Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Mark Pesce
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
04:40 – Mark Pesce: “I knew that part of my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn’t to escape into another dimension but to find a way to make real to us the things that we can’t always see because we exist at a level of scale, of experience, that hides them from us.”
06:29 – Mark Pesce: “Because where we’re going, the simulated and the real are going to get really blurry.”
15:13 – Terence McKenna:“Obviously, from the first time I had a major [psychedelic] trip on it was clear to me that this had to have evolutionary implications.”
17:09 – Terence McKenna:“Whatever it was that psychedelics were doing, it was taking anybody’s notion of reality, anybody’s mindset, and radically extending it. And if they found that comfortable they were ecstatic. And if they found it horrifying they were traumatized. But the common thread was, takes ordinary minds, makes them bigger, stranger, more grotesque, less predictable, more bizarre.”
24:22 – Terence McKenna: “Our ideologies are probably lethal, obviously lethal I would say. But they are, fortunately, a kind of chrysalis of ideological constraint that technology is in the process of dissolving.”
27:16 – Terence McKenna: “Occasionally you flop on the seamy side. It gives a literary quality to life that’s lacking among the tight-assed.”
32:24 – Terence McKenna: “If anything undoes us this will be it, that our language has failed, that we misread each other’s intent, that we could not understand each other. So the project of refining language is the same project as the ending of history. I mean, history is the story of languages that failed, and when language grows perfect history will end.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from
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Cyrodelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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Now before we get into today’s program, I want to be sure and thank Jeremy S., Vipal P., and Joel S.,
00:00:33 ►
all of whom have been so kind as to send donations to help offset expenses incurred in producing and publishing these podcasts.
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Thank you ever so much, one and all, for your very generous donations.
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And as for today’s lecture, well, it comes from a weekend workshop given at Esalen in August of 1998.
00:00:54 ►
And it features two people that you’ve heard from before here in the salon, Terrence McKenna and Mark Pesci.
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And one of the main reasons that I’m playing this today is that I’ve received copies
00:01:05 ►
of it from a half dozen or so people. And so I finally got the message that it’s perhaps
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significant in ways that I’m not yet clear about. Now, what we’re about to hear is only a small
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portion of the entire workshop. But if this conversation grabs you, well, the good news is
00:01:22 ►
that the entire weekend workshop is available for your listening pleasure on one of Mark Pesce’s websites.
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And I’ll post a link to them with the program notes for today’s podcast and our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
00:01:38 ►
Or you can just go over to Mark Pesce, M-A-R-K-P-E-S-C-E, markpesche.com, where you’ll find this workshop and much, much more.
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As I said, I’ve received copies of this talk from several sources,
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and tape two, which I’m about to play right now,
00:01:56 ►
begins the same way on every copy,
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and that is with Mark more or less in mid-sentence,
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as he was talking about Robert Anton Wilson’s book,
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Cosmic Trigger, in which Terence is mentioned.
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Tape 1, by the way, consists primarily of brief personal introductions
00:02:12 ►
given by the people in the audience.
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So now let’s begin with Mark Pesce at Esalen sometime in August 1998
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as he begins their discussion about techno-pagans at the end of history.
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as he begins their discussion about techno-pagans at the end of history.
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This cosmic trigger, probably on the influence of some psychedelic drugs, but we’ll come to that.
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And in it, he summarizes yours and your brother’s work on the time wave.
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And he, in fact, charts out history into three major sections.
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The 67-year section, which will comprise the bulk of my life an interesting 13 month section which will happen
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in 2011 and then an interesting six day section which will happen immediately preceding the winter
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solstice in 2012 in which i believe during the last six day session a little bit more novelty
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than has existed on the planet since ever since ever And I looked at this and I had been reading,
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I’d started off easy, so I’d read Alvin Toffler,
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and then I could take a little bit more,
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so I worked myself up into Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
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and then I came across that and I said,
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well, this appears to be the case.
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It was confirmed to me internally
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in a way that I could not particularly argue with.
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I could not argue out of.
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It was simply a foundational fact.
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And all of my work thereafter was based on a premise that the universe is seeking a type of closure, that in fact things
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are converging. And so my own life study had been perhaps an exploration of what those avenues of
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convergence were. And it ended up over a period of years that my own life story became a search to create the forms of that convergence.
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So we’ll now flash forward to my first experience of virtual reality, which happened in 1990
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and required absolutely no technology except about 500 micrograms of LSD-25.
