Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The imagination is actually a kind of window onto realities not present.”
“If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane it’s paranoia.”
“Art is like the footprint of where the imagination has been.”
“Below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics, there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomenon. It raises the possibility then that the imagination is in fact a kind of organ of perception, not an organ of creative unfoldment, but actually an organ of perception. And that what is perceived in the imagination is that which is not local and never can be.”
“Who would have placed their bet on a monkey to be the top carnivore when there were saber toothed cats walking around that weighted 1100 pounds?”
“Imitation is an act of the imagination.”
“What is a city but a complete denial of nature? … Urbanization is the first of these impulses where society leaves nature and enters into its own private Idaho.”
“What this [virtual reality] should tell us, in the domain of light the intractability of matter is overcome. And so we are on the brink of a time, we have arrived, we are at the time where the human imagination now need meet no barriers to its intent. And so we are going to find out who we are. We are going to discover what it means to be human when there is no resistance to human will.”
“Shamanism didn’t use matter to build its realities. It was more sophisticated than that. It directly addressed the capacity of the human mind, in the presence of unusual neurochemicals, to produce unusual phenomenon and unusual sensoria of experience.”
“A true civilization lives in its own imagination and lives through its imagination.”
“We now know from the study of the introduction of media that if a medium of sufficient power and bandwidth is introduced into a population it will abandon all previous forms of media in favor of this.”
“Clearly we [humans] view the language-forming enterprise as a task not yet brought to completion.”
“The only difference between computers and drugs is that one is too large to swallow … and our best people are working on that very problem.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And today we are going to begin to hear some of the talks that have been sent in by some of our fellow salonners.
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As you know, a few weeks ago I mentioned that I was looking for some as-yet-unheard McKenna talks that haven’t been found on the net before.
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And the response has been quite good.
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In fact, I now have dozens of hours of Terrence McKenna workshops that I, for one, haven’t heard before. So today I’m going to begin to play some of that material.
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But first, I would like to thank Visionary Temple and longtime salon supporter Dharma Awakenings
00:01:00 ►
for their very generous donations to the salon.
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Your support is appreciated more than you can know, you guys. Thank you. to add a little sense to the world right now. Also, I want to thank Brian Pitkin,
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who sent me many, many hours of what for me is all new material.
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In fact, he sent so much that instead of giving it a pre-listen before podcasting it,
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I’m just going to listen along with you,
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and hopefully there will be ever more new ideas and combinations of thoughts that make Terrence’s workshop so interesting, even after you already know a lot of his rap.
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Now, from what I gather from this first tape that I’m about to play is that this workshop was held sometime in 1994 over a long weekend at Esalen Institute.
00:02:03 ►
You know that place.
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Those are the people who so very carelessly allowed Terrence McKenna’s entire archive.
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Rare books, papers, manuscripts, works in progress, everything.
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Everything was lost to fire due to the carelessness of the people to whom the archive was entrusted.
00:02:22 ►
But that’s another story.
00:02:26 ►
The intention of this workshop, apparently, was to focus on the human imagination, and I think Terrence does a good job introducing the subject. However,
00:02:32 ►
as you’ll hear in a moment, it didn’t take long for the participants in the workshop to
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begin to skew the lecture in an interesting variety of ways, so let’s join them now.
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an interesting variety of ways. So let’s join them now.
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I can’t imagine a domain of human endeavor that isn’t impacted by the imagination. I mean,
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teasing the imagination apart from the talking monkey is not an easy thing to do. Imagining ourselves without imagination is itself a paradox. And yet, you know,
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what is it? And why is it, if you take the view that biology does nothing in vain and evolutionary economics are incredibly spare, then why have this faculty that allows one to command and manipulate realities which do not exist.
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I mean, that’s, to my mind, the basic function of the imagination.
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Some people might argue and say,
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well, for most people the imagination is the coordination of mundane data.
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In other words, if I work this hard and if I have this much money, can I afford that car?
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To my mind, this is not putting great pressure on the human imagination.
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The human imagination, as I suppose it is almost an extension
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of the visual faculty
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imagination is something
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that one beholds
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something that takes
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people speak of castles in the air
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or something like that
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one idea that is worth entertaining
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because it is entertaining,
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not necessarily because it’s the truth,
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but is the idea that the imagination
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is actually a kind of window
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onto realities not present.
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In other words, it’s very clear from an evolutionary point of view
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that our body and our sensory perceptors
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are organized in such a way as to protect us,
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to warn of danger, to give you the muscles to respond to that
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danger when it comes.
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The imagination doesn’t seem to work quite like that.
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If the imagination runs riot in the dimension of the mundane, it’s paranoia. In other words, if you believe every cop on the corner is looking at you,
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every chance heard comment is about you,
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the imagination is, in that situation, pathological.
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It is taking the raw data of experience and giving it a maladaptive spin.
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So then, where is the imagination appropriate?
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And it seems that it is most appropriate in the domain of human creativity, that in fact separating art from imagination
00:06:30 ►
is simply the exercise of separating cause from effect. Art, sculpture, poetry, painting, dance, is like the footprint of where the imagination has been.
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And you know, the abstract expressionists, Pollock particularly, always insisted that a Pollock is not what the process is about.
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The process is about making a Pollock,
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being Pollock, the act of creation.
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What the rest of us are then left with is a husk, a tracing,
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something left behind which says, imagination was here, imagination
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acted in this place, and this is what is left. A very interesting
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thing that’s going on in physics at the moment is,
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and I don’t want to spend too much time on this because it’s slightly off-subject,
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although it certainly is fascinating,
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the great bridge between art and science that was supposedly built in the 20th century
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hinged on this thing called the uncertainty principle.
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hinged on this thing called the uncertainty principle.
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It was the idea that as you know more and more things about certain aspects of a system,
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an atomic system in this case,
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certain other parts of it lose focus
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and become less and less clear.
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For example, if you know velocity,
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you don’t know position. As you hone in on exact
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position, velocity becomes smeared out. And probably more ink and more breath-beating has
00:08:36 ►
been shed over this aspect of modern physics than any other. Now, to the great embarrassment of all the people who held workshops and
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wrote books and pontificated on this matter, it appears that this is what it
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always looked like, fuzzy and confused thinking, and that the Heisenberg
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uncertainty principle, or rather the Heisenberg formulation of the quantum theory, is now not to be preferred.
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The preferred understanding now is the version of quantum theory formulated by David Bohm.
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The difference between these two theories mathematically
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is precisely zero.
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There is no difference.
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But they make different assumptions.
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And the reason originally the Heisenberg formulation was preferred
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was because it was felt that this uncertainty principle,
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which was a hard swallow,
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was not as hard a swallow as a piece of baggage
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which the Bohm theory carried embedded in it.
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And that piece of baggage was called non-locality.
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The two theories produced identical mathematical descriptions of nature
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but one had this uncertainty principle in it
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the other had built into it non-locality
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non-locality is the idea that any two particles
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that have been associated with each other in the past
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retain across space and time a kind of connectivity
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such that if you change a physical aspect of one of these particles,
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the law of the conservation of parity
00:10:44 ►
will cause the other particle
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to also undergo a change
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at the exact same moment,
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even though they may by now
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be separated by millions of light years
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of space and time.
