Program Notes
Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
Well, it sure is good to be back here in the salon once again.
00:00:28 ►
As you know, I’ve been away for two weeks while I traveled to the East Coast to visit part of my family.
00:00:35 ►
In one sense, the trip was a little surreal due to the hurricane that blew into the Texas coast the day after I left.
00:00:43 ►
As I flew from California to Florida,
00:00:45 ►
I could see the leading edge of Hurricane Ike begin to make its appearance.
00:00:50 ►
And since our family had lived in Galliston County, Texas,
00:00:53 ►
during the time I was practicing law in Houston,
00:00:55 ►
my oldest son and I watched the storm coverage on TV from Tampa together
00:00:59 ►
and saw that many of our old haunts had been completely swept away.
00:01:04 ►
and saw that many of our old haunts had been completely swept away.
00:01:10 ►
And just now I tried once again to reach Lefty of the Lefty’s Lounge podcast that are on dopebean.co.uk.
00:01:13 ►
I tried to reach him by phone, but it still wouldn’t connect.
00:01:16 ►
So I’m assuming that Lefty still may be without power, phone, gasoline, food,
00:01:22 ►
many of the other little things that make our lives comfortable.
00:01:24 ►
phone, gasoline, food, many of the other little things that make our lives comfortable.
00:01:31 ►
So, Lefty and everyone else on the Gulf Coast who is still in recovery mode from the storm,
00:01:34 ►
please don’t think that we’ve forgotten about you.
00:01:39 ►
And once you get back online, also please be sure to let us know if there’s anything we can do to help out.
00:01:45 ►
I would much rather send some hurricane aid to people I know than to give it to some big organization.
00:01:50 ►
Yet while the psychedelic salon isn’t a big organization,
00:01:54 ►
there are some fellow salonners who have sent us a financial donation to help offset the out-of-pocket expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:01:59 ►
And so right now, I’d like to personally thank Mitchell C., Andy H., Kennebus, and longtime salonner and contributor to the salon, Larry T.
00:02:10 ►
And by the way, Larry, I just heard KMO thanking you
00:02:13 ►
for sending a donation to his most excellent Sea Realm podcast as well.
00:02:18 ►
In fact, I’ve noticed that quite a few of the people who have donated to the salon
00:02:22 ►
have also helped support the work of fellow podcasters KMO and the Dope Fiend. And it’s truly an amazing little community that seems to be
00:02:31 ►
growing here in podcast land. And I have to admit that I feel as much at home and surrounded by
00:02:37 ►
family here in the salon as I do in the default world. So thank you one and all. And I particularly want to thank you. Thank you for
00:02:47 ►
spending some of your valuable time with us each week here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:02:52 ►
And I also want to mention EROCX1, whose Guyon Botanicals link is featured on our
00:02:58 ►
psychedelicsalon.org blog, because he was also the one who sent me a recording of the talk we’re about to hear in a couple of minutes.
00:03:06 ►
It’s a talk given by Robert Anton Wilson and was recorded sometime in the 1980s.
00:03:13 ►
Obviously, a lot of new information has come to us since then,
00:03:17 ►
which is actually the point of his talk, I guess.
00:03:20 ►
But nonetheless, his historical overview holds some very interesting clues
00:03:25 ►
to what may be just around the corner for us.
00:03:29 ►
I have to admit that for the first 20 minutes or so,
00:03:32 ►
I was thinking that maybe this talk wouldn’t be of much interest to many of our fellow salonners,
00:03:37 ►
but once he got up to speed, his junctiposition of ideas jolted me into some parts of my mind
00:03:44 ►
that I haven’t visited for a while,
00:03:47 ►
and I hope it has the same effect on you.
00:03:50 ►
Actually, what Raw, or Bob as he preferred to be called, has to say seems very appropriate to me
00:03:57 ►
in light of what’s going on in the world right now.
00:04:00 ►
For one thing, the financial foundation of the empire is finally beginning to see a few cracks,
00:04:06 ►
just as it did in ancient Rome when the squeezed-out middle class paid all their taxes for bigger and more destructive wars and got nothing back for it.
00:04:15 ►
You know, it’s a house of cards, and it’s coming down.
00:04:18 ►
I’m afraid that we’re probably too far gone to avoid repeating history, but if you study it, at least you might be able
00:04:25 ►
to find a way for you and your family to survive the collapse and eventual shift that seems
00:04:30 ►
so inevitable once you take a close look at how unsustainable the human way of life has
00:04:36 ►
become.
00:04:37 ►
But enough of my speculating.
00:04:40 ►
I’m just the carnival barker.
00:04:41 ►
So let’s all step into the big tent right now and listen to Robert Anton Wilson
00:04:46 ►
talk about the acceleration of knowledge.
00:04:52 ►
There’s an old Jewish story about a man who liked to play the violin.
00:04:58 ►
He had this habit, though.
00:04:59 ►
He kept playing the same note over and over.
00:05:02 ►
It amused him.
00:05:04 ►
Perhaps it gave him a deep ecstasy. But that
00:05:07 ►
was his shtick. He kept playing the same note over and over. His wife, like most wives,
00:05:13 ►
was tolerant. He played the same note over and over again. After several years, his wife
00:05:22 ►
finally got to the point where even her wifely patience was exhausted
00:05:27 ►
and she said to him max she said max max for god’s sake max other men who play the violin
00:05:35 ►
they don’t always play the same part of the string they play up and down the string and they play on
00:05:40 ►
all the strings they make melodies and they make counterpoint. They make sonatas.
00:05:51 ►
They make forms. Not the same note over and over. And Max looked up from playing his one note and he said, they’re looking for the place. I found it. I thought of Max last night in Boulder. Last night I had the wonderful compliment of having people watching around the church where I was speaking,
00:06:12 ►
protesting against me.
00:06:14 ►
It’s a wonderful feeling to think you’re important enough that people will protest against you.
00:06:20 ►
I took the leaflet they were giving out and they claimed I was a servant of Satan.
00:06:25 ►
And that’s a high compliment, too.
00:06:27 ►
I mean, that gives you a certain glamorous aura.
00:06:30 ►
Don’t you feel you’re getting your money’s worth if you think that maybe you’ve got an agent of the devil came here just to deceive you?
00:06:38 ►
I haven’t felt so good since May Brussel.
00:06:43 ►
Any of you heard of May Brussel, or is she strictly a Californian? Ah, of you heard of May Brussels or is she strictly a California?
00:06:46 ►
Ah, somebody’s heard of May Brussels.
00:06:48 ►
She’s the world’s leading authority
00:06:50 ►
on conspiracies.