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I’d been thinking, I’d been reading, and all of a sudden I drop acid after several years.
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And of course, if you’ve taken several years break and all of a sudden thrust yourself back into that realm,
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you can find that things really pop up.
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And I found myself in a virtual world.
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And what I found in this virtual world, the thing that I must have suspected that I would find in this virtual world,
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wasn’t an artificial Tron-like environment.
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It wasn’t something that was entirely artificial.
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What I beheld in that environment was an image of the planet, as if I was cruising above it in a spaceship.
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And I knew that part of my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn’t
00:04:46 ►
to escape into another dimension but to find a way to make real to us the things
00:04:51 ►
that we can’t always see because we exist at a level of scale of experience
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that hides them from us and at that point in my life
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I decided I needed to leave New England
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and come to California
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where everything was really going on
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this was 1990
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and VR was the hot new thing
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and we forget now that VR was the hot new thing
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before the internet became the hot new thing
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but for a while it was the cheese
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and I moved to San Francisco
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which made it much easier to get good drugs It was the cheese. And I moved to San Francisco,
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which made it much easier to get good drugs.
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And I started to explore,
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by working, by building systems, what virtual reality was.
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And this started to have a profound change
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on my own understanding of how reality was constructed.
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Because my psychedelic description of reality,
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which is that mind forms reality,
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began to conflate or become identical with
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my physical or scientific description of reality,
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which is that mind forms reality.
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And all of a sudden I understood that
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everything I used to understand about the way the universe works
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wasn’t as true as I had thought. And so this began to inspire in me a search, a search
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to get to some basic level of being that would allow me to work in a world that was manifest
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because of my own will and just as much as manifest
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because of your own will it is where we’re going was simulated and the real
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are going to get really blurry and we don’t have any tools we don’t have any
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tools of mind Western culture which is based on this idea of this objective
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external reality,
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it’s not hard. It’s all become very soft and it’s all flowing together.
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So we need to now start to
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find ways of
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describing what’s going on.
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And so what we need
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to do, I found in my own investigations,
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is to take a look
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at cultures that describe
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the world magically,
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that understand that perception shapes what you are,
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and you shape what you see,
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and that they’re not separate areas,
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they’re not separate domains,
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but you have to consider them as a whole.
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So the four sort of prongs that got talked about
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in the blurb that was written for this piece are technopaganism.
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And technopaganism is maybe, you could describe it a bunch of different ways.
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And I certainly didn’t make the word up and I certainly didn’t apply the word to myself.
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But it stuck because Wired Magazine published an article two years ago with my face blazoned on it photoshop reversed in color and said this is a
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techno pagan and really what it was trying to do was trying to articulate my own experience of
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being thrust into this world where everything was melting and nothing was solid and trying to come
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to grips with it philosophically trying to come to grips with it ontologically. And my own explorations had led me to understand
00:08:06 ►
that in fact in a world where anything you want is true,
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the only way you can deal with this is by learning how to deal with your will.
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Dealing with your will is what magic has always, in all cultures, always been about.
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This is why the shaman doesn’t go insane when the world disappears.
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He’s ready for it. They’re ready because they understand that where they are isn’t bound up in their view of the world.
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The internet is a connective layer. And you were talking about this last night. It’s beautiful.
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If you took a picture of this room in 1990 and you took a picture of it today,
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everything would look exactly the same
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and yet everything is completely different.
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Because in 1990 we didn’t
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have this layer of bits that’s
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flowing seamlessly among all of us.
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And it’s changed us.
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It’s radically sped up the way
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we deal with information in society.
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And every bit of information
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that passes
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through you changes you you cannot be unaffected in any way by any bit of
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information so the Internet is acting as this enormous accelerator it’s acting as
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something that’s passing through all of us and radically transforming us and
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part of what it is doing is ripping us apart and that’s dangerous. If we don’t approach
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that carefully and if we don’t approach
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that with a lot of heart, we’re going to find
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ourselves and what we think of as ourselves
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ripped away in that process.
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One of the reasons why I think it’s very
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important that this is happening at Esalen
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is because if Esalen were running a
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political campaign, their slogan would be
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it’s the body, stupid.
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Because it begins here and it a political campaign, their slogan would be it’s the body, stupid. Because
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it begins here
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and it ends here.
