam or the noise from stuff that we can use.

01:08:35

This is a lot of information.

01:08:36

It’s too much information floating.

01:08:39

But the next time you have a powerful dream,

01:08:41

consider that it may have come from the field.

01:08:45

Another way to think of it, I all of human history people have thought where

01:08:49

did this I where does this come from but it could have come from this that but

01:08:53

it’s a two-way thing so we talked about co-creation it’s another way of

01:08:56

describing what people have been talking about at this series but it may be all explainable within our lifetimes. Next question.

01:09:08

Thanks.

01:09:11

My major center of the universe journey was just straight through meditation.

01:09:18

And at one point I was in this space where I thought I was falling asleep

01:09:23

and my body was kind of constantly just sort of tripping out on kind of collapsed and I wasn’t sure I

01:09:29

was going and then all of a sudden I just entered this space within my brain

01:09:35

and it was started was triggered by a thought that somebody had told me that

01:09:38

the interior space is as vast as the entire universe so all of a sudden that thought just

01:09:46

triggered that experience and I was a singular point of view that had no

01:09:53

physical matter in the universe and I saw that universe was the universe

01:09:59

within me truly was as vast as the entire universe and now that I’m

01:10:03

thinking about what you’re saying I realized that that triggered a whole cascade of other acknowledgments to me

01:10:09

and this one phrase came to me after that a few years later that if it vibrates it’s not the void

01:10:17

period if it vibrates it is not the void. So what is the void? What is the consciousness within us?

01:10:27

What is language and the talkity mind, the thinkity mind?

01:10:32

What is it always revolving around?

01:10:34

What is it always trying to avoid not looking at?

01:10:38

Because it can’t look at it.

01:10:39

It can’t focus on it.

01:10:41

It can’t grab it.

01:10:42

It can’t use it.

01:10:44

It can’t do something with it.

01:10:46

But when we enter that space of total emptiness,

01:10:49

then I think that is the ultimate tapping into the creative realm,

01:10:53

somewhat in the sense that anytime the universe wants to create something,

01:10:57

it first has to create a void.

01:11:00

It has to create a space where there is no energy,

01:11:03

where there’s nothing pulsing, nothing

01:11:05

vibrating, and in that absolute nothingness of no space, no energy, no time, then that’s

01:11:12

the only possibility for something genuine and new to be created.

01:11:17

The greatest thing that we fear, I think, is that, well, what if I just turn off everything?

01:11:22

What if I turn off my mind?

01:11:24

What if I turn off my fear generator? What if I turn off my mind? What if I turn off my fear generator?

01:11:26

What if I turn off my paranoia generator?

01:11:28

What if I turn off my consciousness?

01:11:31

But there’s still something left.

01:11:33

There’s still something there, and that is my only identity.

01:11:38

The only thing that I can claim that I know that I am

01:11:41

is this thing that I cannot find and I cannot name and I cannot manifest.

01:11:46

But it seems to me that

01:11:47

that is the whole of the universe.

01:11:51

That we exist in it,

01:11:53

a black hole,

01:11:54

the infinitely most dense point

01:11:56

would eventually lead to a point

01:11:58

where there is no vibration.

01:12:00

So that there’s no difference

01:12:01

between that black hole within me

01:12:03

or seeing inside an insect and seeing that that emptiness is alive there.

01:12:10

And you know, if you wake up in the morning, think of this,

01:12:13

and this goes back to the power of meditation and clearing the mind.

01:12:16

If you wake up in the morning and you feel completely fresh,

01:12:20

completely like, I’m a newborn baby.

01:12:23

I don’t know who I am.

01:12:26

And part of you may be panicked, like,

01:12:28

I’ve got to get to work or whatever.

01:12:30

But what if you wake up as a newborn baby every day?

01:12:33

And perhaps I think people who meditate

01:12:35

and who really try to clear their mind

01:12:37

do wake up as newborn babies,

01:12:39

and then they come alive each day

01:12:40

so that each possibility of the day comes in

01:12:43

and it manifests itself.