00:06:52 ►
And she wrote in Conspiracy
00:06:54 ►
Digest that I was an agent of the
00:06:56 ►
Rockefeller conspiracy.
00:06:58 ►
And that’s
00:07:00 ►
not quite as good as being an agent of the devil,
00:07:02 ►
but it’s pretty good. I wrote
00:07:03 ►
in right away to the next issue confessing that it was true
00:07:07 ►
and my cellar is full of bars of Rockefeller gold stacked from the floor to the ceiling.
00:07:12 ►
I thought that would improve my credit rating.
00:07:18 ►
Actually, neither Satan nor the Rockefellers have been very eager to recruit me,
00:07:26 ►
and so I’m still pretty much on my own.
00:07:29 ►
As far as I know, the CIA has a term, useful idiot.
00:07:34 ►
That describes somebody who’s working for them and doesn’t know it.
00:07:38 ►
And I find it a very useful yoga to stop at least once a day and ask,
00:07:43 ►
Am I a useful idiot?
00:07:46 ►
You never know.
00:07:55 ►
Max, with his one note, reminded me of those chaps protesting in Boulder because they have one explanation of the universe, and it’s the final explanation, and it satisfies them. I call
00:08:01 ►
such types Johnny One Note types. After Max and his One Note and after the song
00:08:06 ►
Johnny One Note, recorded by Judy Garland some years ago. There are many One Note theories around.
00:08:15 ►
There’s the Marxist theory, which holds that the whole universe was explained when Marx published
00:08:20 ►
the last volume of Das Kapital in 1892. There’s the objectivist theory, which holds that everything was explained
00:08:28 ►
when Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged in the early 1950s.
00:08:33 ►
And then there’s the fundamentalist theory that everything was explained
00:08:39 ►
when the King James translation of the Bible was finished.
00:08:44 ►
What I am offering tonight is a slightly different
00:08:47 ►
perspective which holds that nothing has been explained yet in full and that our picture
00:08:52 ►
of the universe is constantly changing. Thailand is responsible for two of the major contributions
00:09:01 ►
to civilization. Everybody in an audience like this will know that the
00:09:06 ►
first is Thai sticks. I know what kind of audience turns up for my lectures. The other
00:09:18 ►
was bronze. Thailand happens to be rich in copper and tin, and so they were naturally the people who first melted copper and tin and produced bronze,
00:09:29 ►
and thereby they created the Bronze Age and what we mockingly or despairingly or satirically refer to as civilization,
00:09:39 ►
or as women’s liberationists call it, patriarchal civilization.
00:09:43 ►
as women’s liberationists call it, patriarchal civilization.
00:09:47 ►
The Thais, after they invented bronze,
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they also invented the Latine sail and the broad-ribbed ship,
00:09:57 ►
and they started sailing all over the Pacific and across the Indian Ocean, and eventually they brought the Bronze Age to the Middle East.
00:10:02 ►
And curiously enough, you’ll find, although there’s no clear picture of how
00:10:08 ►
this migrated from Thailand across the Indian Ocean and then jumped, you find on the western
00:10:16 ►
coast of Africa, you find the Berber people have Latin sails, just like the one the Thais have been using for the last 6,000 years.
00:10:26 ►
And you’ll find those Latin sails used on ships along the Gaelic-speaking area of western Spain
00:10:33 ►
and in Breton France, and in western Ireland also, in Connemara and Clare and the other western
00:10:42 ►
counties of Ireland, which may explain what William Butler Yeats meant when he said Ireland was part of Asia until the Battle of the Boyne.
00:10:50 ►
Then again, sometimes it’s impossible to explain what Yeats meant by anything.
00:10:54 ►
But the spread westward from Thailand of Bronze Age culture is what Alvin Toffler calls the first wave.
00:11:07 ►
Bronze Age culture was based on large-scale agricultural civilization,
00:11:12 ►
usually with a god-king at the top.
00:11:14 ►
The god-king was identified with the sun in most cases.
00:11:19 ►
And we find this pattern of large-scale agricultural civilization with a god-king at the top spread
00:11:25 ►
pretty rapidly across the world. From the time the Thais discovered bronze up until about the
00:11:32 ►
18th century, it was still spreading into other areas of the world. Then came the Industrial
00:11:38 ►
Revolution, which is what Toffler calls the second wave. But before I get to that, considering the spread of the first wave, Bronze Age civilization,
00:11:48 ►
large-scale agriculture across the world, by 1 AD, the center of this whole process was Rome.
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That is to say, Rome was the center in that Rome was the biggest empire of all the empires
00:12:01 ►
that had grown up from the beginning of the Bronze Age until 1 AD.
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There had never been an empire of that size up until that date.
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The Roman roads went damn near everywhere,
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and all the knowledge of the world found its way back to Rome and was processed there
00:12:17 ►
and then was transferred elsewhere where it was useful to the Roman Empire.
00:12:21 ►
So Rome was both the mercantile and intellectual center of
00:12:26 ►
the world in one a day and this brings us to the beginning of what I call the
00:12:31 ►
jumping Jesus phenomena as your chandelier a French statistician and
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economist did an analysis using information theory of how many
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scientific facts were known at each period of history
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and tried to find a pattern in it.
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He took all the knowledge possessed by the Roman Empire in 1 A.D.
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and took that as his fundamental unit and asked how long it took that to double.
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To make this more vivid and to popularize Anderle’s work, I have called that unit 1 Jesus,
00:13:04 ►
because generally in science a basic unit is
00:13:06 ►
named after a famous individual, like the Volt is named after Volta, the Farad is named after
00:13:12 ►
Faraday, the Om is named after Om, and so on. And so I call all the knowledge that the human race
00:13:19 ►
had accumulated up until 1 AD, most of which was being processed through Rome. I call it 1 Jesus.
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Now, how long did it take that to double?
00:13:29 ►
It took 1,500 years to double, according to Anderle.
00:13:32 ►
And by 1,500 AD, we had two Jesus of knowledge in the human intellectual order.
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At this point, the center had shifted from Rome to northern Italy
00:13:44 ►
to the large banking families like the Medicis
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and was centered around places like Florence.
00:13:50 ►
And the world had changed quite a bit.
00:13:53 ►
In 1 AD, starting from Thailand and moving gradually west to Rome and north to India and China,
00:14:02 ►
knowledge of what the world is made of
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had gotten as far as knowledge of nine chemical elements.
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The curious thing is they didn’t even know they knew nine chemical elements.
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They knew these elements, but they didn’t know they were elements.
00:14:15 ►
They thought there were only four elements.