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This was thought to be so counterintuitive,
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so preposterous, that the Heisenberg uncertainty
00:11:07 ►
principle was chosen as the lesser of two evils.
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But it turns out, over the past ten years, experiments have been done in the laboratory, not thought experiments, actual apparatus experiments, which secure that non-locality actually is real.
00:11:32 ►
There is, below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics, there is this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter,
00:11:48 ►
of all phenomena. It raises the possibility then that the imagination is is in fact a kind of organ of perception,
00:12:06 ►
not an organ of creative unfoldment,
00:12:14 ►
but actually an organ of perception,
00:12:16 ►
and that what is perceived in the imagination
00:12:19 ►
is that which is not local and never can be.
00:12:27 ►
So I myself am up in the air about this,
00:12:33 ►
or as you get to know me better, you will see,
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I don’t feel the need to believe or disbelieve
00:12:39 ►
to proclaim this true or untrue.
00:12:43 ►
But it is useful at this stage for understanding our mental life.
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I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people and thinking about the origins of consciousness,
00:13:02 ►
consciousness and
00:13:07 ►
In one sense asking the question what is the imagination?
00:13:14 ►
Is a different way of asking the same question. What is the origin of consciousness?
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and as some of you know to
00:13:24 ►
Distraction I believe that psilocybin mushrooms played a role kick-starting human evolution.
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I don’t want to repeat all that here.
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It’s been taped many times. in nature, I think, the declension from the full-blown human imaginative capacity
00:13:52 ►
back into the organization of the animal mind.
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We can see the stages through which this must have unfolded.
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The interesting animal to look at in all of this for the moment
00:14:07 ►
are the top carnivores. This is not PC in a vegan environment, but a thought just
00:14:17 ►
has to lead you wherever it leads you. It’s very clear to me that top carnivores coordinate data in the environment very judiciously.
00:14:33 ►
Cows have very little to say about grass,
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but cats, hunting cats, have a great deal to say about their diet, because a top carnivore, to be successful, must, in a certain sense, think like its prey.
00:14:54 ►
And so at the very point of the emergence of these coordinated strategies held in the mind, there’s a paradox. The earliest consciousness is consciousness
00:15:08 ►
which apes other consciousness. In other words, the top carnivore that is most
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successful is the carnivore that can think most like a weasel or a groundhog
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or a rabbit, because this ability to think like the prey gives you a leg up on the prey.
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And if you’ve ever seen, not domestic cats, but small jungle hunting cats or jaguars or something like that,
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wars or something like that in the sudden presence of a chicken a hundred feet away or something they fall into a fit of imagining because they can almost
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taste it they probably can taste it and they fall into a strategic mode that is clearly an intense state of imagining, but it is
00:16:07 ►
triggered by the presence of the prey. What is interesting about human beings
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is we went one step beyond that. We, for reasons which don’t need to concern us here, acquired the ability to strategically suppose, not in the presence of the stimulus, but in fact, back in the back of the cave around the fire with our bellies full, telling tall tales.
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with our bellies full, telling tall tales.
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And it’s interesting that the imagination is the land of what if.
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And what if is almost like a statement
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in a computer language.
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If is a Boolean operator, if you know what I mean.
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If breaks the flow of the imagination.
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And I would submit to you, since we all are sitting here in monkey bodies,
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that it’s pretty clear that the stimulus for all this if-thinking comes in two forms.
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this if thinking comes in two forms, food and sex.
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In other words, we think about what we are going to eat,
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we construct our behavior along an if tree.
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If I go to the waterhole, if I take my sharpened arrows,
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if I lie in wait, if the gods favor me, I will bring down dinner.
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The sexual game is played the same way. If her mood is correct, if my gifts are found pleasing,
00:18:30 ►
then some wonderful thing will follow from all of this.
00:18:36 ►
So animals, I don’t think, think like this. They may think, but they don’t think like this.
00:18:41 ►
It seems to be a unique human ability that probably has to do with as
00:18:49 ►
I say in our case there were many different factors for example we became
00:18:56 ►
the top carnivore on the planet but who would have placed their bet on a monkey to be the top carnivore
00:19:07 ►
when there were saber-toothed cats walking around that weighed 1,100 pounds?
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How were we able to insinuate ourselves into a more powerful position
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than these enormously powerful animals that we once shared the earth with
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and that in fact we hunted to extinction
00:19:26 ►
it’s our destiny and our fate to have removed the so-called megafauna from this planet it
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is now generally agreed by paleontologists that the disappearance of the megafauna and the appearance of the human beings are linked in time. Well,
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we did this by imitating those carnivores, and imitation is an act of the imagination.
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We like, in our story about ourselves, to think of ourselves as bold hunters.
00:20:07 ►
But the evolutionary truth of the matter is probably that
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as the first wave of primate radiation into the grassland occurred,
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as the diet was in transition, we were scavengers of carrion.
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As the diet was in transition, we were scavengers of carrion.
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We were not noble hunters bringing down mighty animals.
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We followed along behind lions.
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Lion kills.
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There’s one school of evolutionary theory that believes this is why our olfactory senses are so diminished.
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Because, quite frankly, we had our face in rotten meat
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for a million years. And if that doesn’t dull your appetite for keen smells, nothing will.
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Least you despair, I’ll tell you that there’s a counter-theory no no we lost our sense of smell when we stood upright because it
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lifted our face off the ground
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in either case
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there seems to be the idea that
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when you get away from the olfactory
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action the
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energy to
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support the maintenance of that
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sense collapses
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for whatever reason we made our way to the brink of the imagination. In other
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words, I don’t think we require a deus ex machina to take ourselves to the position of being top
00:21:39 ►
carnivore on the planet. We have a mean throwing arm. you know you may notice no animal throws things
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the way we do other primates hurl excrement down on agonized explorers but fortunately
00:21:59 ►
not with great accuracy and anyway that particular material is rarely deadly anyway.
00:22:08 ►
But a human being, for example, a big league baseball pitcher,
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can, at 125 miles an hour, put a baseball across a 17-inch plate over and over again.
00:22:23 ►
One theory of the origin of consciousness wants to say
00:22:27 ►
that throwing something is an interesting action, activity, because
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though it may appear to be the same activity as digging grubs or scratching
00:22:41 ►
your ass or something like that. In fact, it requires coordination
00:22:47 ►
toward a future outcome that is highly mathematical. In other words, you may not
00:22:55 ►
think in numbers, but you must somehow sense the concept of trajectory, coordination of target and intent. And when you get all this up and running,
00:23:07 ►
according to some people, you have enough brain power left over to write the Fifth Symphony,
00:23:13 ►
invent quantum physics, and paint The Last Supper, if you like. This seems preposterous to me. I think that how the imagination got such a hold on us
00:23:29 ►
was that we accepted into our diet catalysts that we were unaware of
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that pushed our mental state around,
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specifically psychedelics of various sorts, and a reasonable working definition
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of psychedelics, what they do, whether you’re for it or against it, whether you think it
00:23:55 ►
triggers paranoia or ataraxia, they are catalysts for the imagination.