01:12:44

They’re not on a rigid

01:12:45

schedule and a checklist and perhaps that’s that’s the way our ancestors might have risen each dawn

01:12:51

as new beings every every dawn what’s interesting is in the beginning of the universe for the models

01:12:58

that they have now there was actually a phase where the universe is expanding ball out of the

01:13:02

void and it reached the phase where everything’s a gas and there are massive vibrations there was a voice

01:13:08

period of the universe the voice voice was a roar in fact scientists have tried

01:13:12

to reproduce if you had a microphone in this early bubble what would it sound

01:13:17

like what would be the nature enormous sound everything’s vibrating this roar

01:13:21

of voice coming into existence and then it expanded so much that the gases are separated.

01:13:28

And then you have, and you can see it in the cosmic background mass.

01:13:31

You can see all this rippling and that’s actually the vibratory forces that created the distribution

01:13:37

of matter.

01:13:39

And that’s, that’s the remnant of that.

01:13:40

And then the work out sheet walls of galaxies and tendrils and all this sort of stuff.

01:13:44

And then the dark matter in between or whatever it’s all

01:13:46

because of this massive vibration like a massive stereo system blowing the playa

01:13:51

apart and but then what happened was when planets formed gas again appeared

01:13:58

now there’s gas in stars but it’s so noisy and so hot and I think it happened

01:14:02

but cool gas around planets like Earth appear and you have an embryo effect like you’re breathing this this embryo you’re inside the

01:14:09

embryo and then a friend of mine who went to the digital burgess conference up to the burgess shale

01:14:14

from university of manitoba he’s a world leader in embryology he published this book about this

01:14:20

thick that i can’t read that showed that in the early formation if

01:14:25

you try to create a child or any being on on earth and you get this you get a

01:14:30

duplication and a foursome and an eight some in a 16 seven you get this thing

01:14:35

called the blastula forming but this blastula is a ball of cells and they’re

01:14:42

always the biggest question this is almost like the origin

01:14:45

of life question for embryologists is what what communication mechanism causes

01:14:50

the cells over here to start saying I’m going to be a back and the cells over

01:14:55

here saying I’m going to be a gut so we better start turning in puckering in and

01:14:59

everything does that right and this is little puckering in. And he claims that, found it, that it’s vibratory patterns,

01:15:07

that there’s this shaking vibration, sonic waves going

01:15:11

through the blastula.

01:15:13

Where do those come from?

01:15:15

What triggers and what starts those?

01:15:17

So what it goes back to is maybe the entire universe

01:15:22

is a big voice, has made the structure structure but you were made by a tiny

01:15:27

little voice in your own personal Big Bang at your own personal beginning and

01:15:32

the question of what started the what started the vibration and the

01:15:37

vibrations complex in the communication between the back cells and the gut cells

01:15:41

it has to send a bio signal, a message to the next cell

01:15:47

that reproduces more gut-like from the information coding, and the next cell is more gut-like

01:15:51

and then stomach-like, and then stomach lining wall-like.

01:15:57

And it’s amazingly complex, but it happens and may happen through vibration.

01:16:00

So maybe it is voice, maybe it’s what we’re doing here talking

01:16:05

through the ether if you sing if you talk whatever you’re participating in

01:16:10

the in the great gift which is vibration through a gas or through water whales

01:16:16

cetaceans if they’re vibrating things and maybe they’re vibrating things at a

01:16:21

lower level in the quantum level to that we don’t know how to measure so perhaps it’s all about vibration in the

01:16:28

void as you said as your insight came the ultimate conduit every single point

01:16:37

anywhere in the universe is simultaneously connected there’s no

01:16:40

space or time there so that’s being right here being at the farthest distance of one universe

01:16:47

is instantaneous right and that’s why if we create artificial life or life inside the quantum

01:16:54

mechanical field it can you imagine experiencing this it’s the great the great wet dream of all

01:17:01

science fiction right is that suddenly everything unites in a in a

01:17:05

thunderclap or instantaneously everything becomes a single now does it should it start for burning

01:17:14

in burning man 2022 well after the 2012 so people don’t worry about deadlines they’re 10 years 10

01:17:20

years late we’ll bring the box out right the black box with the big button on it,

01:17:26

and we’ll choose somebody, some random person to punch the button,

01:17:31

and we’ll ignite the entire universe as a single living being,

01:17:35

and it’ll start right from here.