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By 1500 A.D., they knew about 11 elements,
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but they still didn’t know they were elements,
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and they were still thinking in terms of four elements the pattern of movement of
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knowledge and wealth from east to west was still continuing the next doubling
00:14:35 ►
occurred by 1750 that only took 250 years the first doubling took 1500 years the second doubling took 250 years
00:14:46 ►
we had four Jesus in our intellectual storage by 1750 AD
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and by then there was no doubt the intellectual and mercantile center of the world was England
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London specifically and also the universities of London and Edinburgh
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and Trinity College Dublin and the universities of London and Edinburgh and Trinity College,
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Dublin, and the universities around the British Isles.
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That’s where all the knowledge was being processed.
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Everything eventually arrived there wherever it was being discovered.
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Most of the discoveries were being made there.
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The steam engine came out of the British Isles.
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Most of the new elements discovered between 1500 and 1750 were discovered in the British Isles,
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with a small smattering discovered in Finland and France and so on.
00:15:33 ►
Hardly any chemical elements were discovered in southern Europe after 1500,
00:15:38 ►
due to the activities of the Holy Inquisition, I believe.
00:15:42 ►
By 1750, the center of knowledge and power had moved to London, and England was a much
00:15:49 ►
bigger empire than Rome ever was. England was the first empire in history of which it could
00:15:54 ►
literally be said, as it was said, that on this empire the sun never sets. And knowledge having doubled in 250 years,
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where previously it had taken 1,500 years for knowledge to double,
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after 1750 there came a great upsurge of interest in the doubling of knowledge,
00:16:15 ►
the accumulation of knowledge, and the possibility of change.
00:16:18 ►
Up until 1750, hardly anybody had thought of change at all,
00:16:22 ►
except Heraclitus, who said everything flows and you can’t step in the same river twice.
00:16:30 ►
And a few other gnomic aphorisms like that.
00:16:34 ►
But after 1750, there was a great deal of speculation about the possibilities of change.
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There was so much speculation about the possibilities of change,
00:16:43 ►
that change started happening rapidly.
00:16:46 ►
Shortly after 1750, there was the American Revolution, followed by the French Revolution,
00:16:51 ►
followed by the first Mexican Revolution, followed by the Bolivar Revolutions all over South America,
00:16:58 ►
followed by the uprising of the United Irishmen in 1798.
00:17:02 ►
And the spirit of revolution was definitely in the air all over the western
00:17:07 ►
world. And as well, these political revolutions were occurring and monarchy was in the process
00:17:14 ►
of beginning to collapse. Another revolution was happening, the Industrial Revolution,
00:17:20 ►
ushered in by James Watts’ steam engine, which he created in 1765.
00:17:27 ►
A few years after that, Lavoisier discovered the correct definition of an element,
00:17:32 ►
and scientists got their thoughts clarified.
00:17:34 ►
They realized there weren’t four elements, but many,
00:17:38 ►
and they had a total knowledge of 19 elements at that point.
00:17:44 ►
By 1900, knowledge had doubled again. This time,
00:17:48 ►
it only took 150 years. So the first doubling took 1500 years to bring us to two Jesus. The
00:17:57 ►
second doubling took 250 years to bring us to four Jesus. The next doubling took 150 years to take us to eight Jesus. And the
00:18:07 ►
next doubling only took 50 years, and by 1950, we had 16 Jesus. So you see, the process was
00:18:13 ►
accelerating. Meanwhile, between 1750 and 1900, the tendency was for the, as knowledge doubled,
00:18:21 ►
for the center of knowledge and power to continue to move westward.
00:18:25 ►
In 1892, Brooks Adams, one of the first futurists,
00:18:30 ►
one of the first philosophers to attempt to think about the future scientifically,
00:18:34 ►
noted this westward movement of capital throughout history.
00:18:37 ►
He didn’t know about Thailand and the Bronze Age and that,
00:18:40 ►
but he noticed that capital from Babylon on had been moving eastward from Babylon to Egypt
00:18:46 ►
to Greece to Rome and up to London and so on. And he perceived in 1892, just before the next
00:18:55 ►
doubling ended in 1900, he perceived that knowledge and power were gradually migrating from London to
00:19:02 ►
New York and Boston, and he saw an American empire growing up to replace the English empire,
00:19:08 ►
which indeed has happened since then.
00:19:11 ►
He saw the shift of capital moving from London to New York,
00:19:15 ►
as indeed happened between 1900 and 1950.
00:19:20 ►
The British empire had pretty much collapsed by 1950,
00:19:23 ►
and the American empire was already in rambunctious existence all over the planet,
00:19:28 ►
just as Brooks Adams predicted.
00:19:31 ►
Now, the pattern is, to make it a little clearer,
00:19:36 ►
1502 Jesus, 254 Jesus, 158 Jesus, 5016 Jesus.
00:19:44 ►
Four Jesus, 158 Jesus, 50, 16 Jesus.
00:19:50 ►
The next doubling only took 10 years, and by 1960, we had 16 Jesus.
00:19:52 ►
By 1967, wait a minute, I’m loose.
00:19:52 ►
Wait a minute.
00:19:54 ►
Let’s start over again.
00:19:57 ►
Something went wrong with the figures there.
00:20:01 ►
The first doubling took 1,500 years to bring us to two Jesus. The second doubling took 250 years to bring us to four Jesus. The next doubling took 250 years to bring us to four Jesus. The next
00:20:05 ►
doubling took 150 years to bring us to eight. The next doubling took 50 years to bring us to 16.
00:20:11 ►
The next doubling took 10 to bring us to 32. The next doubling took seven years to bring us to 64.
00:20:20 ►
That was in 1967. And the next doubling only took six years.
00:20:28 ►
And by 1973, we had 128 Jesus.
00:20:34 ►
So this is a very rapidly jumping function, which is why I call it the jumping Jesus phenomenon.
00:20:47 ►
There hasn’t been any really detailed studies since Anderle to show how fast knowledge has been doubling since then, but it’s obvious that if you study the number of patents granted per year, the number of scientific papers
00:20:52 ►
published per year, that knowledge is doubling even faster.
00:20:56 ►
And with microprocessors and networking and so on, it’s doubling so rapidly that some
00:21:03 ►
have guessed that it’s doubling every year now. This
00:21:05 ►
has never happened before in history, but we’ve been building up to this all along.
00:21:10 ►
To look again at Toffler’s model, first there was the spread of agricultural civilization with
00:21:16 ►
god kings on top, which took millenniums to spread across the world from Thailand. And before it had
00:21:22 ►
entirely covered the world, by 1750, the Industrial Revolution was starting.
00:21:28 ►
And that just about spread all the way across the world
00:21:30 ►
in only hundreds of years instead of thousands of years.