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And if we can stay in our bodies,
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even while we’re projected into cyberspace,
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we have some zone
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for sanity. We have some zone for being.
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And psychedelics
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can produce these
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boundary dissolutions where you
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flow into another thing.
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What we’re going to see, and it’s actually quite true that certain types of VR can produce precisely the same affect.
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There are zones where virtual reality can be very dangerous for that reason or incredibly powerful and meaningful for that reason.
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So where I would like to work from this weekend
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is I really want to work from the heart.
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I personally think in my own philosophy
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that to work in technology
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you have to work from the heart center
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because otherwise you’ll create golems,
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you’ll create frankensteins,
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your creations will run away from you.
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And that’s the essence of the story of the golem
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is that this is a creature
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that was created
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with the breath of life,
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but without the light of knowledge
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or the heart,
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the heart of God.
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So we really have to work from that.
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And one of the things
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that we’ll be doing
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this weekend for that,
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and we’re inviting you,
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I don’t think we’re requiring you,
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because that would just not be
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in the tenor of this place,
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but we’re inviting you
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at 7.30 in the morning,
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both tomorrow and Sunday, to come
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practice Kundalini Yoga.
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Kundalini Yoga works very much on the heart center.
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It’s not strenuous. I guarantee
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it will be fun.
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We have a very good teacher, James, who will be teaching this.
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And the idea is that with these exercises
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we can help to open up
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our heart center so that when we talk tomorrow,
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when we meet tomorrow, we can really be
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working from that, Even when we’re
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talking about these ideas that may be very
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technologically relevant,
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they won’t be isolated in our minds.
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That all said,
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I also want
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to explore the joyous nature of what we can do.
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And a lot of my work has been around exploring the joyous nature of what we can do.
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We have to, if we’re working from our hearts in these environments,
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then a part of what we want to do is be joyous in these environments.
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One of my biggest gripes about the Internet is that it can’t as yet contain the tenor of human emotion, which is so important. If we’re building this edifice
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to be the global mind and it can’t laugh, we’ve got a big problem. If it can’t sing,
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we have a big problem. And so one of the things we’ll be doing probably in the evening on
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Saturday is doing something we call voce,
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which Paul and I have been working on. We call it world song or voce, which is a singing
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or toning technique. And it can produce a quality of connection in a group of people,
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which is the closest I’ve heard it described as it’s almost like instant ecstasy in the
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sense of the drug. And it’s a temporary sort of lowering of interpersonal barriers in a really, really wonderful way.
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And hopefully at the end of all of this,
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I will have been inspired,
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and Terrence will have been inspired by what you had to say,
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and we’ll be able to bring that heart-centeredness,
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which has to, I believe, remain at the heart of how we work
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when we’re working in the world and with technology in the world.
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for me at the heart of how we work when we’re working in the world and with technology in the world.
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Isn’t he a great guy?
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If I had the Timothy Leary laurels with me, I’d hand them on.
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The bad penny could pass.
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Well, I love listening to Mark rap this stuff,
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and he really knows where he’s coming from and it’s it’s exciting stuff I’ve been into this psychedelic
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thing since the late 60s and it’s transformed in different ways and there’s been a strange
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sort of literary parallelism or cloud over my own life so that as my obsessions evolved,
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society obligingly evolved in the same directions.
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And when I got started with psychedelics, it was because I was interested in the mystical experience,
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a la Jakob Berman, Thomas Terhearn, and all that sort of thing.
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And I had read Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception.
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So it was a spiritual intentionality.
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And as time passed, I was completely satisfied in that
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but I also became interested then in what were psychedelics
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in terms of their impacts on large numbers of people
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and on human social and cultural evolution
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because to me it was just this incredible power,
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this dimension which my own culture completely denied and overlooked,
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but that obviously from the first time I had a major trip on,
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it was clear to me that this had to have evolutionary implications.
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to have evolutionary implications. And it seemed to me as I read my Darwin and Freud that there had to be some kind of quickening influence in human emergence that if not outright
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transcendental was certainly unique and out of the ordinary
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order of nature
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and so then I spent years
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thinking about psychedelics implications
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for human evolution
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and most of you if you’re interested
00:15:56 ►
know my theories about all this
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well then the
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engagement with it
00:16:01 ►
extended further and I began
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to see it as a lens for coordinating
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large amounts of data in order to essentially prophesize the future.
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That the future, somehow I had the notion that history and the individual life built
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around the psychedelic experience
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were fractal reflections of each other.