01:17:39

So somebody who’s now very young will be tasked to push that button.

01:17:43

Good question.

01:17:43

Somebody who’s now very young will be tasked to push that button.

01:17:44

Good question.

01:17:49

Yeah.

01:17:52

I just, well, first of all, thank you.

01:17:54

This is really a wonderful opportunity.

01:17:56

I feel really grateful to be here.

01:18:08

And I love what you’re saying about love and it’s I just want to make a plug to be kind of ruthlessly committed to being loving in a really vigorous way because we we have all

01:18:13

these ego attachments and every day there’s all these opportunities to move

01:18:18

in that fear about you know not having enough or not being good enough or being

01:18:24

controlled and feeling like a

01:18:25

victim or being arrogant or being selfish or you know all those kind of things are challenges for

01:18:30

us every day and so love is like you know this beautiful soft gentle concept but it’s not

01:18:36

valuable unless we’re willing to go down to the bone and eliminate those things that prevent us

01:18:43

from being loving in an authentic way.

01:18:46

So I just wanted to put that out there.

01:18:49

And I think any time you can wake up like a newborn in the morning,

01:18:54

think if you’re a kindergarten teacher, right?

01:18:57

This would be useful, right?

01:18:59

Because you see those faces of those kids and they wake up as new kids every day.

01:19:03

They’re forming egos and they’re forming all that. but when you look at the rare times I’ve helped a

01:19:08

friend of mine teach kindergarten it’s amazing it’s not like Arnold Schwarzenegger

01:19:12

falling on the bed at the end of the day it’s like you’re looking in these

01:19:16

faces and you’re realizing that wow you know they’re open and in a sense if you can look in the eyes of another

01:19:26

person especially children or your loved one or you know without any kind of a

01:19:30

mask on you’ll get rebooted a little bit you’ll get that back or you can meditate

01:19:35

and become empty but it’s a practice

01:19:40

I see that absolute way and it’s the same thing that’s animating me.

01:19:46

So you see the void in my eyes.

01:19:49

Every single life I ever lived.

01:19:51

Yeah, yeah.

01:19:53

In the eyes of lavender plants.

01:19:55

The void.

01:19:57

Well, something happened to me when I was…

01:19:59

This is another very personal story,

01:20:02

but I always, as a kid, kid I was adopted and I never knew

01:20:06

my birth mother and they always say no now they’re understanding about

01:20:10

adoption is when when the baby was brought to the mother or comes out of

01:20:14

the mother they make that eye contact incredible deep contact that humans need

01:20:19

the infant needs I never had that. Not that I know of.

01:20:26

And so I was brought into a ward and put into a crib somewhere and bundled up like they

01:20:31

did in the early 60s.

01:20:32

And so I was sort of put in jail right away.

01:20:36

No one to look at and whatever.

01:20:37

So instead of I didn’t have anything to look at.

01:20:40

So there was a moment.

01:20:43

I remember this moment when suddenly these vertical bars, which

01:20:47

were the jail, which is a crib, suddenly, instead of them being a flat pattern, they went 3D.

01:20:55

They went incredible 3D. And I expanded out, my mind turned on to space, because I didn’t have

01:21:01

anything to look at. What was I going to do? I was studying the universe, which was wood slats and stuff like that. And then I traveled out and I could

01:21:11

see the whole hospital and everything. It’s like, whoa, space turned on. It was an incredible

01:21:15

high for me. And there was a moment after that, and it’s hard to say, I was in the hospital

01:21:21

for two weeks before my adoptive parents came and picked me up. And it was so cold. I was in the hospital for two weeks before my adoptive parents came and picked me up. It was so cold. I was in Canada.

01:21:26

It was so cold my little booty fell off and my little foot was blue when they brought me home.

01:21:32

It’s another story.

01:21:34

There was this moment and it came to me.

01:21:36

I was saying, why can’t I look into other people’s eyes?

01:21:39

Why am I afraid?

01:21:40

All my life as a kid I couldn’t make eye contact.