00:21:33 ►
And that was pretty much complete,
00:21:36 ►
although it hadn’t reached the whole world,
00:21:37 ►
but it had reached most of the world by 1950.
00:21:41 ►
And then during the next doubling,
00:21:42 ►
between 1950 and 1960,
00:21:49 ►
the Industrial Revolution began to be replaced by what Toffler calls the third wave which is information civilization which is what we’re living in now.
00:21:54 ►
Now in the 1980s it’s getting more and more commonplace to say
00:21:57 ►
that we’re living in an information technology rather than a power technology.
00:22:01 ►
So we’ve gone from the agricultural revolution, which took millenniums,
00:22:07 ►
to the industrial revolution, which took centuries,
00:22:10 ►
to the information revolution, which is taking place in decades.
00:22:15 ►
So there is a definite acceleration in history.
00:22:19 ►
If you look back to earlier stages, you find that it took about 30,000 years to get from the appearance of Homo sapiens to the beginning of the Bronze Age in Thailand.
00:22:30 ►
And if you look back to our prototypes or progenitors, you find from the first hominid-type creatures in South Africa,
00:22:42 ►
I’m not referring to the present government there.
00:22:44 ►
I mean, I’m talking about an earlier brand of domesticated primate.
00:22:50 ►
The Australopithecines, it took 5 million years to get from the first Australopithecines to Homo sapiens,
00:22:58 ►
and it took 30,000 years to get from Homo sapiens to the Bronze Age,
00:23:03 ►
and only a couple of thousand years to get from that to the Industrial Revolution,
00:23:06 ►
and only a couple of hundred years to get from that to the Information Revolution.
00:23:10 ►
Or if you look at it on a bigger scale,
00:23:12 ►
it took approximately four billion years for revolution to get to the point
00:23:17 ►
where we had a Bronze Age and then an Industrial Revolution
00:23:21 ►
and now the Computer Revolution.
00:23:23 ►
If you put all this on a clock, if you take history on this planet is starting at midnight
00:23:29 ►
and you assume the life of the planet is 15 billion years, which is the estimated life
00:23:34 ►
of a G-type star, then it is now 8 o’clock in the morning and it’s time for us to wake
00:23:41 ►
up because we’ve pretty much been operating on autopilot up until now.
00:23:48 ►
And there are signs of planetary awakening.
00:23:52 ►
Domesticated primate psychology remains pretty much the same as it was in the Paleolithic,
00:23:59 ►
but one sees increasing evidences of mutations.
00:24:02 ►
There was only one Buddha 2,500 years ago.
00:24:05 ►
Now you meet five or ten Buddhas everywhere in every city you go to.
00:24:10 ►
If you go to Boulder, you’ll meet a few dozen of them.
00:24:16 ►
While civilization has been moving gradually westward
00:24:19 ►
and knowledge has been doubling,
00:24:21 ►
there have always been conflicts between the more westernmost part that’s rising
00:24:27 ►
and the more easterly part which has reached its peak and is ready to decline.
00:24:32 ►
This is the usual pattern of the great wars throughout history.
00:24:36 ►
They have been between a rising western power and a declining eastern power.
00:24:42 ►
And as a matter of fact, you find this on a mini-scale, too, if you look within
00:24:45 ►
American history. The big struggle at the end of the 19th century that involved the Western states
00:24:51 ►
versus the Eastern states was about free coinage of silver. Do they teach anything about that in
00:24:57 ►
universities at all these days? The free silver movement was based on the fact that a lot of silver was found in Colorado
00:25:05 ►
and I think some in New Mexico and a few other states around here.
00:25:11 ►
And a lot of the Westerners got the idea, if we could have free coinage of silver,
00:25:14 ►
then we wouldn’t have to borrow from the Eastern banks.
00:25:17 ►
We could have a silver-based currency, and then we wouldn’t be paying such enormous interest.
00:25:22 ►
And so there was a big movement for the free coinage of silver, and the eastern bankers objected to this on the grounds that they wanted to collect the
00:25:28 ►
maximum amount of interest. And the only way they could do that is if the currency was based on one
00:25:33 ►
metal only, on gold, and they maintained their monopoly on gold. That’s how William Jennings
00:25:39 ►
Bryan got to make that famous speech, of which everybody, however little they know about 19th century history,
00:25:46 ►
they’ve heard the closing line of it,
00:25:48 ►
you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
00:25:52 ►
You’ve all heard that?
00:25:54 ►
He was referring to the gold standard
00:25:56 ►
and the Western desire to have a double standard, including silver.
00:26:02 ►
That conflict between the Western and the Eastern United States
00:26:06 ►
has accelerated during the 20th century,
00:26:08 ►
and it’s the subject of Carl Oglesby’s book,
00:26:11 ►
The Yankee and Cowboy War,
00:26:13 ►
which traces the conflict between Western and Eastern interests
00:26:17 ►
throughout the 20th century
00:26:18 ►
and applies it to some of the mysterious questions of the 20th century,
00:26:22 ►
such as the Kennedy assassination,
00:26:25 ►
in which, under very mysterious circumstances, a representative of the eastern banking powers
00:26:30 ►
was abruptly replaced by a representative of the Texan oil interests,
00:26:36 ►
or the ignominious defeat of Richard Nixon after winning the most overwhelming landslide victory in American history until that date in 1972.
00:26:49 ►
Within a year and a half, Nixon was out of office in disgrace.
00:26:53 ►
Oglesby suggests that this was the Yankee revenge.
00:26:57 ►
Nixon was very much a cowboy candidate representing specifically California wealth.
00:27:03 ►
And the Yankees decided to dump him.
00:27:06 ►
So every single crime Nixon committed became public knowledge.
00:27:10 ►
There’s generally a tacit agreement among the powers that be.
00:27:13 ►
If you don’t expose me, I won’t expose you.
00:27:16 ►
But suddenly everybody was eager to leak to the press everything they had on Nixon,
00:27:20 ►
and he was pretty thoroughly disgraced and demolished. This Yankee and cowboy war is
00:27:29 ►
probably gradually being replaced as the two forces are going to be driven to combine against
00:27:36 ►
the rising threat that’s coming from Japan once again. The last time the threat came from Japan,
00:27:41 ►
it came in military form. Then the Japanese wrote pacifism
00:27:45 ►
in their constitution, and now they represent an economic threat. And there is this rising anxiety
00:27:51 ►
about Japanese efficiency and technology, and why do they do things so much cheaper and quicker and
00:27:57 ►
so on. And in fact, every part of the computer field in which the United States doesn’t lead,
00:28:03 ►
the Japanese do lead already. And in some parts parts the Japanese are leading more and more, and it looks like where
00:28:09 ►
America is in the lead, the Japanese are catching up.