00:24:04 ►
They catalysize thought. Thought becomes more baroque. It reaches deeper into reality for data. It sees forms of connectivity that previously escaped it. It makes assumption, leaps of assumption, not always correct, but sometimes correct.
00:24:28 ►
So what it does is by, to some degree, transferring chaos into the mental world,
00:24:38 ►
it creates a much richer dynamic.
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richer dynamic.
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And so thought processes become more complicated. And in a sense, then, language becomes the behavior
00:24:56 ►
which expresses the imagination.
00:25:02 ►
It can be expressed in a limited form through dance, through gesture,
00:25:09 ►
and of course it can be expressed very well through painting. If you’ve reached the stage
00:25:15 ►
where you have painting and are not chipping rock or drawing in blood in the sand, or something like that, but if you have really a rich technology behind your artistic intent,
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but that rich technology would never have arisen
00:25:34 ►
without the intercession of language.
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And so these two things,
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which make us unique among nature’s productions on this planet,
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imagination and language seem to be almost like the exterior and interior manifestation of the same thing, the same phenomenon and what it is is it’s a facility with data an ability to connect
00:26:10 ►
it in novel ways for one’s own entertainment and amusement if nothing
00:26:19 ►
else storytelling is obviously this kind of activity where modules, a ghost, a princess, a lost kingdom, a disturbed father-son relationship, these modules are manipulated to entertain people. And, you know, it’s a cliché that there are only five stories.
00:26:46 ►
And I think Robert Graves in The White Goddess argued
00:26:49 ►
there’s only one story,
00:26:51 ►
and we keep telling variants of this story over and over again.
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Well, what history then is, or what culture is,
00:27:05 ►
is the phenomenon that attends the rise and spread of the imagination in the human species.
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But because the imagination works on this what-if model,
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it always tends toward idealism. In other words, it is
00:27:30 ►
not simply a networked process. It’s a networked process with a vector field. In
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other words, it’s going somewhere. It’s not just a random walk. It’s headed somewhere. We idealize.
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If you’re going to play the game, what if, most people who are psychologically healthy don’t
00:27:57 ►
sit around entertaining dire possibilities. What if I get a terrible disease? What if I’m run over by a truck? No, people say,
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what if I make a lot of money? What if I meet somebody who gives me a lot of money? And,
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you know, it begins to tend toward idealism. And we are obviously ruled by ideals and ideas.
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We haven’t found a good one yet,
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but we certainly have sacrificed a lot of blood and time
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in the process of discovering a whole bunch of bad ideas.
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And we haven’t lost our faith in ideas,
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even though human history is the record. Not one idea has survived from the distant past in its original form.
00:29:09 ►
some of the most pernicious ideas. I mean, the idea of man’s inherent flaw, that’s an old, old idea, and how much suffering has existed because of it. But culture
00:29:18 ►
then is the record of the human imagination. Well, that’s fine. That’s of interest to anthropologists
00:29:26 ►
and somebody else who knows.
00:29:28 ►
What gives the whole thing a lot of bite
00:29:31 ►
is that more and more
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the imagination is where we spend our time.
00:29:44 ►
You know, there’s a lot of talk these days about virtual reality,
00:29:49 ►
an immersive, state-of-the-art technology
00:29:53 ►
in which you put on goggles and special clothing
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or enter special environments,
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and then you are in artificial worlds created by computers,
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and this is thought to be very woo-woo and far out.
00:30:08 ►
But in fact, if you’re paying attention, we’ve been living inside virtual realities for about
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10,000 years. I mean, what is a city but a complete denial of nature and say, no, no,
00:30:27 ►
complete denial of nature and say, no, no, not trees, mud holes, waterfalls, and all that.
00:30:38 ►
Straight lines, laid out roads, class hierarchies reflected in local geography, meaning the rich people live here, surrounded by the not so rich people, all served by the poor people who are so glad they’re not the outcast people.
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So, you know, urbanization is essentially the first of these impulses where society
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leaves nature and enters into its own private Idaho.
00:31:12 ►
Idaho. And the growth of cities and the growth of the immediacy, I guess you would say, of the urban experience has been a constant of human evolution since
00:31:18 ►
urbanization began. Now the only difference that the new technologies offer is we are going to do this
00:31:29 ►
with light, not mortar, brick, steel, aluminum, and titanium, which are incredibly intractable
00:31:37 ►
materials. I mean, it’s amazing to me. We started with the toughest stuff.
00:31:43 ►
It’s amazing to me. We started with the toughest stuff.
00:31:51 ►
And, of course, it cost enormous amounts of human blood and treasure to work with such intractable materials.
00:31:54 ►
It’s always been amazing to me that the largest buildings human beings ever built
00:32:00 ►
are, in a sense, the first buildings human beings ever built, because the pyramids of Egypt
00:32:08 ►
are enormous, even by modern scale, and yet they were among the earliest buildings
00:32:16 ►
ever built. In virtual reality, the difference between a hundred-story building and a 10-story building is one zero.
00:32:28 ►
That’s all in a line of code.
00:32:30 ►
You specify 100 over 10, and you get a 100-story building instead of a 10-story building.
00:32:38 ►
What this should tell us is that in the domain of light,
00:32:44 ►
the intractability of matter is overcome.
00:32:48 ►
And so we are on the brink of a time, we have arrived, we are at the time where the human
00:32:58 ►
imagination now need meet no barriers to its intent.
00:33:06 ►
And so we are going to find out who we are.
00:33:11 ►
We are going to discover what it means to be human
00:33:18 ►
when there is no resistance to human will.
00:33:23 ►
Now, this is, I suppose,
00:33:25 ►
like a litmus test for paranoia.
00:33:28 ►
Is this going to be a nightmare
00:33:31 ►
of 24-hour-a-day
00:33:35 ►
sadomasochistic pornography?
00:33:38 ►
Or is it going to be,
00:33:41 ►
will we literally build heaven on earth? Knowing what I know about the human
00:33:48 ►
animal, I suspect it’ll be both and, because we’re not going to get everybody marching
00:33:55 ►
in the same direction on this, and one person’s hell is another person’s heaven. But the imagination,
00:34:09 ►
person’s heaven. But the imagination, which to this point has been a human faculty and the consol shamans who for the past 50 000 years have been
00:34:33 ►
essentially they leapt over the material phase of imagination engineering and went to nanotechnology 25, 30,000 years ago.
00:34:48 ►
By nanotechnology, I mean reliance on machines to achieve your goals,
00:34:55 ►
machines that are under one nanometer in size, smaller than a billionth of an inch.
00:35:01 ►
We don’t think of drug molecules as machines, but in fact they are machines,
00:35:10 ►
and they perform their work in the synapse like machines. So shamanism didn’t use matter
00:35:19 ►
to build its realities. It was more sophisticated than that. It directly addressed the capacity
00:35:28 ►
of the human mind in the presence of unusual neurochemicals to produce unusual phenomena
00:35:38 ►
and unusual sensoria of experience. Now what’s happening is these two strains of development,
00:35:49 ►
the let’s call it the pharmacological, nanotechnological, low-tech, natural, shamanic
00:35:58 ►
path, and the high-tech, material-manipulating, macro-physical technologies
00:36:07 ►
are encountering each other and meeting in the domain of the modern computer.