01:21:43

My mother would say’re he’s in his

01:21:45

own world they would send me to the school psychologist and i would i would whale away

01:21:50

pounding square pigs into round holes and i managed to do it things like that they were

01:21:55

testing me all the time and they said no he’s not stupid he’s probably quite bright but he had they

01:22:00

didn’t know about aspergers or nobody understood any of that stuff, but I was just a square panging around.

01:22:05

But I couldn’t make eye contact.

01:22:06

I was afraid.

01:22:07

So people were walking down the distance.

01:22:09

No matter who it was, I was afraid of them immediately.

01:22:12

This is out of principle.

01:22:13

Everybody.

01:22:14

So I asked myself, I need to understand this.

01:22:19

I need to understand where this came from.

01:22:21

And out here in Burning Man about three years ago,

01:22:23

after a very intense experience, when my vision separated,

01:22:28

I had such an intense experience that my vision broke up

01:22:32

into two, and on the left-hand side of the vision

01:22:36

was all these wiggling color pixels,

01:22:38

and on the right-hand side was something else, a soft form.

01:22:41

And I looked in Galen’s face, and I could see her face in beautiful 3D with

01:22:46

no color. And when she smiled, I felt happiness. But when I looked with the left camera, she

01:22:54

was all pixels. And I didn’t understand it was a face at all, but I could see the absolute

01:22:59

tiny glistening drops on the surface of her eyes and I could study that for an indefinite period and for a moment I said that’s what an autistic person’s

01:23:08

like they don’t have the model on the set they only have the pixel camera

01:23:13

that’s why they sit and they stimulate on a little point on the wall for hours

01:23:16

in detail that raw pixels they don’t they never understood what a face was

01:23:20

this profoundly Galen works with profoundly autistic kids.

01:23:26

So I said, I have a camera.

01:23:29

I got this camera.

01:23:30

I broke my vision system.

01:23:32

I separated it out into two parts.

01:23:34

I can use it to answer questions.

01:23:36

So I turned the camera around and I pointed it back at me, at my brain or my past or whatever.

01:23:42

While I got this camera, know i gotta focus and i gotta

01:23:45

get some shots and the first thing i said okay what happened why am i afraid to look into faces

01:23:51

and the first thing that came back was this turning on a 3d it’s like your first memory

01:23:57

was this powerful memory of the world becoming 3d instantly and then the second memory was this terrifying vision. This terrifying thing was this round face and this fat body,

01:24:09

sort of a white body, and these two black eyes.

01:24:13

These two black eyes looking at me.

01:24:16

And it was the most terrifying thing.

01:24:19

And then I realized this is the black-eyed baby.

01:24:22

This is my first contact with another human being looking in their eyes.

01:24:27

And the eyes were totally empty.

01:24:30

They were absolutely empty, staring at me.

01:24:34

And I was just crinkling up.

01:24:36

This is the most unbelievably horrifying thing,

01:24:39

because I’d never seen eyes before.

01:24:41

It could have happened a couple of weeks into the hospital.

01:24:43

Maybe I was in the crib and they plopped this baby down,

01:24:46

socialized them, put this other kid in there, black-eyed baby.

01:24:51

It’s like, oh, they’re attacking me, or it’s attacking me.

01:24:55

It has malice for me because it’s so empty.

01:24:59

And then the answer came.

01:25:00

The answer was, it’s just absorbing you.

01:25:04

It’s studying you you it doesn’t have

01:25:07

malice or there’s no meanness it’s a baby because then I understand about

01:25:10

babies when you have a newborn man they look right through you why because

01:25:15

they’re void and they are sucking everything in they’re pulling everything

01:25:19

you have to give into them and that baby was pulling everything I had built in the tiny little life that I had in.

01:25:27

Who are you?

01:25:29

There was no mass.

01:25:30

There was no ill intent.

01:25:33

I said, oh, that’s where it started.

01:25:36

That’s the gift, the black-eyed baby.

01:25:39

So I try to remember eye contact.

01:25:43

I got it wrong the first time why do I need to

01:25:46

get it wrong every time after that so that was that was an important gift and

01:25:53

it’s a if you can forget the blurry vision thing if you get whacked on the

01:25:58

head or whatever so you’re actually separate I asked the neurologist after

01:26:01

and they said yeah you’re seeing that’s the two forms of how your vision is put together you have the model forming that comes from one

01:26:09

part of the brain and you have the raw pixels and it has to integrate right and

01:26:14

if it separates it’s actually a tool but I wouldn’t try it at home I wouldn’t use

01:26:18

it as a thank you don’t try this at home. Good advice. Thank you, Bruce.

01:26:27

And you know, I’ve heard Bruce talk a lot of times. We’ve got a lot of long conversations.

01:26:36

But this is the one I’m going to remember the most. I think we should all remember this one.

01:26:42

It was really great. It reminds me of the first very first by log that or

01:26:46

Plank a norte lecture that John Hannah gave and

01:26:49

Everybody but John had masks on it that we had the open thing at the time

01:26:53

They had a whiteout come in so it’s very interesting five years ago

01:26:57

Our first by log star like or blank in our key talk started and here five years later

01:27:02

We conclude with the same thing so uh

01:27:05

I don’t know if that’s a message or not but uh anyhow thank you very much for Bruce and

01:27:09

I’d like to introduce Bruce’s sister June June came in from Canada first timer and thank

01:27:14

you very much for coming down June is an artist by the way and uh so she fits into black she

01:27:20

was a burner just didn’t know it so she fit in pretty naturally i only met june in

01:27:26

92 i i was reunited with my bio family when i had three full so i have this it is this interesting

01:27:34

nature versus nurture thing i looked at this wonderful woman and 10 or 12 years ago and it’s

01:27:40

like that’s a female me or i’m i’m a female her and she’s like a male me. And it was such an amazing, and it’s still amazing to this day that I have an other,

01:27:50

you know, and we have the same bloody crazy tastes.

01:27:55

So anyway.

01:27:57

Canada’s in trouble too.

01:27:59

Thank you.

01:28:00

Thank you for being here, Jim.

01:28:01

Really appreciate it.

01:28:02

If you want to come up here and…

01:28:05

Do you want to come up here, too?

01:28:06

Get the drums up here and didgeridoo,

01:28:08

and I’m going to back out of the way.

01:28:10

And Matt is going to do a tobacco ceremony

01:28:15

as he did to open it.

01:28:16

We’ll do to close it.

01:28:17

Is there a recorder?

01:28:20

And there you have it, the final

01:28:26

pile log of the 2007

01:28:28

Burning Man Festival.

01:28:30

Did you hear the raindrops a little past

01:28:32

the midway point? They came right

01:28:34

when Bruce told the story of his vision

01:28:36

of Terrence McKenna’s getaway car.

01:28:39

As the

01:28:40

first drops hit the canvas yurt,

01:28:42

Bruce just casually said,

01:28:46

and there’s some rain.

01:28:53

Well, those few drops may not sound like a big deal to all of you who have been inundated with rain this year,

01:28:57

but it’s an exceedingly rare event on the playa at Burning Man.

01:29:03

I’ve never seen it there before, and I only know of one year where they actually had a big rain during a festival.

01:29:09

Now, the amount of rain that fell on the playa this year probably wasn’t even enough to measure.

01:29:13

But, of course, that’s not going to keep me from making a big deal out of it, because, as you already know, I tend to make a big deal out of all kinds of little things like that.

01:29:19

You know, it just makes life more interesting, don’t you think?

01:29:22

So think about this for just a minute.

01:29:24

just makes life more interesting, don’t you think? So think about this for just a minute.

01:29:30

Basically, we have almost perfect weather all week, right up until the moment Bruce begins his pliologue. Then we go through the most intense windstorm and whiteout of the

01:29:35

week, followed by a brief rain shower, and then, just as Mateo began the closing ceremony

01:29:41

and the drummers and didgeridoo player began, we all stepped

01:29:45

outside the yurt and what did we see but a rainbow. That’s right, a rainbow stretched

01:29:50

from one side of Black Rock City to the other. And it was no ordinary rainbow. Not that any

01:29:56

desert rainbow could be called ordinary. But this rainbow, the one that came with the little

01:30:01

shower that accompanied Bruce’s story about Terrence McKenna’s getaway car,

01:30:06

this rainbow was a double rainbow.

01:30:09

I could go on, and in fact I’ve been chewing on this in my mind for over a week now.