00:28:12 ►
So it seems this west to east thing has gone all the way around the globe in the last 5,000
00:28:19 ►
years since the Bronze Age began.
00:28:22 ►
It’s not only gone all around the globe, it has more and more feedback incorporated
00:28:26 ►
into it. By the time the center of power had moved from Thailand to Rome, most of the knowledge
00:28:34 ►
from Rome wasn’t getting back to Thailand, let’s say, although some of it was getting
00:28:38 ►
back to China by way of the Silk Road, which went from Rome to North India and from North
00:28:42 ►
India to China, which explains a lot of the similarities between mystical traditions in China and Gnosticism in Rome.
00:28:50 ►
They were both being passed back and forth through northern India.
00:28:54 ►
But a lot of the Roman knowledge wasn’t getting back to Thailand,
00:28:59 ►
and by the time of the rise of the great Italian city-states around 1500, the Renaissance,
00:29:08 ►
that knowledge was not getting back as far as the Near East even.
00:29:15 ►
But as this process has accelerated, the more knowledge that’s accumulated in one place,
00:29:17 ►
the faster it gets around the whole world.
00:29:23 ►
Like TV, when I started high school, there were no TV sets outside of laboratories.
00:29:30 ►
By the time I graduated from high school, you couldn’t look over any American city without seeing a sea of TV aerials.
00:29:33 ►
A whole revolution had occurred in just four years.
00:29:37 ►
Something similar has been happening with computers in this decade.
00:29:40 ►
They’ve spread across the whole country with tremendous rapidity.
00:29:45 ►
But meanwhile, knowledge, wherever it’s discovered, is traveling over the whole world faster and faster. So the movement of knowledge and power from east to west over the last several
00:29:50 ►
thousand years has now become an oscillation in which the knowledge is circling the globe faster
00:29:56 ►
and faster, very palpably and physically in the form of the satellites up there, which are circling
00:30:02 ►
the globe and serving as the communication network of the emerging global brain. The average mammal is not a caribou. Caribous migrate over thousands
00:30:13 ►
of miles every year, but the average mammal looks more like a mouse or a hedgehog. Most mammals are
00:30:19 ►
quite small. They live less than 10 years and they never travel more than 10 miles from the place where they’re born. Most mice never get anywhere, never get more than a few miles from where they’re
00:30:30 ►
born. Most squirrels never go more than a few miles from where they’re born. Most human beings
00:30:35 ►
throughout history have lived about 30 years and have never gotten more than 10 miles from where
00:30:40 ►
they were born. There have always been exceptions. There are Phoenician carvings in Virginia.
00:30:47 ►
There’s a record of a Chinese philosopher
00:30:49 ►
who visited Athens at the time of Plato.
00:30:53 ►
There are those Latin sails
00:30:55 ►
that found their way from Thailand to Western Ireland.
00:30:58 ►
But by and large, most human beings throughout history
00:31:00 ►
haven’t got any further than 10 miles
00:31:02 ►
from where they were born.
00:31:04 ►
And they haven’t lived more than 30 years.
00:31:06 ►
At the time of the French Revolution, average life expectancy in Europe was 27 years.
00:31:12 ►
When Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in the middle of the 19th century,
00:31:17 ►
life expectancy among the working class was still under 40 years.
00:31:22 ►
It was 37 and a half years.
00:31:22 ►
was still under 40 years.
00:31:24 ►
It was 37 and a half years.
00:31:30 ►
By 1900, life expectancy for the middle classes in the United States was 50 years.
00:31:33 ►
It was still lower than that for the working classes.
00:31:36 ►
The latest estimate is that in the Western democracies, for all classes, due to welfare and the dole and Social Security and so on,
00:31:42 ►
for all classes it has averaged out to 72 and a half years.
00:31:47 ►
So we have been traveling further and further throughout history,
00:31:50 ►
and lifespan has been getting longer and longer,
00:31:53 ►
just as knowledge has been doubling more and more.
00:31:55 ►
The general pattern that emerges as one contemplates the structure in history
00:32:01 ►
is the pattern that Timothy Leary, with his great skill for Madison Avenue techniques,
00:32:06 ►
has put into the slogan SMILE, S-M-I squared L-E.
00:32:12 ►
That means space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension.
00:32:17 ►
We have been traveling further and further.
00:32:20 ►
Now we’re going into space, so space migration is the obvious next step.
00:32:24 ►
Now we’re going into space, so space migration is the obvious next step.
00:32:33 ►
And a recent poll in Europe showed that 90% of the children in grammar school in Europe expect to go into space when they grow up.
00:32:37 ►
I’m sure a similar poll in the United States would get the same result.
00:32:47 ►
I read recently that there isn’t a single hour of the day, of the 24 hours, in which there aren’t people looking at Star Trek somewhere on this planet,
00:32:54 ►
all you have to do is say, beam me down, Scotty, no matter where you are, and everybody knows what you’re referring to.
00:33:00 ►
All you have to do is make this gesture, and people say, live long and prosper in whatever language they’re speaking.
00:33:11 ►
A large part of our communication technology is already in space and the obvious next step is to put our industrial technology into space. For one thing, as Bucky Fuller pointed out, the nearest naturally occurring nuclear engine to us is 93 million miles away. That may give us a rough idea of nature’s system of organizing things.
00:33:29 ►
Nuclear energy should be 93 million miles from human beings. So the obvious thing is to put the
00:33:35 ►
nuclear plants into space around 93 million miles away. But a great deal of other technology can
00:33:43 ►
very profitably be moved into outer space.
00:33:47 ►
Robert Heinlein was the first one to suggest putting nuclear plants into space.
00:33:50 ►
That was back in the 1940s in a science fiction story called Blow Ups Happen,
00:33:56 ►
which is based on Murphy’s Law.
00:33:58 ►
Blow Ups Happen, so get them the hell away from us.
00:34:04 ►
Gerard O’Neill in the 1960s had his class at Princeton consider the question for the first time in terrestrial history,
00:34:11 ►
is the surface of a planet the best place for an advanced technology?
00:34:18 ►
And once the question was raised, the students began examining it and they all came to the same agreement.
00:34:28 ►
The more you examine it, the more obvious it is that an advanced technology does not belong on the surface of a planet.
00:34:31 ►
It is much more profitable to put it into outer space
00:34:34 ►
and it is much safer to put it into outer space too.
00:34:37 ►
G. Harry Stein of NASA has calculated that there are 10 to the 100th power
00:34:42 ►
industrial processes that can be done cheaper in outer space.