00:36:14 ►
And this is fascinating.
00:36:20 ►
The world is becoming more and more defined by the imagination.
00:36:26 ►
And those of us who are involved in creating this,
00:36:32 ►
I think have the feeling that it has a kind of built-in dynamic toward finality.
00:36:40 ►
In other words, this is not a process that can go on for hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of years. Because the human imagination is so endlessly self-transcending, whatever its most advanced creation of the moment is, it’s in the process of obviating and denying it and seeking to go beyond it.
00:37:06 ►
And, you know, I think it was Plato, I’m not sure he said it first,
00:37:09 ►
but said if God does not exist, human beings will create God.
00:37:16 ►
Well, I think the truth is they’re not even going to wait to find out.
00:37:20 ►
It’s easier to cut to the technical solution and sort the whole thing out later.
00:37:24 ►
And if the God we make and the God we find are in conflict with each other,
00:37:29 ►
they’ll just have to duke it out.
00:37:33 ►
Maybe they’ll marduke it out, I’m not sure.
00:37:40 ►
Because, you know, there’s a wonderful phrase in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries,
00:37:45 ►
a book by Mersilliad, where he’s talking about powered flight of all things,
00:37:52 ►
the Wright brothers.
00:37:53 ►
And he says, whatever we make of this as an engineering feat,
00:37:58 ►
it speaks volumes about the human psyche’s desire to transcend itself infinitely.
00:38:07 ►
And so, you know, in a sense,
00:38:09 ►
the powered flight is a psychological breakthrough
00:38:14 ►
because man flies.
00:38:17 ►
Well, then, spacecraft, we break beyond the embrace of gravity.
00:38:23 ►
And these technological breakthroughs are always presented
00:38:27 ►
in terms of overcoming some set of boundary constraints
00:38:31 ►
imposed by nature.
00:38:33 ►
And in virtual reality, all boundary constraints
00:38:38 ►
are overcome by nature, just as in the imagination.
00:38:43 ►
But the imagination metabolically sustained. In other words,
00:38:49 ►
you eat well, then you smoke a lot of hash, then you enter into an imaginative reality,
00:38:59 ►
but as metabolism ebbs and flows, as your food digests, as the drugs leave your system,
00:39:07 ►
this reality, whatever it is, falls to pieces and it’s washed away.
00:39:13 ►
But the reality, the virtual realities created in code are more enduring. They are, in fact,
00:39:21 ►
as enduring as the code maker. And so we’re beginning to talk in terms of dreams which don’t go away,
00:39:31 ►
worlds of the imagination which one can work on for months
00:39:35 ►
and then lead one’s critics through
00:39:38 ►
and collect their critiques and make the corrections
00:39:42 ►
and dot the I’s and cross the p’s according to
00:39:47 ►
the way one’s critics and friends think it should be done. And so what this means is
00:39:54 ►
somehow the imagination, always among the most private of domains, is like everything else under the impact of the new
00:40:06 ►
technologies being redefined so that there is no private and public
00:40:12 ►
distinction anymore so we are on the brink of losing in a sense a part of our
00:40:19 ►
individuality we are going to be able to build hallucinations and then walk through them
00:40:27 ►
and discuss them and edit them and re-edit them. And to this point, we’ve been doing psychology
00:40:39 ►
sort of like a blind man polishing a Cadillac in total darkness.
00:40:49 ►
You know, if you keep excellent notes and don’t lose your place, you form a kind of a notion of what a Cadillac must be.
00:40:55 ►
But what we’re about to do is just turn on the fluorescent lighting
00:40:59 ►
and look at the thing.
00:41:01 ►
And I don’t know what this will bring.
00:41:04 ►
I think it will redefine us. We are a great
00:41:07 ►
mystery to ourselves and to each other, but not in principle, only through limitations imposed by the
00:41:16 ►
physical body and limitations of technology. And so I think, you know, what our yearning for community, for collectivity, for telepathy, for universal human understanding is in a sense going to be self-fulfilled by simply opening up the imagination, not as a private dimension, but as a public and shared dimension.
00:41:47 ►
And this will be, I think, incredibly enriching and surprising.
00:41:53 ►
We are going to find out what the human critter really is,
00:41:59 ►
and what we are really capable of and I’m not afraid of this at all because I think
00:42:09 ►
well basically I’m a Platonist and Plato identified the good and the true and the
00:42:18 ►
beautiful as the same thing but notice it’s very hard to know what is good,
00:42:28 ►
and it’s quite difficult,
00:42:30 ►
even more difficult, to know what is true.
00:42:33 ►
But it is intuitively understood
00:42:37 ►
what is beautiful.
00:42:41 ►
So beauty is the easy way in.
00:42:44 ►
Beauty leads to the good and the truth
00:42:49 ►
and we are on the brink, I think
00:42:52 ►
of taking a stride toward beauty
00:42:55 ►
that is the greatest stride in that direction
00:43:00 ►
since the emergence of language in the human species
00:43:03 ►
and the emergence of language in the human species. And the emergence of language in the human species
00:43:05 ►
was the first shoe dropping in this enterprise.
00:43:11 ►
And the building of virtual realities
00:43:13 ►
that can be shared and critiqued and understood
00:43:16 ►
is the dropping of the second shoe.
00:43:20 ►
A true civilization lives in its own imagination and lives through its imagination. great deal of our inhumanity will simply fall away from us because it is not
00:43:48 ►
inherent it is the product of misapprehension misapprehension of each
00:43:54 ►
other’s goals and intent and aesthetic so I think that’s about all I have to say about that tonight.
00:44:06 ►
I get spun into it and I can’t stop.
00:44:09 ►
I don’t know whether I’m talking to yourself or to you or to me,
00:44:13 ►
but this is some of what we’ll talk about this weekend.
00:44:18 ►
This may be the longest single uninterrupted spiel you hear from me.
00:44:23 ►
As I said, these things are best
00:44:25 ►
driven when people inject their agenda into it. But these are the things I’m
00:44:31 ►
thinking about. History feels very risky to a lot of people. I think that it
00:44:38 ►
is risky, but it is because the stakes are so high.
00:44:50 ►
We really have an opportunity to transcend ourselves and to fulfill the human enterprise on this planet.
00:44:56 ►
And, you know, I’m so aware of the limitations of the people of the past,
00:45:06 ►
their agonies, their concerns.
00:45:10 ►
I mean, how many children died, were born stillborn?
00:45:14 ►
How many women died in childbirth?
00:45:17 ►
Nine times in the last five million years,
00:45:21 ►
the glaciers have ground south from the poles,
00:45:24 ►
pushing everything in their path.
00:45:26 ►
Those people didn’t drop the ball. The amount of human suffering and agony that has gone into
00:45:35 ►
carrying us to this moment of privilege and opportunity is incalculable and can only be redeemed
00:45:45 ►
if we bring this inherent human beauty into the world
00:45:51 ►
as spiritual food for ourselves and for the human community.