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And that led to the conclusion that history is a trip.
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And that led to the conclusion that the best was yet to come,
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or the best was bet to come.
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I’m not sure so it had this socio-political and historical
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implication and it wasn’t as simple as just imagining what would happen if societies would
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permit these things but I could also see that it was a catalyst on imagination that you know
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whatever it was that psychedelics were doing it was taking anybody’s notion of reality anybody’s
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mindset and radically extending it and if they found that comfortable they were ecstatic and if they found it horrifying they
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were traumatized but the common thread was takes ordinary minds makes them bigger stranger more
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grotesque less predictable more bizarre so then that was not yet the outer parameter of the issues that this phenomenon, the psychedelic experience, seemed to engage.
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It seemed to me that at the personal and experiential level, the thing that was so astonishing about it was not that it led, at least for me, directly to God.
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What it led to was more art than I conceived of existing.
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How was it that, you know, in a five-hour psilocybin trip, an ordinary person lying in darkness sees more art than is stored and cataloged in all the museums of Europe.
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I mean, this was confounding to me.
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And I had a Jungian bias too.
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So I was full of the notion
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of the commonality of the unconscious
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and all that.
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And so I was puzzled,
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why don’t I see these motifs
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in Tibetan paintings, Shipibo carving?
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How can something which is so near over a very slight energy threshold
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involved in taking these substances be so distant from our cultural values
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and our store of images. And it was around this time, roughly 1990,
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that I began to hear the first buzz about virtual reality.
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And I knew, the minute I understood the concept,
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I knew in the same way that I knew when I heard about the first Mac and LSD and potassium sugar perchlorate rocket
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fuels that this was going to be the next great thing. And as a tool of art, as a tool for leading us beyond the
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notion that
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we are a
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hive society
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of advanced
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primates.
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Because that’s
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how we
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visually appear
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to the
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empirical point
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of view.
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That’s an
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out of
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context
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description of
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what we
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are.
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It’s like a schematic or an aerial map.
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What we really are is a community of mind knitted together by codes and symbols,
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intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes.
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The invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world of the human experience
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is far more real to us than the visible world
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which is little more than a kind of screen
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or stage upon which we move
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so this thing Mark said
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I heard it for the first time and got it
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that the purpose of VR is to show us aspects of reality
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that are not artificial,
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but that are fields of data
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not ordinarily coordinated by ordinary perception.
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You know, Ralph Abraham, who’s a favorite around here,
00:21:03 ►
has talked about how mathematics,
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which has been a high priesthood of arcane formulae and special signifying languages,
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is giving way to visual understanding.
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If you talk to someone about a seven or eight dimensional process,
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most people completely blur out if you show them an animation of an ongoing eight dimensional
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process everybody understands without a word being said exactly what is
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happening so I see virtual reality as a way not of escaping any notion of empirical reality
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but as a way
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of re-portraying
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invisible levels
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of the given world
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that are very
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vital and important to us
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how we see flows
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of energy, how we understand
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complex economies
00:22:03 ►
how we understand the fractal hierarchies
00:22:07 ►
of nature.
00:22:09 ►
Everything is about to get very much more complicated, much larger.
00:22:15 ►
The number of choices are about to exponentially explode.
00:22:21 ►
In a sense, these technologies point us toward, if not literal godhood, then a kind of
00:22:29 ►
fictional godhood. We are all going to become the masters of the narrative in which we are embedded.
00:22:39 ►
Our separate stories are going to take on dimensions so multifarious that for all practical purposes we will each move
00:22:50 ►
into a cosmos of our own creation and control. In a way
00:22:55 ►
all that is happening is that what is already co-present with three-dimensional
00:23:00 ►
reality is being literalized. But literalized
00:23:04 ►
in time scales that make the reality is being literalized, but literalized in
00:23:05 ►
time scales
00:23:07 ►
that make the
00:23:09 ►
nature of the game apparent
00:23:11 ►
to all but the dullest
00:23:13 ►
among us. I mean, after
00:23:15 ►
all, we have always lived in virtual
00:23:18 ►
realities ever since we
00:23:19 ►
abandoned nomadism
00:23:21 ►
and defined
00:23:22 ►
a polis and a wilderness and you know when Hammurabi
00:23:28 ►
set up the first codes in Babylon these were operating codes these were
00:23:36 ►
constraints on the human system that did not fully implement its capabilities but
00:23:42 ►
rather defined and limited it for
00:23:45 ►
purposes of implementing certain design goals well now we’ve been in the birth
00:23:53 ►
canal of the design process for about 8,000 years now and and we can see light
00:24:01 ►
at the end of the tunnel the French have a notion of forward escape.