00:34:47 ►
So the communication satellites are out there now
00:34:50 ►
because they were the easiest things to put up and the quickest to make a profit.
00:34:54 ►
But the rest of technology is going to go into outer space too
00:34:57 ►
because it’s much cheaper to do things out there.
00:35:00 ►
You have very high-grade vacuum, and you can have any degree of gravity you want,
00:35:06 ►
depending on how you build your space station.
00:35:09 ►
You build a space station to spin in the proper way,
00:35:11 ►
you can have normal Earth gravity out at the perimeter,
00:35:13 ►
and you can have zero gravity in the middle and different degrees of gravity in between.
00:35:18 ►
And you can do all sorts of processes you can’t do in a gravity well like the Earth.
00:35:22 ►
And you can do most processes cheaper and more efficiently.
00:35:26 ►
Ten to the hundredth power industrial processes can be done cheaper and more efficiently in space.
00:35:31 ►
So technology is migrating into space, and people will be migrating along with it.
00:35:36 ►
First technologists, and then teachers, because there’s going to have to be schools for the technologist children,
00:35:42 ►
and then hospitals, and then doctors and nurses,
00:35:45 ►
and then entertainment will move out into space. I hope to be the first writer in residence
00:35:51 ►
on the L5 space colony. Only I don’t want it called L5. I want it called Proxmire.
00:35:59 ►
So the first generation of children born there can go around asking,
00:36:03 ►
why is this place called Proxmire?
00:36:07 ►
I got that idea from Ted Sturgeon.
00:36:11 ►
As for intelligence increase, throughout history,
00:36:17 ►
there’s been this general impression that stupidity was an incurable problem.
00:36:21 ►
Voltaire sort of summarized all thinking up until his time when he said that the only way to get an inkling of what mathematicians
00:36:26 ►
mean by infinity is to consider the extent of human stupidity. But that’s because he was
00:36:33 ►
considering religious history. If you look at political history, you find that the stupidity
00:36:39 ►
doesn’t tend to be quite so long-lasting. The general pattern is religious stupidity exists for millenniums, political stupidity exists for centuries, scientific stupidity
00:36:49 ►
exists only for generations before it gets cured. So there are different ratios
00:36:55 ►
of recovering from stupidity depending on what method you’re using. The
00:36:58 ►
theological method sort of guarantees that you can remain stupid indefinitely
00:37:02 ►
or until a major calamity forces
00:37:05 ►
a change. The political method allows you to remain stupid for many generations until
00:37:11 ►
you’ve antagonized enough of the world that they come in and sack your cities. And scientific
00:37:17 ►
stupidity only lasts until a generation is born bright enough to start asking basic questions again and not just following what the teacher tells them.
00:37:27 ►
The possibility of changing consciousness was discovered in the Orient 2,500 years ago at least.
00:37:35 ►
Probably it’s older than that.
00:37:37 ►
But techniques were discovered to quiet the mind, pacify the mind, remove emotional compulsions.
00:37:43 ►
And these were organized into the science of yoga.
00:37:46 ►
As John Lilly says, yoga is the science of the East, as science is the yoga of the West.
00:37:52 ►
Science is a yoga, too. Science is a way of trying to reach an objective level in which your emotional
00:37:58 ►
compulsions and prejudices aren’t twisting all the facts to fit in with your favorite reality tunnel.
00:38:03 ►
Judices aren’t twisting all the facts to fit in with your favorite reality tunnel.
00:38:06 ►
Science and yoga have a lot in common.
00:38:14 ►
The scientific worldview grew up in the West between 1500 and 1750,
00:38:17 ►
largely due to mystics who were known as hermeticists.
00:38:21 ►
And one of the key figures of that period was Giordano Bruno,
00:38:25 ►
who was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for, among other things, teaching the Copernican theory
00:38:29 ►
that the earth was not the center of the universe,
00:38:32 ►
but also on charges that he had organized secret societies
00:38:35 ►
to conspire to overthrow the Catholic Church.
00:38:39 ►
And there is some evidence that the secret societies Bruno founded
00:38:42 ►
are what have come down to us through various delusions as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. This
00:38:49 ►
Hermetic scientific revolution between 1500 and 1750 saw theology as its enemy
00:38:57 ►
and so and there was no conflict between hermeticism and science they were both
00:39:02 ►
based on experiment find out what happens
00:39:06 ►
if you do this, and they were both opposed to the authority of the church. Shortly after 1600,
00:39:13 ►
this began to split, and the hermetic tradition faded into the background, and we developed for
00:39:20 ►
the first time in history a science that had absolutely no connection with anything except pure reason.
00:39:26 ►
The Hermetic tradition was that there is no such thing as pure reason.
00:39:30 ►
You’ve got to first work on your own perceiving apparatus to correct your prejudices,
00:39:36 ►
and the scientist is not separate from what the scientist observes.
00:39:40 ►
And the general yogic attitude that you are the master who makes the grass green.
00:39:48 ►
Western science lost that insight, and from Newton onwards,
00:39:53 ►
we had the idea that it doesn’t matter who you are.
00:39:55 ►
If you follow scientific procedure, you’ll find the truth.
00:39:58 ►
This began to break down after 1900 due to Sigmund Freud,
00:40:03 ►
who pointed out that even scientists are human beings and may have neuroses
00:40:07 ►
and that scientific theories may be elaborate rationalizations for neuroses.
00:40:12 ►
And the influence of Karl Marx, who pointed out that no matter what you’re theorizing about,
00:40:17 ►
it’s a mirror of your economic status and what your economic goals are.
00:40:22 ►
And then anthropologists started coming back with reports about alternative
00:40:26 ►
reality tunnels, showing that no matter what reality tunnel you live in, the world will
00:40:30 ►
organize itself in your perceptions to be compatible with that reality tunnel.
00:40:36 ►
So science began to have data to look at science itself critically. This is what I think I squared
00:40:42 ►
really means. I don’t think Leary understands the full
00:40:46 ►
meaning of the symbol he created. I squared means intelligence looking at intelligence.
00:40:51 ►
That’s how intelligence increases, when intelligence looks at intelligence and
00:40:55 ►
criticizes intelligence. And so due to psychoanalysis and anthropology and Marxism
00:41:01 ►
and various other shocks, we got to the point where we could look at science and say,
00:41:05 ►
science is the product of people.
00:41:07 ►
People are doing this.
00:41:09 ►
And their prejudices are getting into it.
00:41:11 ►
And it’s not just enough to say, I will be objective.
00:41:14 ►
You’ve got to learn to change yourself from the inside out
00:41:16 ►
before you can even begin to approximate toward objectivity.
00:41:20 ►
How do you do that?