01:30:15

Maybe all of these weather-related events surrounding Bruce’s pliologue

01:30:19

and invocation of the spirit of Terrence McKenna

01:30:22

were nothing more than a very cool set of coincidences.

01:30:26

And maybe they were something else entirely, but I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

01:30:31

In any event, it was a moment I’m sure we’ll all treasure for the rest of our days.

01:30:36

So to dear Spalding Gray, wherever you are these days, you can rest knowing that we actually

01:30:41

did experience our perfect moment at Burning Man this year.

01:30:44

rest knowing that we actually did experience our perfect moment at Burning Man this year.

01:30:49

I wish I had the energy to tell a few more stories about this year’s burn,

01:30:52

but this program is already overly long,

01:30:57

so I’ll wrap this up with the promise that I’ll get back to you again as soon as I can.

01:31:03

Right now I’m planning on a few non-Burning Man talks before returning to the Plyologs,

01:31:05

not because they aren’t extremely interesting, but because I feel like putting a little distance between myself and the playa

01:31:10

for a while.

01:31:11

I’m all burned out, as they say.

01:31:14

But before I go, I want to give a special thank you to some really special people.

01:31:19

As you probably have experienced for yourself, coming home from a big trip isn’t usually

01:31:24

something we all look

01:31:25

forward to. You know how it is. You’re tired. There’s still a lot of unpacking to do. All that

01:31:30

work you left undone as you escaped for your holiday has now grown in urgency, and basically

01:31:36

you just want to throw your hands up in the air and walk back out the door. Well, that’s where I

01:31:41

was a week ago when I got back from the playa. So I decided that before I started any of my unwelcome chores that awaited me,

01:31:48

I’d take a few minutes and just read the subject lines in the email that had piled up.

01:31:53

And the first thing that came in was a bunch of notices from PayPal

01:31:56

saying that a truly surprising number of our fellow salonners had made donations

01:32:01

to help defray the expenses involved in growing this podcast.

01:32:06

You guys have no idea how wonderful it felt to return home all hot, dusty, and tired, but

01:32:11

to find that you were thinking about the salon even when there was nothing new going on.

01:32:17

And so I want to express my deep appreciation to Joseph B., Stephen S., Colin C., Jeremy C., Zachariah B., Terry L., Mark B., and Janice Gate Creative.

01:32:30

And actually, Terry, Mark, and Janice Gate Creative are frequent donors to the Psychedelic Salon,

01:32:37

and all of you guys have really helped a lot.

01:32:41

I really just can’t thank you enough.

01:32:43

And thanks to these donors and our previous donors,

01:32:46

I now have enough confidence to begin planning some new excursions

01:32:51

to capture a few stories that are still floating around.

01:32:54

For example, while I was talking to the Shulgens at Burning Man a few weeks ago,

01:32:59

Ann invited me to come up to their place for a visit

01:33:01

and hopefully to do a few recording sessions.

01:33:05

But on my way home, as I was doing a reality check on my finances,

01:33:11

it became obvious that my choice was going to be to go for a visit to my grandchildren on the other coast

01:33:17

or rent a car and drive up and visit the Shulgens.

01:33:20

Well, as much as I love the Shulgens, I’m sure that, like me, they’d choose their grandchildren first, too.

01:33:26

So I figured I’d have to tell Han and Sasha that I couldn’t make it.

01:33:30

But then after returning home, I discovered that even in the absence of a new podcast,

01:33:35

these wonderful fellow salonners out there wanted to help out in the collection and podcasting of these talks. So it’s now obvious, even to me, that there’s enough interest in capturing these stories

01:33:48

that I should get better focused and make some plans to do more original interviews during the next 12 months.

01:33:55

And to help with that, my friend John M. from Seattle has given the salon an 8-track digital recorder,

01:34:02

complete with traveling case.

01:34:06

in the salon an 8-track digital recorder complete with traveling case. It’s really a professional piece of equipment that over time will add immeasurably to what we can do here in the

01:34:11

way of recording interviews. Now to be honest, it’s such a big gift that I’m actually having

01:34:16

trouble accepting it, so I’ve decided that right now I’m holding it in trust for all

01:34:20

of us here in the salon, and I’ll do my best to put it to good use. So, John, thank you

01:34:26

again. I really do appreciate it. I’d like to go on and tell more stories about all of the wonderful

01:34:31

salonners who came up to us at the burn this year. It was really amazing to have so many of you go so

01:34:37

far out of your way to locate the pod cluster where we were holding the plyologs. And for some

01:34:43

of our regulars, like a dime short,

01:34:45

well, I’m sorry you went to the wrong place to look for us,

01:34:49

but my guess is that you found something equally interesting.

01:34:52

Now, while in the next few podcasts,

01:34:54

I’m going to play some non-Burning Man talks

01:34:56

just to give us all a little break from it,

01:34:59

I do plan on stopping by Lefty’s Lounge

01:35:02

on thedopetheme.co.uk sometime in the next week or so and tell some

01:35:07

more of my Burning Man stories there, in addition to telling them here in the Psychedelic Salon

01:35:13

as the weeks and months go on.

01:35:15

And while I’m thinking about the Shulgens, I’d like to ask you, if you will, to check

01:35:21

around anywhere you can and see if you can find out if there are any stem cell research studies

01:35:26

that are taking place on dry macular degeneration and that are looking for participants, of course.

01:35:33

As you probably already know, Sasha is suffering from macular degeneration, the dry kind,

01:35:40

and apparently the only advice they’ve received from physicians here in the States

01:35:44

is that about all he can do is get used to going blind.

01:35:49

Now please keep in mind that Sasha’s form of the disease is dry macular degeneration.

01:35:54

There are a lot of treatments for the wet variety,

01:35:56

but as far as they’ve been able to find out,

01:35:58

the only possible hope right now might be a stem cell research project that’s working on the problem.

01:36:05

So should you learn of a study or other protocol that might be a benefit to Sasha,

01:36:10

well please send the information to me via email. My address is lorenzo at matrixmasters.com and

01:36:17

I’ll be sure to call the Shulgens and pass your information along. Let’s just hope that somebody

01:36:22

can help us find a cure for Sasha in the very near future.

01:36:26

But in case you’re wondering, Sasha’s slow loss of his sight hasn’t done a thing to dampen his

01:36:32

spirits. In fact, for me, the high point of this year’s Burning Man Festival was watching Sasha’s

01:36:39

interaction with little two-year-old Audrey, Ann’s newest grandchild. Watching Audrey and Sasha play together, and that’s what they were doing.

01:36:47

They were playing together.

01:36:49

And that’s just something I’m never going to forget.

01:36:52

You just simply can’t imagine a bigger smile than the one that graces Sasha’s face

01:36:57

every time little Audrey says, Sasha! Sasha!

01:37:00

And then he gets up and walks over to see what she wants.

01:37:04

All of the heat and pain and expense and everything else that’s involved in going to Burning Man was more than worth it just to see that beatific smile on Sasha’s face.

01:37:15

Not to mention Anne’s pure joy at being around her granddaughter.

01:37:19

You know, it was a magical moment for me to be there. Magical for sure. Let’s hope that a cure can be found soon

01:37:26

so that Sasha can continue seeing

01:37:28

all of these wonderful little children

01:37:30

who already seem to be kind of

01:37:32

running things for us around here.

01:37:34

Well,

01:37:35

time to get out of here, I think.

01:37:38

Before I go, I want to mention, as

01:37:40

always, that this and all of the podcasts

01:37:42

from the Psychedelic Salon are

01:37:43

protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.

01:37:49

If you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which may be found at www.psychedelicsalon.org.

01:38:01

And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts,

01:38:05

well, just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

01:38:10

And Chetul Hayuk, thanks again for the use of your music here in the salon.

01:38:15

And to Bruce Dahmer, well, thank you just doesn’t seem like enough to say

01:38:19

for all that you’ve done for us here in the Psychedelic Salon.

01:38:23

But I guess that’s just going to have to suffice for now.

01:38:25

So thank you, Bruce, Galen, Mary C., Mateo,

01:38:29

and to all of the other brave souls who hunkered down in the yurt

01:38:33

to hear this interesting plialogue.

01:38:36

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:38:41

Be well, my friends.