00:24:09 ►
That means when the situation gets so crazy,
00:24:12 ►
then you just hit the accelerator and drive straight up the middle,
00:24:17 ►
and that’s the forward escape.
00:24:20 ►
And technology represents this for us.
00:24:23 ►
Our ideologies are probably lethal,
00:24:26 ►
obviously lethal, I would say.
00:24:29 ►
But they are fortunately a kind of chrysalis
00:24:33 ►
of ideological constraint
00:24:36 ►
that technology is in the process of dissolving.
00:24:41 ►
And, you know, William Butler saw this in the 19th century
00:24:45 ►
Tellar de Chardin
00:24:47 ►
reached it in the 40s and the 50s
00:24:50 ►
McLuhan expressly
00:24:52 ►
articulated this vision
00:24:54 ►
in the 50s and the 60s
00:24:56 ►
this is really
00:24:58 ►
as Ahab tells the crew
00:25:00 ►
in Moby Dick
00:25:01 ►
this is what you’ve shipped for
00:25:03 ►
this was the plan
00:25:07 ►
you know Plato said if God does not
00:25:10 ►
exist man will create
00:25:12 ►
such a thing
00:25:13 ►
and we are creating a simulacrum
00:25:16 ►
of our highest hopes
00:25:17 ►
and the effort
00:25:19 ►
to define
00:25:21 ►
the actual delimiting
00:25:24 ►
architecture of our hope
00:25:26 ►
is an intellectual exercise that we have never previously submitted to.
00:25:33 ►
And what I mean by that is, when you can do anything, what do you do?
00:25:42 ►
We’ve always worked within the constraints of mortar, glass, steel,
00:25:47 ►
our economic scales, the physical scales.
00:25:52 ►
VR eliminates all of this.
00:25:55 ►
You know, the difference between a 10-story building
00:25:58 ►
and a 100-story building in virtual reality is 1-0 in a line of code.
00:26:03 ►
Well, with that kind of freedom the human imagination
00:26:08 ►
which has been defined by limitation the planet’s surface the needs and wishes of others is going to
00:26:17 ►
unfold in these super spaces and you know it’s a gnostic epiphiphany. What it really comes down to in terms of the politics and psychology of it
00:26:30 ►
is a final resolution to my mind of the question,
00:26:34 ►
is man good?
00:26:37 ►
In other words, with all constraints removed, removed do we descend into a a world of
00:26:47 ►
Freudian nightmare
00:26:50 ►
and simulated
00:26:51 ►
sadomasochism
00:26:53 ►
or do we
00:26:55 ►
express something which
00:26:57 ►
matter always mitigated
00:27:00 ►
against so that’s what I
00:27:02 ►
think is I’m sure we
00:27:04 ►
will do both I mean the essence
00:27:06 ►
of choice means not only will will we collectively do both probably each and
00:27:13 ►
every one of us will do both you know occasionally you flop on the seamy side
00:27:19 ►
it gives a literary quality to life that’s lacking among the tight ass.
00:27:30 ►
Well, I don’t know. It’s a quarter of ten.
00:27:32 ►
Do you want to riff off that for a bit?
00:27:34 ►
And then we’ll send these folks packing.
00:27:36 ►
Thank you.
00:27:43 ►
I’ve been piecing together an essay while I’ve been piecing together an essay
00:27:48 ►
while I’ve been here,
00:27:49 ►
which I’m calling West of Esalen,
00:27:51 ►
which is interesting because if you take a look
00:27:54 ►
at what’s west of Esalen,
00:27:56 ►
you see a gaping cliff,
00:27:57 ►
which has been growing of late.