00:41:22 ►
Well, that was a hard one,
00:41:24 ►
and it took a while to begin to find answers to that.
00:41:27 ►
Wilhelm Reich pointed out that scientists can be so armored that they literally will not perceive what’s in front of them.
00:41:35 ►
Reich used as a motto in several of his books, what is hardest of all?
00:41:39 ►
That which seems easiest of all, to see what is in front of your nose. The big change overcame when Albert Hoffman went for a bicycle ride one day
00:41:50 ►
after experimenting with ergot derivatives.
00:41:54 ►
Ah, I see some people recognize St. Albert’s name.
00:41:59 ►
And Albert Hoffman, after accidentally ingesting LSD, went through a profound experience in 1942,
00:42:11 ►
which he did not put into words until 1982.
00:42:14 ►
It took him 40 years.
00:42:15 ►
Well, he was educated as a classical chemist with a classical scientific background
00:42:21 ►
and assumed that there was such a thing as an objective observer and so on.
00:42:26 ►
So it took him 40 years to figure out what LSD meant. And in 1982, he wrote an essay on the 40th
00:42:32 ►
anniversary of the discovery of LSD, in which he says, the main thing I have learned from LSD is
00:42:38 ►
that there is no objective reality separate from us. All there are are the realities that our nervous systems
00:42:45 ►
construct out of the signals they receive.
00:42:49 ►
This became obvious to others due to the things
00:42:53 ►
that were happening in quantum physics from 1900 on.
00:42:56 ►
In the doubling of knowledge between 1900 and 1950,
00:43:00 ►
physicists discovered that the atomic world is just not describable in terms of Aristotelian logic.
00:43:08 ►
For one thing, you can’t describe anything on the quantum level accurately
00:43:11 ►
unless you include the observer in your picture.
00:43:15 ►
So quantum physics turned out to be saying exactly the same thing
00:43:18 ►
that the psychedelic revolution was saying,
00:43:22 ►
that there is no objective reality separate from us.
00:43:25 ►
All we know is the reality that we are co-creators of, the reality perceived, conceived, created, put together by our nervous systems.
00:43:35 ►
At this point, it becomes obvious that intelligence can be raised, consciousness can be altered.
00:43:40 ►
Nothing is static.
00:43:42 ►
All we’ve got to do is learn how to change our nervous systems,
00:43:45 ►
nothing is static all we’ve got to do is learn how to change our nervous systems and we can go to wider and wider reality tunnels and bigger and bigger levels of perception and so on and so there
00:43:50 ►
was a great deal of drug research and a lot of people were getting a lot of radical ideas and
00:43:56 ►
so the government made it illegal which is the natural thing to do if you’re a politician the
00:44:01 ►
last thing you want is intelligence increase.
00:44:11 ►
So then some others started saying, well, okay, they won’t let us investigate drugs,
00:44:15 ►
but now that we know it’s possible to change consciousness, let’s see the other techniques that they will let us investigate. So they started investigating yoga with scientific
00:44:21 ►
equipment and discovering what goes on in the various yogic states.
00:44:29 ►
And pretty soon they know which type of brain waves are associated with which type of consciousness.
00:44:33 ►
And then the next step was to figure out how to change the brain waves.
00:44:35 ►
And so we had biofeedback.
00:44:44 ►
And then you could accelerate the yogic process by a factor of hundreds, where we could take seven years of traditional practice
00:44:47 ►
and traditional yoga to get to certain states.
00:44:49 ►
With biofeedback, you could do it in a few weeks.
00:44:52 ►
Now we’ve got to the state where we’ve got the Pulse Star,
00:44:56 ►
invented by Mike Hercules in Boulder,
00:44:58 ►
which uses biofeedback in reverse, so to speak.
00:45:01 ►
You attach Pulse Star to your head with the electrodes,
00:45:06 ►
turn it to the brainwave you want, and it adjusts your brainwaves to that level.
00:45:10 ►
So you can go into deep meditation in two seconds.
00:45:14 ►
It doesn’t even take a couple of weeks practice like biofeedback does.
00:45:19 ►
And then there have been researches in electrical brain stimulation.
00:45:22 ►
And then there have been researches in electrical brain stimulation.
00:45:32 ►
And meanwhile, there were researches in drugs the government hadn’t forbidden yet.
00:45:35 ►
And along came XTC.
00:45:40 ►
And psychiatrists all over the country were curing damn near everything with it.
00:45:42 ►
And there was wild enthusiasm. And the 60s started to be repeated all over again.
00:45:44 ►
So the government made that illegal too. it and there was wild enthusiasm and the 60s started to be repeated all over again so the
00:45:45 ►
government made that illegal too meanwhile we are learning uh more and more about how these
00:45:51 ►
various techniques work and different approaches to them there are flotation tanks in almost every
00:45:57 ►
large american city now on this tour i have seen flotation tanks virtually every place i have gone
00:46:03 ►
i’m sure there are lots of flotation tanks in Denver right now.
00:46:07 ►
Am I right?
00:46:09 ►
Yeah.
00:46:10 ►
And that hasn’t been made illegal yet.
00:46:18 ►
Nobody has made pranayama illegal yet because it would be impossible to enforce.
00:46:22 ►
You just have to read a book on yoga and learn how to breathe through alternative nostrils and you find you go into an entirely
00:46:28 ►
different consciousness state. Then you can go back to your ordinary consciousness, think about
00:46:32 ►
that state, then go back into that state and think about your ordinary consciousness and already
00:46:37 ►
you’re in I squared. You’re in intelligence, studying intelligence. You’re finding out how
00:46:42 ►
your nervous system works. So with each decade since the 1960s,
00:46:46 ►
we are moving more and more to the place where we can change our nervous systems,
00:46:51 ►
change reality tunnels, and make bigger and bigger reality tunnels.
00:46:56 ►
Once you look down at your reality tunnel,
00:46:58 ►
whether your reality tunnel is Ohio, Methodist, or New York, Jewish,
00:47:14 ►
Ohio Methodist, or New York Jewish, or Marin County Hippie, or Tokyo capitalist, then Buddhist, or Iranian Muslim fundamentalist.
00:47:21 ►
Once you get to the level where you’re outside your reality tunnel looking down at it, you can compare reality tunnels,
00:47:30 ►
and then you’re on a higher level of intelligence already because you’re no longer a conditioned mechanism just following the reality tunnel that was accidentally imprinted or conditioned and you can start choosing between reality tunnels you’re listening to the psychedelic
00:47:38 ►
salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a time. And how is your reality tunnel looking these days?
00:47:48 ►
Hopefully, you’re expanding it on a daily basis.