00:45:59 ►
Well, it’s very interesting.
00:46:02 ►
I’m working on a book now. A lot of it is about the subject of language.
00:46:09 ►
It’s a little hard to talk about it in English, because in English, the word language both means the general linguistic facility, and it also is heard as meaning speech.
00:46:29 ►
And as I looked into language and studied it,
00:46:33 ►
and studied what other people had said about it,
00:46:37 ►
there were some surprises.
00:46:41 ►
The first surprise is that the straight people in the field, what is taught in the academy, is that language is no more than 35,000 years old.
00:46:57 ►
This was astonishing to me.
00:47:08 ►
to me. I just, for some reason, my own intellectual biases, assumed that the conservative academic position would be that spoken language is old, because it seems so basically a part of us. How
00:47:16 ►
can it have arrived 35,000 years ago? That makes it something as artificial as a bicycle pump or a transistor radio. Well, the problem here
00:47:29 ►
is that this word language is misheard in English. So in writing it it’s even possible when you think of chemical
00:47:51 ►
communication that flowers and ants do it nature is knit together by communication which has rules, has syntax, and so is language. If you’ve ever stood in a
00:48:08 ►
rainforest or any species-dense environment, it’s alive with signals, with sounds, with odors
00:48:18 ►
that are carrying messages. These things are not just produced for aesthetic effect. They have intended hearers
00:48:28 ►
and so forth and so on. And language in human beings is old because we know that we evolved
00:48:39 ►
from pack hunting primates, socialized primates, that had, as we observe the behavior of primates alive in the world today,
00:48:50 ►
very complex repertoires of signals.
00:48:54 ►
Signals which mean dive for cover, an eagle is cruising the area,
00:49:00 ►
or here is food enough for a dozen of us and so forth.
00:49:06 ►
Complex pack signaling.
00:49:11 ►
What happened, and it was the greatest technological leap we’ve ever made,
00:49:22 ►
and in some ways the cleanest and the most astonishing. It’s almost
00:49:28 ►
like a resonance. Remember last night I mentioned how strange it was that the largest buildings
00:49:33 ►
people ever built were the first buildings they ever built. Well, the greatest technological technological revolution so far ever launched by human beings was in a sense this early one,
00:49:49 ►
I won’t call it the first because there was tool making before that, there was fire before that,
00:49:55 ►
but somewhere in Africa, no less than 40,000 years ago, And this means a time when human beings who look like you and I,
00:50:09 ►
maybe a little pigmentation differential, but basically people exactly like you and I
00:50:15 ►
had already radiated all over the planet. I mean, by 40,000 years ago, nobody argues
00:50:22 ►
that people weren’t everywhere. Recent finds in Australia have
00:50:27 ►
pushed back the date of aboriginal penetration into Australia to 120,000 years. And that’s not
00:50:36 ►
woo-woo. That’s Wollongong University Department of Archaeology stuff. 120,000 years. So people were all over the world. Well, did they
00:50:49 ►
communicate? They certainly did communicate. They communicated with dance, with gesture, and,
00:50:58 ►
leading back to your question, with music. They communicated in all kinds of ways. But we now know from the
00:51:11 ►
study of the introduction of media that if a medium of sufficient power and bandwidth is
00:51:21 ►
introduced into a population, it will abandon all previous forms of media in favor of
00:51:29 ►
this. We saw this in America after World War II when a print literate society within a decade
00:51:36 ►
became a television society. We are seeing it now where in the space of five years, the internet goes from being say what to indispensable for huge numbers of people.
00:51:52 ►
And that’s in the space of five years. experimenting with singing and chanting and sound
00:52:05 ►
was lifted out of their plane.
00:52:10 ►
In other words, they actually had a breakthrough in the imagination.
00:52:15 ►
And they said, how would it be if,
00:52:18 ►
this amazing word, the power of if,
00:52:21 ►
how would it be if we decided that a certain sound is
00:52:30 ►
associated with a certain thing? And let’s play a little game. Every time I
00:52:36 ►
make this sound, you think of this thing. And let’s make a little list. Let’s take
00:52:43 ►
five sounds and assign them to five common things.
00:52:47 ►
And now I’ll make the sound
00:52:49 ►
and you think the thing.
00:52:52 ►
Well, behind all this
00:52:55 ►
is the organizational architecture
00:52:59 ►
of the human organism,
00:53:01 ►
which onto a game such as that will effortlessly lay what is called
00:53:09 ►
syntax. And Chomsky and others have shown that this, that what is called the rules
00:53:17 ►
of transformational grammar or the deep structures of language are genetic. All languages, in order to be intelligible,
00:53:30 ►
have to obey these rules. The language which does not obey these rules is not a
00:53:36 ►
language, is not intelligible. So through a breakthrough in imagination, a kind, you know,
00:54:05 ►
the mother or the father of all media
00:54:09 ►
discovered utterance,
00:54:12 ►
and it was like an intellectual virus
00:54:16 ►
spreading through the population
00:54:19 ►
and moving as quickly as human beings could carry it
00:54:24 ►
because it was a superior form of media.
00:54:28 ►
Before, communication had been, I imagine,
00:54:32 ►
highly slanted toward emotional states
00:54:36 ►
and time-bounded states.
00:54:39 ►
You know, you go up to somebody,
00:54:40 ►
you take hold of them, you look at them,
00:54:43 ►
and they understand we’re either going hunting or
00:54:47 ►
we’re going to have sex, and it will be spelled out in just the next little while. That kind of
00:54:53 ►
thing. And this kind of communication was a sufficiently viscous social glue to hold small hunting gathering groups together. As society complexifies and spreads out
00:55:10 ►
through space and time, it either loses its coherency or it evolves methods of communication
00:55:19 ►
to keep it in touch with itself. I am not a linguist. I read a lot of this linguistic literature without
00:55:27 ►
really understanding it. But I know that the people who give their lives to this believe
00:55:34 ►
that they can extrapolate the rules of spoken language of the Indo-European, of modern European languages,
00:55:45 ►
to reason backward toward a language that was spoken 12,000 to 10,000 years ago
00:55:53 ►
called Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European.
00:56:00 ►
And this was thought to be the great achievement of linguistics as of 15 or 20 years ago.
00:56:07 ►
Now a new generation of people have pushed it further back.
00:56:12 ►
There is a language called Norstratic that was spoken on the Anatolian Plateau and across Southern Europe 15,000 to 25,000 years ago.
00:56:24 ►
15,000 to 25,000 years ago.
00:56:28 ►
And now people like Shavroshkin at Stanford,
00:56:32 ►
and this was all done by Russians, by the way.
00:56:35 ►
The Russians hold the high ground in linguistics. It was the Russians, it was Russian insights
00:56:39 ►
that cracked the Mayan language too.
00:56:43 ►
But Shavroshkin and his people are now talking about a language called
00:56:48 ►
Old World. And Old World is the first language ever spoken on this planet by higher primates.
00:56:57 ►
Beyond Old World, there is inarticulate silence. And Old World is a 35,000 year old language. How can we
00:57:09 ►
know such things? You have to push into the linguistic literature and you’re a
00:57:14 ►
better man than I am, Gangadin, but there are websites you can hear what it sounded like
00:57:26 ►
and sounds like a bunch of really primitive people.
00:57:34 ►
How do we know that we’ve really evolved
00:57:37 ►
with this language?
00:57:38 ►
Well, a funny, this is an interesting area.
00:57:43 ►
You know, one of my sub-themes is novelty,
00:57:47 ►
and that supposedly reality becomes more novel
00:57:51 ►
as we approach the present.
00:57:53 ►
And this is certainly true of biology
00:57:55 ►
and many, many phenomena.
00:57:58 ►
But there is an important exception, so I’m told.
00:58:02 ►
I’m not yet entirely convinced of this,
00:58:04 ►
but convinced enough to pass it on.
00:58:07 ►
And that is, though this obviously contains a paradox, languages seem to be more complicated as you go back in time.
00:58:24 ►
structurally and in number of words.
00:58:26 ►
So that, for instance,
00:58:33 ►
Old English is considerably richer in certain areas than modern English.
00:58:37 ►
Now, I say probably what’s happening is
00:58:40 ►
the technical vocabularies are keeping the boat
00:58:43 ►
roughly at equilibrium.
00:58:47 ►
But, you know, for every widget word,
00:58:52 ►
a word describing some subset of our technology,
00:58:56 ►
if we’re losing words that indicate emotional nuances
00:59:01 ►
or nuances of rapport and understanding, then the language is being impoverished.
00:59:11 ►
Most scholars of English believe that Shakespeare caught the wave. Shakespeare is not only a
00:59:18 ►
phenomenon of immense human genius focused in one person, but it’s also a moment of incredible linguistic richness and opportunity
00:59:30 ►
that didn’t exist 200 years before and didn’t survive 200 years after.
00:59:38 ►
Well, but as I lay in the tubs at Esalen,
00:59:46 ►
a vast vocabulary of subtle gradients
00:59:50 ►
of interpersonal states of angst, longing,
00:59:54 ►
need, rejection, triumph, and defeat
00:59:58 ►
are passed in front of me.
01:00:00 ►
And frankly, I’d rather read my manual on my hard disk sometimes
01:00:12 ►
but I’m a tough nut to crack but this does lead on to an aspect of all this
01:00:22 ►
that I wanted to talk about which is language language is, I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard it said, it’s a double-edged sword because it liberates as it enslaves.
01:00:34 ►
All clarity is achieved by the sacrifice of true identity.
01:00:49 ►
sacrifice of true identity. You know, the world is actually a messy and difficult to articulate place, and if you can make it all seem very simple and smooth
01:00:54 ►
running, then you’re a speak, I already lie.
01:01:09 ►
Yes, well, one group of linguists suggests probably the big impulse producing language originally
01:01:13 ►
was the wish to lie.
01:01:17 ►
I said, if only I could deceive people more.
01:01:23 ►
deceive people more.
01:01:33 ►
And I always, you know, along this line, the wonderful thing which Winston Churchill said at the height of World War II, he said, truth is so precious that she must always be accompanied
01:01:42 ►
by a bodyguard of lies.
01:01:48 ►
That’s an interesting point of view.
01:01:52 ►
The truth is not something you trot out and show everybody,
01:01:58 ►
that you surround truth with lies so that only the discerning,
01:02:05 ►
you know, we simple, straightforward, plain dealers don’t think like that.
01:02:10 ►
But believe me, you get with an Amazonian shaman or someone like that,
01:02:15 ►
he is not operating under a strong moral obligation to tell you the truth,
01:02:20 ►
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as quickly as he possibly can.
01:02:27 ►
No, it’s all about leading you this way leading you this way and then dropping you and watching you wiggle and then leading you another way. And eventually, because truth is guarded, this is,
01:02:36 ►
in our society, the commodification of information has made it something that you want to deliver with maximum punch to its target audience as fast as possible
01:02:47 ►
and cash the check and get out.
01:02:50 ►
But that is not traditionally how it’s done.
01:02:55 ►
But that’s not what I mean by…
01:02:57 ►
Well, it divides the seamlessness of reality
01:03:01 ►
into the articulated and the unarticulated.
01:03:05 ►
You know, Trumbull Stickney, who’s not exactly a household name,
01:03:10 ►
was one of those poets who died in the trenches of World War I,
01:03:16 ►
the golden generation.
01:03:18 ►
And he wrote a poem called Meaning’s Edge.
01:03:22 ►
And he said in that poem,
01:03:28 ►
I do not understand you, tis because I lean over your meaning’s edge and feel the dizziness of the things
01:03:36 ►
that you have not said and it’s that the dizziness of things unsaid that always surrounds the enterprise of communication, especially spoken language.
01:03:52 ►
Now, to go back to this thing about the evolution of language and technology, and are we getting better or worse at it, communication,
01:04:10 ►
at it, communication. I discern, at least, from the simply the idea of colorful and
01:04:29 ►
rich speech, which was all we had for a long time, gives way in the early 19th
01:04:35 ►
century to photography. And it’s still and it’s black and white, but immediately
01:04:42 ►
the people who invent it can think of nothing but color and
01:04:46 ►
motion. And by 1900, they’ve got that under control. And then there’s stuff like stereophonic
01:04:54 ►
sound and on and on. Clearly, we view the language forming enterprise as a task not yet brought to completion.
01:05:06 ►
One of the things that seems to always come up in these things
01:05:09 ►
is the fact that so-called primitive or aboriginal or preliterate people
01:05:16 ►
using psychedelic plants that melt local cultural conditioning seem to access a place where language is much more a visual enterprise.
01:05:34 ►
Ayahuasca circles sing, but the singing is critiqued as though it were pictorial activity.
01:05:48 ►
In other words, after the shaman stops singing,
01:05:49 ►
you hear people saying,
01:05:52 ►
I like the part with the orange spots, but I thought the olive drab magenta section was self-indulgent,
01:05:57 ►
or something like that.
01:06:00 ►
And you’re thinking, you know, this is a critique of a song.
01:06:04 ►
No, the song is the sound, is the carrier. The acoustical wave is no longer in the lot of people think that somewhere in the human future lies
01:06:27 ►
telepathy, and it’s usually imagined as, you hear what I think, a kind of extension of what we have.
01:06:39 ►
But I think it’s more likely to develop along the lines of you see what I mean. In other words, we add
01:06:48 ►
dimensionality to language, and we then can walk around in it. I touched on some of this
01:06:55 ►
last night with the virtual reality, because virtual reality in the service of the ideals that I’m interested in would become
01:07:07 ►
a technology for showing each other the contents of our imagination with less ambiguity than we
01:07:15 ►
have ever had before. Yeah. Well, I suppose every technology has created more opportunity for deception. You can’t have complex illusionistic
01:07:29 ►
realities unless you work in pictorial space. Yes, I don’t think these technologies will reform
01:07:37 ►
the human character. Also, I’m not sure, subterfuge is a major part of art. It certainly is a major part
01:07:49 ►
of leisure domain. Every sentence is essentially a conjuration. And, you know, the hat of constructive syntax. So you cannot have truth
01:08:09 ►
unless you allow for the possibility of error.
01:08:14 ►
You know, this is the point that illuminates
01:08:17 ►
why predestination is a waste of time.
01:08:22 ►
Predestination is the idea that the universe is a kind of film, and it’s running,
01:08:29 ►
and it’s all determined how it’s going to come out, and there’s nothing anybody or anything
01:08:33 ►
can do to affect it. God created it, and it’s unfolding. Well, the thing that makes predestination theory worthless, in my estimation, is notice that if that’s true, then you think what you think because you can’t think anything else.
01:08:57 ►
And that puts the enterprise of seeking truth in a preposterous position.
01:09:02 ►
In order to seek truth, one must have the option of screwing up,
01:09:07 ►
and then it’s the dichotomy between the screwing up and the finding truth that creates the sense
01:09:15 ►
of dynamic existential completion. Well, this is now you’re at the cutting edge.
01:09:27 ►
I mean, yes, yes, and yes.
01:09:30 ►
Sound is the fourth dimension.
01:09:34 ►
Sound is a very effective way for transducing energy into the body.
01:09:40 ►
The body is virtually transparent to sound.
01:09:48 ►
the body. The body is virtually transparent to sound. The mushroom said to me once,
01:10:02 ►
apropos of absolutely nothing, it said, what you call man, we call time. And time and metabolism. Metabolism is permitted by time,
01:10:08 ►
and somehow time is caused by metabolism.
01:10:13 ►
And then sound is in there as an energy transducer.
01:10:19 ►
And yes, I think a future technology of sound probably will cure disease and set people right.
01:10:31 ►
All this business that goes on in shamanism with blowing on the body and projecting sound into the body,
01:10:39 ►
obviously some of it is misunderstood and marginal and showmanship,
01:10:49 ►
some of it is misunderstood and marginal and showmanship, but at the core, sound is, I think, not yet been given its complete role in all of this.
01:10:57 ►
The fact that you can see sound under certain conditions, you know, there’s a phenomenon called sonoluminescence
01:11:07 ►
that creates temperatures 20 times greater
01:11:12 ►
than the surface of the sun.
01:11:14 ►
This is done in a test tube
01:11:16 ►
by simply using acoustical waves and bubbling fluid
01:11:21 ►
to collapse and create extremely brief high pressure states.
01:11:28 ►
So it’s sonoluminescence. There’s a website you can visit. Isn’t there always? Yeah, yeah, Al.
01:11:36 ►
Are you seeing a catalyst?
01:11:41 ►
Well, I guess what I’m sort of saying is that once you have the concept of nanotechnology,
01:11:48 ►
then you see that drugs and prosthesis or computers or tools are categorically migrating
01:11:58 ►
toward each other.
01:11:59 ►
You’ve probably heard me say, you know, the only difference between computers and drugs is
01:12:05 ►
that one is too large to swallow. And our best people are working on that
01:12:12 ►
very problem. So yeah, I think that from the middle of the 19th century on,
01:12:26 ►
without really much drugs to help them along,
01:12:30 ►
I mean, a little ether, a little hashish,
01:12:33 ►
poets and artists in Europe were obsessed with synesthesia.
01:12:40 ►
There’s a wonderful New Yorker cartoon,
01:12:42 ►
maybe some of you saw it,
01:12:47 ►
a bunch of guys in suits are sitting around what is obviously a corporate boardroom, and in the background there’s a profit
01:12:53 ►
and loss chart, and it’s clearly headed into hell, and the chairman of the board is saying to a small
01:13:01 ►
smiling man sitting at the other end of the table, you’re right, Higgins, a deliberate disordering of the senses worked for Rimbaud,
01:13:10 ►
but would it work for us?
01:13:16 ►
So this is a reference to a symbolist poet of the 19th century, and the belief that we need to erase the boundaries
01:13:28 ►
between the senses and create a synesthetic, a hallucinogenic, a psychedelic, if you will,
01:13:36 ►
reality. I mean, the late 19th century, the pre-Raphaelites, the Jugendstil impulse,
01:13:42 ►
that was all like, you know, they could smell psychedelics in the air of the future.
01:13:47 ►
They couldn’t quite get high,
01:13:48 ►
but they were definitely bird-dogging in the right direction.
01:13:53 ►
So, yeah, the trick,
01:13:56 ►
if we’re going to design our own states of mind,
01:14:01 ►
is to make sure that we don’t dump the baby out with the bathwater. We want the net
01:14:08 ►
to be as haunted as possible. We don’t want to lose its atavistic connections back into the
01:14:16 ►
darker resources, recesses and resources, of the unconscious. That’s why Bill Gibson’s novel Neuromancer
01:14:27 ►
is so prescient,
01:14:30 ►
because here it is, this super technological fantasy.
01:14:33 ►
But at the center of the net,
01:14:36 ►
the gods of voodoo are reappearing.
01:14:41 ►
And I came to the realization,
01:14:44 ►
thinking about the internet
01:14:47 ►
you know the other is within us when the other finally if it ever comes into full
01:14:58 ►
manifestation it won’t come in mile-wide ships of titanium that position themselves over the secretariat building of the UN. It won’t come like that. It will come out of human hands and human dreams. It will be fully other. I’m not copping out here. It will be fully other, but it can only be built through us.
01:15:27 ►
This addresses what I was beginning to get at last night when I talked about non-local
01:15:33 ►
information. The alien is real, but the alien is not here in the stupid sense.
01:15:45 ►
The alien can only manifest itself through us.
01:15:52 ►
But this probably means that given a sufficiently resilient technology,
01:15:58 ►
it can manifest completely through us.
01:16:03 ►
So, in a sense, the internet is a kind of landing pad.
01:16:10 ►
There has always been in our fantasies of extraterrestrial contact the notion of the pad
01:16:18 ►
which has to be built for them. And people claim it’s the Nazca lines and all, you know, it’s an archetype,
01:16:26 ►
the idea of the prepared space that awaits the arrival of the other. But now, because of the
01:16:35 ►
nature of the internet, because you can’t see who’s coding, you can almost imagine that we’re calling the thing forth. And I think it will probably appear as a website.
01:16:49 ►
And, you know, when it’s sorted out,
01:16:53 ►
you’ll realize, my God,
01:16:55 ►
01:17:02 ►
is really coming from Zeta Reticuli,
01:17:05 ►
but through virtual, through non-local,
01:17:10 ►
Balmian space.
01:17:12 ►
Yeah.
01:17:14 ►
It’s totally separate in the sense
01:17:17 ►
that it is somewhere else in the universe
01:17:20 ►
and evolving completely along its own lines
01:17:24 ►
and not in any way under our control.
01:17:28 ►
But then you turn the coin over and the division between it and us is completely seamless because
01:17:36 ►
of the non-local nature of information. In other words, this is an incredibly empowering idea, if true. I mean, it will make a
01:17:48 ►
revolution in psychology that few people have yet even sensed coming. What we’re talking about here
01:17:55 ►
is putting the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious, first expanding it to the size of the cosmos, and then showing with physics exactly how the trick is done.
01:18:09 ►
So we are not separate from any play.
01:18:16 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:18:22 ►
are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:18:28 ►
Although I had heard him say it before,
01:18:32 ►
I have to admit that I just love hearing Terrence say,
01:18:35 ►
the only difference between computers and drugs is that one of them is too large to swallow.
01:18:38 ►
And our best people are working on that very problem.
01:18:43 ►
Back in 1994, that probably seemed like just a lot of hyperbole. Thank you. reality. But I’ll leave that for some of my fellow podcasters to pick up on the thread and see where
01:19:06 ►
that one leads. Now I just have to insert a little geek moment here to let you know that when Terrence
01:19:13 ►
mentioned Trumbull Strickney just a little while back, I had to go to Wikipedia and look him up
01:19:18 ►
just because I thought he had such a cool name. And my geek moment here is to let you know that Terrence’s information about
01:19:26 ►
Stickney’s death was a little off. You see, like Terrence, he too died of a brain tumor.
01:19:34 ►
But it was in 1904, and that was about a decade before the war where Terrence thought he died,
01:19:40 ►
at least if Wikipedia is to be believed. But that’s an interesting coincidence, don’t you think?
01:19:46 ►
But what about Terence’s memory, though?
01:19:49 ►
I’d never even heard of Stickney before,
01:19:51 ►
yet Terence, without the aid of today’s Internet, had even read Stickney’s poetry.
01:19:57 ►
Just think of the memory recall powers of McKenna.
01:20:01 ►
To pull such an obscure name out just like that, well,
01:20:04 ►
that was one of the reasons it
01:20:05 ►
was so fun to watch Terrence perform his poetic philosophy rap. He was always coming out of left
01:20:11 ►
field with something like that. And to pull out close to the exact lines of such an obscure poem
01:20:18 ►
really blows me away. And by the way, I’ll save my fellow geeks a little time googling that poem and read the exact lines for you.
01:20:28 ►
And they are,
01:20:30 ►
I cannot understand you, tis because you lean over my meaning’s edge and feel a dizziness of the things I have not said.
01:20:41 ►
Which carries a little different meaning from the way Terrence recited it, but to tell you the truth, I’ve never been very good with poetry
01:20:49 ►
and I can’t honestly say that I get what he’s saying
01:20:53 ►
so I guess I’ll just have to go along with Terrence’s explanation
01:20:56 ►
and maybe we’ll be hearing more along these lines
01:20:59 ►
when we continue listening to the recordings of this workshop
01:21:02 ►
if the remaining tapes are anything like the first two that we just listened to now,
01:21:07 ►
it means that we still have five more episodes in this series.
01:21:12 ►
Right now, it’s my intention to podcast all of those in succession,
01:21:15 ►
but next week I leave on a 10-day trip, and so everything is subject to change.
01:21:21 ►
But since it’s going to be difficult to work in a couple of podcasts during that time, Thank you. talks by some other psychedelic luminaries that I’ve been told are winging their ways to me.
01:21:46 ►
So with a little luck, there will be a surprise or two coming your way,
01:21:50 ►
at least between now and the end of the year. There is one more thing I want to mention yet
01:21:55 ►
today, however, and that is to read part of an email that I received from fellow salonner Bob C.,
01:22:02 ►
who said in part, the second topic I would like to take a moment to write to you about is that of Mark Emery,
01:22:09 ►
affectionately known as the Prince of Pot,
01:22:12 ►
who has been a very vocal and dedicated activist in Canada.
01:22:16 ►
I sometimes make the comparison that he is kind of like a Canadian Jack Harer.
01:22:21 ►
Mark Emery has recently been imprisoned
01:22:24 ►
and is to be extradited to the United States for selling pot seeds. Thank you. For selling and mail ordering the seeds to U.S. customers, he is being held responsible for all of the plants and product those seeds are believed to have led to.
01:22:51 ►
Upon arrest, he was to be extradited and given a lifetime imprisonment.
01:22:56 ►
The motive, when viewed from the outside, is clearly one of political imprisonment.
01:23:06 ►
The DE raid of Emery’s Vancouver hemp shop took place shortly after Mark appeared on national television advocating, as he consistently and vocally does, the legalization of cannabis
01:23:11 ►
Most of Mark’s numerous arrests have been in the wake of similar activities
01:23:16 ►
Over the past few years, a long-running legal battle and back and forth with the courts
01:23:22 ►
has reduced what was once to be a lifetime incarceration
01:23:25 ►
in a U.S. federal penitentiary to a five-year imprisonment.
01:23:30 ►
The situation, however, still reeks entirely of bullshit
01:23:33 ►
and is a slap on the face to pot activists worldwide.
01:23:37 ►
Even after his imprisonment, Mark has remained vocal,
01:23:40 ►
which is why I am writing you now.
01:23:43 ►
Mark Emery has begun a prison podcast while he is waiting for his court hearing and extradition.
01:23:49 ►
The first two episodes can be found on his website, and I’ll put the link to that along
01:23:55 ►
with the program notes for this podcast.
01:23:57 ►
It’s a long URL.
01:23:58 ►
The website, however, the main website is www.cannabisculture.com,
01:24:08 ►
and that’s where you can find these podcasts, among much other material.
01:24:12 ►
Now, continuing on with Bob’s email, he says,
01:24:18 ►
Efforts are still being made on Mark Emery’s behalf in attempts to overturn this atrocity,
01:24:22 ►
or at very least have Mark serve his term in Canada,
01:24:46 ►
a bargain the U.S. even agreed to, but our own conservative government turned down. Thank you. and help the legalization movement that we can turn this around. Well, thanks for sending that, Bob.
01:24:48 ►
And as you probably already know,
01:24:52 ►
the Dope Fiend has been covering Mark’s case in great detail on his dopefiend.co.uk podcast.
01:24:57 ►
And as Bob just said, Mark is a person who has done more good for the world
01:25:00 ►
than all of our politicians combined.
01:25:04 ►
So I strongly urge you to support Mark’s podcast and send him your message of support.
01:25:09 ►
We may not be able to stem the tide of the empire’s evil desire to imprison everyone
01:25:15 ►
on the planet who uses cannabis, but at the very least we can show our solidarity with
01:25:20 ►
one of our heroes.
01:25:22 ►
We love you, Mark, and our hearts and minds are with you.
01:25:26 ►
May you see the light of freedom sooner rather than later.
01:25:30 ►
Well, that’s going to have to do it for now,
01:25:33 ►
and so I’ll close today’s podcast by once again reminding you
01:25:37 ►
that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:25:40 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
01:25:43 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:25:49 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:25:50 ►
just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon web page,
01:25:55 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:25:58 ►
And if you are interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon,
01:26:02 ►
you can hear all about it in my new novel,
01:26:05 ►
The Genesis Generation,
01:26:07 ►
which is available as an audio book
01:26:08 ►
that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:26:12 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo,
01:26:15 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:26:17 ►
Be well, my friends.