00:28:01 ►
And Esalen, as is all of California,
00:28:04 ►
is breaking off and falling into the sea
00:28:06 ►
and there is no safe land
00:28:08 ►
anywhere
00:28:09 ►
and that’s
00:28:11 ►
more than a metaphor
00:28:13 ►
for where we are now
00:28:15 ►
and it’s interesting because
00:28:16 ►
there’s talk about what Esalen has to do
00:28:20 ►
with the modern age
00:28:21 ►
and yet so much of what we think of
00:28:23 ►
as modern language has been
00:28:26 ►
shaped by what’s come out of this place. Talking about somebody’s vibes or being touchy-feely
00:28:32 ►
or even doing yoga, which is now, of course, all the rage in late millennial culture. These
00:28:39 ►
are all impulses that came out of this place. So there’s something about this space and about the body
00:28:46 ►
which is incredibly right,
00:28:48 ►
and even if Esalen vanished tomorrow,
00:28:51 ►
God has forbid, even if it did,
00:28:54 ►
the impact of it as an institution has been profound.
00:29:00 ►
And I think perhaps what we’re trying to do here this weekend and tonight
00:29:04 ►
is to extend the franchise of Esalen into another realm,
00:29:09 ►
to say that the values that make us human,
00:29:12 ►
the values that make us good,
00:29:16 ►
are the values that come out of what’s done here,
00:29:21 ►
and maybe they’re values that rely on the body in some way.
00:29:24 ►
That even as we talk about this Gnostic release, what’s done here, and maybe there are values that rely on the body in some way.
00:29:28 ►
That even as we talk about this Gnostic release,
00:29:33 ►
this uploading of the soul into some sort of silicon, which we will talk about,
00:29:38 ►
that there is this body that’s behind, sort of bitching,
00:29:42 ►
saying, excuse me, I’m real,
00:29:46 ►
and I am the potential, I am the ground in which you work.
00:29:58 ►
Because of that, I hope that we will spend some of the weekend not just speculating,
00:30:10 ►
but constantly looping and bringing it back into the body and where the body is. The question of the body is one of the largest questions in virtual reality.
00:30:14 ►
That’s a curious contradiction, and yet it’s true.
00:30:17 ►
Where is the body in cyberspace? Where are you when your email is flashing across the net,
00:30:21 ►
when your agents are doing your bidding?
00:30:23 ►
Where are you, and how do you maintain yourself?
00:30:26 ►
And it was interesting because there was a comment that was made earlier about psychedelics
00:30:30 ►
as a shortcut versus yoga or one of the other traditions.
00:30:33 ►
And I know that in my own life, I need both of them because I need the psychedelics in
00:30:38 ►
order to be able to have the vision, but I need the yoga in order to maintain the stability
00:30:43 ►
to express the vision.
00:30:44 ►
And so there’s both dials there it’s as if the internet is some sort of
00:30:49 ►
collective psychedelic we’re going to need the body as we pass through it so
00:30:54 ►
that we can explore the zones within ourselves that are the good
00:31:02 ►
yeah it’s great what you say about that we’re trying to push the definitions of esalen’s
00:31:08 ►
relevance because you know the entire intellectual and spiritual effort here over the past 30 years
00:31:17 ►
flies under the flag of the human potential movement i mean that’s what it’s called and certainly what we’re talking
00:31:26 ►
about here and trying to bring gently onto the stage is an enormous frontier
00:31:34 ►
of human potential we are to some degree beginning to design ourselves or beginning to design our potential in the
00:31:47 ►
service of the idea of a perfected humanity of some sort and what we’re
00:31:56 ►
talking about here is not genetic manipulation or eugenics or any of
00:32:01 ►
these somewhat dubious enterprises with a clouded
00:32:06 ►
history but using
00:32:08 ►
technological
00:32:10 ►
prosthesis to extend
00:32:12 ►
and enrich humanness
00:32:14 ►
to enrich communication
00:32:16 ►
and it is believe me
00:32:18 ►
the want of good
00:32:20 ►
communication that
00:32:22 ►
is the thing probably
00:32:23 ►
if anything undoes us, this will be it.
00:32:27 ►
That our languages failed, that we misread each other’s intent, that we could not understand each other.
00:32:35 ►
So the project of refining language is the same project as the ending of history.
00:32:46 ►
I mean, history is the story of languages that failed.
00:32:50 ►
And when language grows perfect, history will end.
00:32:54 ►
And language may not look like it looks today or sound like it sounds today.
00:33:01 ►
The realization that’s flowered in the wake of the internet and the rise of
00:33:07 ►
cybernetics is that everything is made of information information is the primary datum
00:33:14 ►
of being concepts like time and space and energy are orders of magnitude removed from the present at hand when compared with a concept like information
00:33:27 ►
and and as Mark said every iota every bit of information that passes through
00:33:35 ►
us that we generate that we transmit changes us so I’m seeing here almost a theosophical epiphany of language trying to bootstrap itself toward realms of platonic perfection, which as organic beings we experience as love.
00:33:58 ►
Love, beauty, truth, these are the vectors of human becoming.
00:34:05 ►
They always have been, they always will be.
00:34:07 ►
And the technologies that open these paths for us
00:34:11 ►
are no more and no less powerful
00:34:16 ►
than the human beings that wield them.
00:34:20 ►
So, you know, this is an enterprise of integrity and millennial implication.
00:34:28 ►
And what lies as the goal is true humanness in sympathetic symbiosis with the planet
00:34:39 ►
and with these strange children that we have brought into the world are machines.
00:34:46 ►
I mean, that is the challenge at the end of history,
00:34:49 ►
and that’s what we’ll be talking about this weekend.
00:34:56 ►
Although I’d like to add my two cents to some of the things that Mark and Terrence just covered,
00:35:01 ►
I’m a little pressed for time right now,
00:35:03 ►
and so I’m going to pass up the
00:35:05 ►
opportunity, at least for now, and talk for a few minutes about a couple of other things that are on
00:35:10 ►
my mind. To begin with, there are some comments I’d like to make about two other podcasts that
00:35:15 ►
many of our fellow salonners have no doubt heard. One is about the ongoing discussion about
00:35:21 ►
meditation versus the psychedelic experience that began on Max Freakout’s Psychonautica
00:35:26 ►
and has more or less been carried to its conclusion
00:35:29 ►
in KMO’s podcast number 64 from the Sea Realm.
00:35:34 ►
And all I want to say about that topic is, first of all,
00:35:37 ►
that I think Daniel Siebert hit the nail on the head
00:35:40 ►
when he observed that the discussion seemed a little pointless
00:35:43 ►
because it’s a lot like comparing apples and oranges.
00:35:47 ►
Both of them are wonderful, delicious fruits, and each has its own place.
00:35:52 ►
So it seems to me that when people begin arguing about the relative merits of those two technologies,
00:35:58 ►
what they’re really doing is trying to justify their own chosen path
00:36:01 ►
by attempting to convince others that their path is the only or the best path,
00:36:07 ►
when the truth, at least as I see it, is that whatever path works for you is the perfect path, at least for you.
00:36:15 ►
And my second thought about the subject is that in the Sea Realm podcast I just mentioned,
00:36:21 ►
Heidi Smith, very wisely I believe, spoke about the middle way, where both technologies have their place.
00:36:28 ►
And for me, the wisdom of that way has been clearly pointed out over the years as I got to better know my dear friend Myron Stolaroff.
00:36:37 ►
Myron, as you know, has probably had more psychedelic experiences, both in number and variety, than any of us will ever approach.
00:36:46 ►
And he is also the most dedicated meditator that I’ve ever known.
00:36:50 ►
He truly walks the middle way.
00:36:51 ►
So those are my ideas on that subject.
00:36:54 ►
The other thing that got my attention the other day was in Max Freakout’s Psychonautica
00:36:59 ►
number 20.
00:37:00 ►
And in that program, at one point, Max says, there is no cultural place, no cultural validity for radically, magically altered states of consciousness.
00:37:11 ►
Now, to a very large extent, that’s true.
00:37:15 ►
However, there is one exception I know about, and it relates to the only issue that Max and I haven’t seen eye to eye on.
00:37:22 ►
And that has to do with the use of ayahuasca.
00:37:24 ►
Max and I haven’t seen eye to eye on, and that has to do with the use of ayahuasca.
00:37:30 ►
Now, I want to preface this by saying that Max is wise enough to allow for the possibility that he may change his own position once he’s had a little experience with the vine
00:37:34 ►
and can make an informed judgment on his own.
00:37:38 ►
Now, what I’m talking about is the point that both Matt Palomary and I believe,
00:37:42 ►
very strongly believe, that the only authentic
00:37:45 ►
ayahuasca experience worthy of the name is one that’s done in a small group and with
00:37:51 ►
a seasoned ayahuasquero leading the ceremony.
00:37:54 ►
Now, like Max and Terrence McKenna, my preferred method for using our sacred medicines is to
00:37:59 ►
do them alone.
00:38:01 ►
And since Max has not yet had the opportunity to personally experience ayahuasca,
00:38:06 ►
he very understandably believes that taking it should be no different than, say, using mushrooms.
00:38:13 ►
And until I had a dozen or more experiences with the vine myself, I probably would have gone along
00:38:17 ►
with him. But over the past several years, I’ve had the great honor to be a member of a small clan that comes together from time to time and joins in ayahuasca ceremonies.
00:38:29 ►
And they’re always led by a Peruvian ayahuasquero we have all known for many years.
00:38:35 ►
Now, I’m not in a position to go into any details about this, but I know with an absolute sense of knowing that it would be impossible to come even within sight of the
00:38:45 ►
experiences that we’ve had together without doing it in a group and with a seasoned Iowa
00:38:51 ►
Scarrow managing the group’s energy.
00:38:54 ►
And by the way, while the experience takes place in a group, and while there is a so-called
00:38:58 ►
leader, it still isn’t a group experience.
00:39:02 ►
And the leader actually does no leading.
00:39:04 ►
He’s really there to smooth out the group’s energy when it gets out of control.
00:39:09 ►
And he does this by singing a caros, our musical lifeline back to this little planet.
00:39:14 ►
He’s actually more of a safety net than a leader in any normal sense of that word.
00:39:19 ►
And as for simply obtaining some ayahuasca brew,
00:39:23 ►
well, once you know a little something about the
00:39:25 ►
tea, as some people call it, you soon understand that it really isn’t as simple as all that.
00:39:31 ►
You see, there are several different varieties of ayahuasca vine and several different varieties
00:39:36 ►
of the chacuna tree.
00:39:38 ►
Also, the age of each plant makes a significant difference, and the combination of the two
00:39:43 ►
plants is never the same, because there just isn’t a simple recipe that tells you to put so many grams
00:39:49 ►
of this and so many grams of that in a pot and cook it at such and such a temperature
00:39:54 ►
for a certain period of time.
00:39:56 ►
It just doesn’t work like that.
00:39:58 ►
I’ve had one brew that came from a vine that was over 50 years old, and I’m here to tell
00:40:03 ►
you that the experience I had that night was unlike any ayahuasca experience I’ve had before
00:40:08 ►
or since each batch of ayahuasca holds its own special magic and by taking it
00:40:15 ►
from the man or woman who harvested the vine and the leaves and then the made
00:40:20 ►
the brew herself or himself well it does make a, a tremendous difference from any experience that is possible
00:40:27 ►
just by scoring something that’s being passed off as ayahuasca
00:40:31 ►
and taking it alone in your apartment.
00:40:34 ►
So enough lecturing, and my apologies to Max and to all the other salonners
00:40:39 ►
who have taken issue with Mateo and myself over this issue.
00:40:43 ►
But as a dear friend of mine once said, we do know what we know.
00:40:48 ►
Enough said.
00:40:50 ►
Well, I’m going to have to cut this short today because I’ve fallen behind in preparing my new podcast channel,
00:40:56 ►
The Matrix Cast, which is where I’ll be playing some interviews, conversations, and lectures that I’ve collected,
00:41:02 ►
but which don’t quite fit in the mix here in the salon.
00:41:07 ►
Initially, I’ll only be producing one podcast a month under that banner,
00:41:11 ►
but in time I plan on picking up the tempo both there and here in the salon,
00:41:16 ►
because I’m suddenly being inundated with new material
00:41:20 ►
that I think you’re going to find very interesting.
00:41:22 ►
So now, when I’m cruising in the areas of philosophy and metaphysics, the psychedelic salon is where you’re going to find very interesting. So now, when I’m cruising in the areas of philosophy and metaphysics,
00:41:27 ►
the psychedelic salon is where you’re going to find me.
00:41:30 ►
And when I’m in a more down-to-earth mood, I’ll drift over to the Matrixcast,
00:41:34 ►
where the talk will be more about the physical world that we now find ourselves in.
00:41:39 ►
And by the way, the first program in that new Matrixcast series,
00:41:43 ►
which will begin tomorrow, November 22, 2007,
00:41:48 ►
well, it’ll feature a long conversation that Bruce Dahmer and I had one night last year.
00:41:53 ►
And should you venture over that way, I hope you’ll also find those podcasts interesting.
00:41:58 ►
Now, before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
00:42:03 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.
00:42:09 ►
And 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 psychedelicsalon.org.
00:42:19 ►
And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts, well, just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
00:42:27 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:42:32 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.