00:47:52 ►
Is your reality tunnel bricked in by work or by a church or by your family or school?
00:47:58 ►
Is your reality tunnel bigger than the city or nation you live in?
00:48:03 ►
Obviously, I don’t know the answer to those questions
00:48:05 ►
for everyone who joins us here in the Psychedelic Salon each week,
00:48:09 ►
but I do know that there are millions of people worldwide
00:48:12 ►
who are living quiet lives in which most of their friends,
00:48:16 ►
neighbors, and relatives are unaware that they are also actively supporting
00:48:21 ►
and in some cases participating in a rapidly growing psychedelic society.
00:48:27 ►
Maybe Terrence McKenna’s dream of an archaic revival is actually taking place.
00:48:32 ►
At least that’s my current fantasy.
00:48:34 ►
I did find it interesting that Wilson began by talking about change
00:48:39 ►
because those of us who are unfortunately being subjected to a constant barrage of hot air coming out of the mouths of politicians in panic, the word change seems to be used in almost every sentence.
00:48:53 ►
In fact, that seems to be about the only thing people in this country seem to agree on, that things have got to change.
00:49:06 ►
And I find that quite funny, actually, because the only thing we can count on, now or any time,
00:49:12 ►
is that the entire world has entered a period of now rapid and significant change.
00:49:16 ►
Only this time, instead of taking place over the course of a generation,
00:49:22 ►
we’re most likely going to experience this change in a relatively short period of time.
00:49:28 ►
Also, it was interesting to hear him talk about an economic threat from Japan,
00:49:31 ►
which at the time, of course, was well underway.
00:49:34 ►
If you were paying attention to the news back then,
00:49:38 ►
you frequently heard people worrying about the fact that the Japanese owned all of the major assets in the U.S.
00:49:41 ►
And yet today, it is the very thrifty Japanese householders
00:49:45 ►
who have been financing America’s spending spree.
00:49:49 ►
And, of course, now they’re also being aided by the Chinese government.
00:49:53 ►
What people still fail to recognize is that we’re all in this together on this little planet.
00:49:59 ►
And if we don’t soon wake up and realize this,
00:50:01 ►
our species may not have another millennium to go.
00:50:05 ►
So my message to the politicians all over the world is that they should take a couple
00:50:10 ►
days off, ingest four or five grams of psilocybe cubensis, and then wake up to
00:50:16 ►
the fact that we aren’t Americans or Japanese or Chinese or Africans or any
00:50:21 ►
other political being. We are human beings.
00:50:30 ►
And if we don’t start acting like an intelligent species very soon, we’re very soon going to go the way of 99% of all the other species that have tried their luck at surviving on
00:50:34 ►
Earth.
00:50:36 ►
And one final note that I feel compelled to make again, as I have on several other occasions,
00:50:41 ►
is that space migration for humans really isn’t practical.
00:50:45 ►
And rather than go into it once again here, I’ll just refer you to several of the podcasts
00:50:50 ►
that I’ve done with Bruce Dahmer, in which he goes into great detail about why promising
00:50:55 ►
moon bases and Mars colonies are simply promises that will never be kept.
00:51:01 ►
Now robots and other advanced technology, that’s another story.
00:51:07 ►
be kept. Now robots and other advanced technology, that’s another story. But the resources required to sustain even a single human body in space simply don’t justify putting people up there.
00:51:13 ►
Hey, we’re earth creatures. Let’s find better ways for the majority of us to live here on our
00:51:19 ►
home planet and not spend all of our cash just to keep a few specimens of our species alive in outer space.
00:51:26 ►
Manned space exploration just doesn’t make sense to me,
00:51:29 ►
at least not now when there are over 3,000 children who die of hunger every day.
00:51:35 ►
It just simply boggles the mind that we keep spending billions of dollars
00:51:40 ►
building bigger bombs and other weapon systems, yet we can’t even feed the poor among us.
00:51:42 ►
building bigger bombs and other weapon systems,
00:51:44 ►
yet we can’t even feed the poor among us.
00:51:48 ►
We may be a technologically advanced species,
00:51:52 ►
but I sure don’t see how anybody can call us an intelligent one.
00:51:54 ►
But enough of my ideas.
00:51:57 ►
What I’m more interested in are your ideas,
00:52:01 ►
particularly the ones that you’ve spent some time in formulating.
00:52:06 ►
Each month, it seems, I have to turn down a request or two to read and review a paper or a book that one of our fellow salonners has written. And it pains me to
00:52:12 ►
say no, because there’s so much of value being created by so many of us in the psychedelic
00:52:17 ►
community. And to remedy that, longtime salonner Dean Haddock has stepped up to the plate and
00:52:23 ►
made a rather remarkable offer,
00:52:25 ►
and that is to coordinate a little experiment that hopefully will grow into a valuable resource for our community.
00:52:33 ►
And so I’ll just read a little press release that Dean has prepared for this new idea.
00:52:40 ►
The Psychedelic Salon Quarterly publishes peer-reviewed articles on the subject of psychedelics,
00:52:45 ►
including thoughtful scientific, psychological, historical, and sociological works
00:52:51 ►
that for conventional or ethical reasons may not be accepted by mainstream publications.
00:52:58 ►
The PSQ aims to facilitate a thoughtful and scientific dialogue
00:53:01 ►
on the utility of psychedelic substances through legitimate research and experience. Thank you. the straight world? Well, then you can go to psq.criticalmath.com, and that is, instead of
00:53:47 ►
www, you use psq.criticalmath.com, and make a submission. And in time, I suspect there will be
00:53:58 ►
a call for reviewers and other forms of help that you may be able to provide for this little venture.
00:54:03 ►
and other forms of help that you may be able to provide for this little venture.
00:54:10 ►
And I guess I should also mention that current plans call for this to be a free online resource.
00:54:14 ►
So I’ll keep you posted as this evolves, and who knows, maybe the next Bob Wilson or Terrence McKenna will one day say that they were first published in the PSQ.
00:54:21 ►
Wouldn’t that be nice?
00:54:24 ►
Well, I can tell that I’m
00:54:25 ►
starting to drift off topic once again,
00:54:27 ►
and so I’ll just close this podcast
00:54:29 ►
by reminding you once again
00:54:31 ►
that this and all of the podcasts
00:54:33 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon
00:54:34 ►
are available for your use
00:54:36 ►
under the Creative Commons
00:54:37 ►
Attribution Non-Commercial
00:54:39 ►
ShareAlike 3.0 license.
00:54:41 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
00:54:42 ►
just click the Creative Commons link
00:54:44 ►
at the
00:54:45 ►
bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
00:54:50 ►
And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.
00:54:54 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends