Program Notes
Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna
In this podcast we have a two-part program that begins with a reminiscence by Bruce Damer about how he came to know Terence McKenna. I then follow that with a recording of one of the last conversations Bruce and Terence had at Terence’s house on the Big Island of Hawaii just a few weeks before Terence was laid low by a tumor in his brain.
One of the reasons I think it might be interesting for you to hear this conversation is to get a feel for what it was like to hang around with the bard McKenna. While you might think that he did most of the talking, you will find that the opposite is true, and much like Aldous Huxley, Terence did a lot of questioning and listening. It wasn’t only from books that they acquired their particular views of the world.
A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You by Bruce Damer
Terence McKenna’s comments on NPR about his time with Bruce
“I spent last week withBruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace … and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen. So you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard, and you can practically feel the McLuhanesque reprogramming of your communications-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you’ve been spending time in.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And this week, I’d like to begin by thanking three fellow salonners who have sent in donations to help offset some of the expenses here in the salon.
00:00:34 ►
And those fine salonners are Chris T., UNM, who actually has sent in two donations this past month.
00:00:42 ►
And we also received a very generous donation from an anonymous Norwegian donor.
00:00:48 ►
And I should note that a part of all your donations this past month
00:00:51 ►
are going to be sent to the fund to help out Jonathan Ott,
00:00:55 ►
who I’m sure is also very grateful for your support.
00:00:58 ►
Now today and next week, I should add,
00:01:02 ►
I’ve got something for you that I’m sure you haven’t heard before.
00:01:06 ►
Today it features two favorites here in the salon,
00:01:08 ►
Bruce Dahmer and Terrence McKenna.
00:01:10 ►
We’ll begin with a reminiscence
00:01:12 ►
by Bruce Dahmer about how he came to
00:01:14 ►
know Terrence McKenna, and then
00:01:16 ►
follow that with a recording of
00:01:17 ►
one of the last conversations
00:01:19 ►
Bruce and Terrence had at Terrence’s
00:01:22 ►
house on the big island of Hawaii.
00:01:24 ►
Now one of the reasons I think it might be interesting for you to hear this conversation
00:01:29 ►
is to get a little feel for what it was like to hang around with Terrence.
00:01:33 ►
Now, while you might think that he maybe did most of the talking,
00:01:37 ►
you’ll find that the opposite is true.
00:01:40 ►
And much like Aldous Huxley, Terrence did a lot of questioning and listening.
00:01:45 ►
It wasn’t only from books that those guys acquired their particular views of the world,
00:01:49 ►
just like you and I, I guess, huh?
00:01:51 ►
So let’s begin now with Bruce Dahmer telling the story of how he came to know Terrence McKenna.
00:01:58 ►
I knew Terrence McKenna personally for a scant three years before his death in 2000.
00:02:05 ►
I was introduced to Terrence by John Wentworth,
00:02:09 ►
who at the time worked deep in the bowels of a Silicon Valley corporate new media laboratory,
00:02:14 ►
which was surrounded by huge projection screens.
00:02:18 ►
One day, John spirited me into the lab,
00:02:21 ►
where I beheld the surreal scene in which a 3D disembodied head
00:02:27 ►
seemed to be hanging in space, mouthing away in a tinny but strangely entrancing voice.
00:02:34 ►
Surrounding this apparition was a virtual room full of avid Avatar listeners. John explained
00:02:40 ►
that he was playing a recording of one Mr. McKenna through his disembodied avatar to the other heads present.
00:02:50 ►
It was an auspicious first encounter with Mr. McKenna.
00:02:54 ►
In the late summer of 1997, Terrence and I finally made direct personal connection through email.
00:03:02 ►
We hit it off and conspired to make a tantalizing exchange. At the time,
00:03:07 ►
I was very engaged in the birth of virtual worlds housing the aforementioned avatars,
00:03:14 ►
graphical depictions clothing real internet users. It was an exciting new frontier that took over
00:03:21 ►
from the earlier virtual reality, which had consisted of mostly single-user head-mounted display experiences
00:03:28 ►
in shaky polygonal worlds.
00:03:32 ►
Terence had been very attracted to VR in the early 1990s
00:03:36 ►
and was keen to actually experience firsthand how its successor,
00:03:42 ►
internet-based virtual worlds,
00:03:44 ►
could relate to his internal worlds of the elevated mind.
00:03:48 ►
In exchange for guiding him into this new cyberspace, Terrence was to introduce me to his worlds of the accentuated mind.
00:03:58 ►
As it turned out, Terrence’s ulterior motive in exploring these worlds was to kick the tires on them
00:04:05 ►
as a potential new medium for him to reach distant audiences.
00:04:09 ►
As Terrence remarked to me at the time,
00:04:13 ►
I get on jumbo jets to fly to speak to audiences of 40 people.
00:04:19 ►
He felt that there had to be a better way.
00:04:23 ►
In November of 1998, just after I had bought the farm,
00:04:28 ►
Ancient Oaks Farm, that is, here in the redwood forests
00:04:31 ►
of the Santa Cruz Mountains next to Silicon Valley,
00:04:36 ►
Terrence, his son Finn, and longtime trialoguer Ralph Abraham
00:04:40 ►
arrived for a personal introduction to the virtual world’s medium.
00:04:46 ►
I sat them down,
00:04:53 ►
with Terrence centered in front of a large monitor set on a round glass table in our fabric-deduct center room. I started Terrence’s journey in Traveler, the aforementioned big talking heads
00:05:00 ►
world. I knew that Terrence would relate to this world because he could use a
00:05:06 ►
microphone to speak directly into it with his oh-so-distinctive voice. He got a serious kick
00:05:13 ►
out of the other geometrically headed users talking right back. After a while in this space,
00:05:20 ►
I knew Terrence had caught my drift, so journeyed on for a time and to the huge user
00:05:26 ►
built landscapes of active worlds and other 3D and 2D spaces. I must have sold Terrence on the
00:05:35 ►
whole experience because he talked to Finn about buying and bringing a Windows box to the house in
00:05:41 ►
Hawaii where we would reconvene for some serious experimentation.
00:05:48 ►
Terrence’s Mac couldn’t run virtual worlds. I hope Ralph found the experience interesting as well
00:05:55 ►
because I knew that he was into 3D representations at his VizMath Institute down in Santa Cruz.
00:06:01 ►
Institute down in Santa Cruz.
00:06:04 ►
Fin seemed very into it.
00:06:06 ►
After leaving the farm,
00:06:08 ►
Terrence was off to other ports,
00:06:10 ►
including Extraordinary,
00:06:12 ►
and to my mind, his
00:06:13 ►
peak, performances
00:06:15 ►
overtoning with the band Lost at
00:06:17 ►
Last, and then swiftly
00:06:20 ►
on to the annual
00:06:21 ►
Entheobotany Conference in
00:06:23 ►
Palenque, Mexico.
00:06:26 ►
We agreed to reconvene in Hawaii after that.
00:06:30 ►
A dream was about to be realized as me and my friend Jim Essex, a long-time Terrenceophile,
00:06:38 ►
arrived in South Kona in late February of 1999.
00:06:47 ►
Kona in late February of 1999. The road up to Terrence’s place on the Hui, which is a kind of shared multiple occupancy land space found only in Hawaii, was so hellacious that we had to park
00:06:55 ►
the rental car on the highway and be driven by four by four over boulders past dripping vine-entwined rainforest to Terrence’s house.
00:07:08 ►
The house was a recently finished two-story wonder,
00:07:11 ►
with a huge library up a rope-lit spiral staircase.
00:07:18 ►
Terrence and family had moved in a couple of years before,
00:07:21 ►
but there was obvious lingering delight with the new settings.
00:07:26 ►
After hanging out and getting to know everyone better and walking through the forest with
00:07:30 ►
Finn and Terrence’s partner, Christy Silmas, we went into serious overdrive on the effort.
00:07:37 ►
The deal was to really give Terrence a deep dive into the medium of virtual worlds, connecting him into this newly birthing
00:07:47 ►
realm at the same time as we set the stage for him to host a gathering, an event with 30 to 40
00:07:54 ►
of his fans. We decided to call this the virtual all-chemical powwow. Despite the remote locations and the sometimes shaky electrical situation
00:08:06 ►
Go and pull start the generator will you please
00:08:10 ►
Terrence would say as the screens dimmed
00:08:13 ►
We powered up Avatar Cyberspace on multiple computers up in Terrence’s library perch
00:08:19 ►
A magical psychedelic virtual world called Pollen had been pre-built for the occasion by a very skilled user of the Active Worlds platform.
00:08:31 ►
Finn was right in there, and I watched the two of them together.
00:08:36 ►
Finn was visibly enthused to work with his father to make this thing come off.
00:09:05 ►
After days of training everyone, nights of intense conversation, and some respite walking through the jungle scape of Terrence’s land, we finally awoke, fired up the generator, and the high bandwidth dish on the roof came alive, giving us a 40 megabit connection beamed across a 40 mile line of sights to Terrence’s ISP in Kona.
00:09:09 ►
Or maybe Kailua, I can’t remember.
00:09:16 ►
The dish was a trip, too, because it was of military origin, which amused Terrence endlessly.
00:09:22 ►
Another delight was that in the morning you had to wait until the dish did its pop-pop,
00:09:26 ►
heating up in the sun to take the right shape for the bits to start zipping off the volcano.
00:09:29 ►
It was February 25, 1999.
00:09:33 ►
All was set. We were all in place and worlds lit the screens.
00:09:38 ►
Fans from Terrence’s mailing list, which was called ee at paganpass.org, and the novelty list were already lingering in world by Finn’s nifty entry portal area, as we were still eating our late breakfast, Terrence’s usual unhealthful bacon and eggs.
00:10:10 ►
Terrence sat down, donned his avatar, which he named Zone Ghost, which was appropriately an olive-eyed grade gray alien.
00:10:20 ►
We had a webcam on Finn’s PC that projected low-res still images every couple of seconds onto a webcam wall inside the virtual world, so the attendees could see Terrence’s avatar, read his chat, and catch
00:10:26 ►
freeze frames of his face.
00:10:30 ►
It was a compelling bit of presence, despite the crudity of the tech.
00:10:36 ►
At fun points throughout the afternoon, we all joined Terrence on camera, waving to the
00:10:41 ►
assembled multitude.
00:10:48 ►
camera waving to the assembled multitude. After quite a bit of initial milling around of avatars and positioning of our little away team, Terrence has started to engage the group
00:10:55 ►
with his brand of hunt and peck typing. There was no way that we could try the voice interface with
00:11:01 ►
the dish’s network latency. It was amazing to me how authors can write whole
00:11:07 ►
books this way, but I guess it gives the brain a bit more time to think in between keystrokes.
00:11:13 ►
The central activity of the event was to guide groups of avatar users so they could flow in and
00:11:18 ►
out of the portals in the gateway world that Finn and I had put together. This was called the Terrence Test World,
00:11:26 ►
sort of in a sense like the acid test.
00:11:29 ►
The main attraction was a portal to the entheogenic garden world named Pala.
00:11:35 ►
It was an impressive achievement for the late 1990s,
00:11:39 ►
complete with shimmering multifaceted landscapes and truly odd avatars,
00:11:43 ►
such as something that looked like a
00:11:45 ►
Volkswagen Beetle on DMT. As users entered pollen, they donned one of the avatars available in the
00:11:53 ►
pollen reality. Christy was also a skillful player in this drama and the whole shebang was captured
00:12:01 ►
on video by a hovering James Essex. This whole escapade was called the virtual
00:12:06 ►
alchemical powwow and is described on the web at www.damer.com. You can find a few photos grabbed
00:12:16 ►
from the video for your interest. Everyone present both physically in South Kona and virtually, felt that the trip that day was a big success.
00:12:26 ►
Let us now leave the virtual alchemical powwow
00:12:30 ►
with an excerpt of chat where in Terrence, as Zone Ghost,
00:12:35 ►
was commenting about the experience,
00:12:37 ►
and I, as DigiGardener, was bopping it back to him.
00:12:42 ►
Zone Ghost, yes, my faith is that we can use these kind of technologies
00:12:49 ►
to eventually share with each other the contents of our heads,
00:12:54 ►
our dreams and visions.
00:12:56 ►
Zone ghost.
00:12:57 ►
So listen, we’re going to try to take a trip together into pollen.
00:13:03 ►
Problem is we don’t know the capacity of the world, so…
00:13:07 ►
DigiGardener, welcome to the trip.
00:13:10 ►
Zone Ghost, I’m now in pollen.
00:13:14 ►
How did we do?
00:13:15 ►
Zone Ghost, amazing, ain’t it?
00:13:18 ►
Zone Ghost, I am walking around dazzled.
00:13:22 ►
Zone Ghost, I am back from the trip to pollen.
00:13:28 ►
DigiGardener.
00:13:28 ►
Like DMT?
00:13:30 ►
Zone Ghost.
00:13:32 ►
Not unlike DMT.
00:13:34 ►
Zone Ghost.
00:13:36 ►
Here is Bruce D. on the screen.
00:13:39 ►
Zone Ghost.
00:13:40 ►
Special thanks to Bruce for making this party possible.
00:13:46 ►
Zone Ghost. Special thanks to Bruce for making this party possible. The Alchemical Conference in September is going to be a gathering of the community of psychedelic arts who are out of the closet.
00:13:55 ►
We hope to have the conference in Hawaii or Mexico with a big virtual annex right where you are standing.
00:14:04 ►
Let me thank everyone for coming to our event.
00:14:08 ►
At one point we had nearly 40 folk in the world, thanks to
00:14:11 ►
Bruce, my son Finn, to Jim Essex and Christy
00:14:15 ►
Silnes, my companion. We want to spend more time with all
00:14:20 ►
of you in virtual space. Zone Ghost,
00:14:23 ►
and until we meet again, this is Ratty dog Terrence McKenna saying happy
00:14:28 ►
trails.
00:14:30 ►
Later, Terrence fan Kathy Livett contributed the following recollection in her trip report.
00:14:39 ►
The simultaneous conversations were hilarious, witty and urbane, kind of like a psychedelic Dada-esque group mind meld.
00:14:48 ►
Wow, it felt like a historic moment to me,
00:14:51 ►
the way that the first transcontinental phone call must have felt.
00:14:55 ►
This medium has vast possibilities for connecting minds.
00:15:00 ►
Just as with this list, there’s a sense of emotional connection
00:15:03 ►
within the discovery and exploration of a new medium.
00:15:07 ►
There’s a shared dimension beyond the worlds and pixels on the screen.
00:15:12 ►
Saying goodbye in deep dialogue after two hours, fans keep arriving from this mailing list well into the night.
00:15:19 ►
I think we’ll be seeing more of this.
00:15:23 ►
During those wonderful days and nights, Terrence and I and everyone sat
00:15:28 ►
around on mats on the floor of the library upstairs and spoke of all things. Life in the universe,
00:15:34 ►
space travel, my newest ballywick as I just started working with NASA at that time,
00:15:40 ►
the fantasy of the singularity, the big volcano we were sitting on, and much, much more.
00:15:47 ►
We also delved into Terence’s ballywick, talking of trips, spaces, their inhabitants,
00:15:54 ►
and how they related to the new low-resolution avatar inhabited worlds of the very late 20th
00:16:00 ►
century. With a wink, I asked him pointed questions about his 2012 prognostications,
00:16:08 ►
as both of us were scholars to a sort, and to a large extent, skeptics. Terrence’s answers were
00:16:16 ►
revealing in the light of today’s 2012 mania and worth retelling here. As far as I can recall from that day over a decade ago,
00:16:26 ►
Terrence made the remark that
00:16:28 ►
people shouldn’t take this all literally.
00:16:31 ►
It’s just a metaphor.
00:16:33 ►
We had talked earlier about Y2K,
00:16:36 ►
and I had said that in my nerd judgment,
00:16:38 ►
it was an overblown fakery
00:16:40 ►
that some people were pulling in piles of profit from.
00:16:44 ►
I sensed that Terrence was worried that his date for
00:16:47 ►
techno-bio-infinite-novelty-curve-blower-must
00:16:51 ►
would be turned into some kind of new-age Y2K.
00:16:56 ►
Little did he know. I am certain that if he
00:17:00 ►
had lived, he would be railing against the current crop of 2012
00:17:03 ►
opportunists as intensely
00:17:06 ►
as he had bit into the UFO believers for more than a decade. Remember, unannounced visits
00:17:13 ►
by pro bono proctologists from other star systems.
00:17:21 ►
Terence was cognizant that his own byline,
00:17:30 ►
they have to be subject to the same rules of evidence as everyone else,
00:17:32 ►
also applied to himself.
00:17:36 ►
Recently, Terence’s brother Dennis has come out publicly questioning his own brother’s common sense in tying the I Ching
00:17:40 ►
to concepts of a historical time wave,
00:17:44 ►
all wrapped up with questionably qualified mathematics.
00:17:49 ►
I join with Dennis and enter my own plea to the seekers
00:17:53 ►
to move beyond the apocalypses on Tuesday fixation
00:17:58 ►
and get on with good visionary works,
00:18:01 ►
not pegged to an arbitrary square on the calendar.
00:18:05 ►
At the end of that conversation with Terrence back in 1999,
00:18:10 ►
I still felt a hope lingering within him that he would be around
00:18:15 ►
to experience what, through all of his conflicted skepticism,
00:18:20 ►
he still clung to, the ultimate trip.
00:18:24 ►
All of this is by way of introduction to the piece you will hear at the second half of this podcast.
00:18:30 ►
In it I gave Terrence a pretty major dump of goods off the shelf of my own novelty general store.
00:18:37 ►
Luckily Jim Essex had his Hi8 video camera running and this picked up the audio of this conversation, complete with a solid chorus
00:18:45 ►
of generator noise removed recently by audio engineering genius and neighbor Amara. Jim also
00:18:53 ►
shot a video of much of our preparations for the virtual world experience I just described.
00:19:00 ►
Terrence and I concluded this good work by planning to do a joint workshop at Esalen in the spring of 2000.
00:19:07 ►
Little of any of us know that Terrence was only weeks away from a personal volcanic eruption of epic proportions
00:19:14 ►
with the arrival of his first major seizure that indicated the large living tumor growing in his brain.
00:19:28 ►
living tumor growing in his brain. Upon our arrival in Hawaii, Jim Essex and I had both felt that Terrence looked pale and unwell over our previous encounters, and he himself admitted to
00:19:34 ►
us that he was having dreams that even he couldn’t explain. After Terrence’s diagnosis and prognosis,
00:19:42 ►
the alchemical arts event, which had been planned for September of 1999, still went ahead and in fact became the goodbye event for Terrence.
00:19:51 ►
It was an exquisite event in a resort hotel scheduled for demolition, so our group was possibly the last to inhabit the place.
00:20:01 ►
Constance Demby arrived with her hammered dulcimer and played the whale sail.
00:20:08 ►
Alex Gray gave us a personal triptych of his becoming an artist. Tom Robbins revealed how his
00:20:14 ►
offbeat writing style came to be, and many others shared how Terrence and his world
00:20:21 ►
irrevocably changed the creative course of their careers.
00:20:26 ►
True to our earlier commitment, my team ran a virtual version of the conference,
00:20:31 ►
with the main focus being a walkable art gallery that was projected on screen
00:20:36 ►
for all to see and interact with users around the world.
00:20:40 ►
I recall a poignant moment when all of us there were invited to get prone on the floor with Terrence in the middle.
00:20:48 ►
We were free to project healing energy, conjure visions, or do anything we wished vis-a-vis Terrence.
00:20:55 ►
As I have a kind of hypercharged 3D imagination, hence my profession in virtual worlds,
00:21:02 ►
my brain immediately popped into gear and started
00:21:05 ►
rendering a vivid scene behind my closed eyes. Overhead from a crystal blue sky,
00:21:11 ►
an ovoid form was descending, and as it came closer, a whirr, whirr, whirr sound became audible,
00:21:20 ►
and I noticed with some glee that it was a bejeweled Fabergé egg,
00:21:29 ►
complete with unseen driver and plush red seating in the rear.
00:21:35 ►
It whirred to a stop next to a vision of the lone, prone Terrence.
00:21:39 ►
His ghostly, lanky form then became upright,
00:21:43 ►
and he stepped deftly into the egg-mobile,
00:21:46 ►
and the unseen pilot shifted some gears,
00:21:50 ►
and up went the vehicle till it was not even a dot.
00:21:56 ►
Later I shared this vision with Terrence, and his immediate retort was,
00:21:59 ►
Ah, the getaway car!
00:22:04 ►
Those were pretty much my last spoken words with Terrence.
00:22:10 ►
In the days leading up to Terrence’s passing on April 3, 2000,
00:22:15 ►
we held vigils at the farm to tie into support for him where he was being tended to by family up in Occidental, California.
00:22:21 ►
Years after that, I sat both upright in bed saying Terrence you left too soon I’m bringing you back
00:22:30 ►
I therefore took on the task of working with Lorenzo Haggerty of digitizing as much of Terrence’s
00:22:38 ►
voice and thoughts as possible from cassette tapes thanks Ralph Abraham, we were loaned the complete set of Trialogues tapes,
00:22:46 ►
which were digitized by myself and Lorenzo in one furious weekend.
00:22:52 ►
Lorenzo has launched his psychedelic salon podcast
00:22:56 ►
from the Palenque lecture series that were being held at Burning Man
00:23:01 ►
and called Palenque Norte.
00:23:03 ►
So this material stoked that channel.
00:23:07 ►
One day in February 2007, Terrence’s entire physical library,
00:23:13 ►
notes, papers, photos, butterflies, and everything else
00:23:16 ►
from that glorious room upstairs in the house in Hawaii,
00:23:20 ►
went up in smoke as the Essel Institute’s offices in Monterey burnt to the ground.
00:23:26 ►
So from that point, I realized that, in fact, Terence would only now exist in cyberspace.
00:23:33 ►
Apart from his published books, the only thing left would be his voice,
00:23:38 ►
digitized and wending its way around the ether.
00:23:42 ►
Today, through the good works of Lorenzo and many others, it is quite
00:23:46 ►
likely that those familiar with Terence’s thought vastly outnumber his fandom at the end of the last
00:23:54 ►
century. Let’s now take on the question of this singularity of the 2012 that came into Terence’s mind sometime in the 70s or 80s,
00:24:07 ►
and his idea of increasing novelty, going to some kind of infinity point,
00:24:13 ►
and his idea that somehow technology will create some kind of intelligence and singularity in a short period of time.
00:24:22 ►
Well, my take on all of this, both from the conversations with Terrence
00:24:26 ►
and my own experience in technology over the last 20, 25 years,
00:24:33 ►
is that, in fact, what was really going on was that Terrence’s own life was accelerating.
00:24:40 ►
And, in fact, if you look at recordings of Terrence in the Maritime Hall
00:24:45 ►
doing overtoning and the poetry and the riffs and the raps
00:24:50 ►
with the band Lost at Last in December of 1998,
00:24:55 ►
you could see that he was peaking,
00:24:57 ►
that all of the novelty of his ideas,
00:25:00 ►
the fact that he was now becoming a performer, not just a speaker,
00:25:06 ►
the acceleration of his life, the house in Hawaii, the trips, the success of the books, multimedia projects,
00:25:14 ►
everything, his life was in this incredible acceleration.
00:25:18 ►
So perhaps Terrence, it was Terrence’s idea that, hey, if I was around to 2012 and my life kept accelerating like this,
00:25:28 ►
I don’t know how this could even be possible.
00:25:31 ►
So in some sense, it was Terrence’s personal eschaton, his personal 2012.
00:25:38 ►
And sadly, the acceleration perhaps of his thought and the pulling together of his crazy ideas
00:25:47 ►
and an accelerating pace might have had something to do with the tumor that was growing inside of him.
00:25:53 ►
And perhaps that tumor was his singularity.
00:25:58 ►
Who’s to say? It’s just an idea.
00:26:00 ►
But perhaps what it might teach us is that we shouldn’t sit here and worry
00:26:06 ►
about a single date that will affect every human being. We should look at the course
00:26:10 ►
of our own life, the pace, the pulse, the accelerations, the novelty in our own lives,
00:26:16 ►
and say, you know, maybe we’re headed, each one of us is headed towards some kind of personal
00:26:21 ►
revelation, personal breakthrough, personal breakdown.
00:26:26 ►
A personal 2012 that doesn’t happen to be in a date on the calendar in 2012.
00:26:32 ►
It’s all about the personal eschaton, the personal singularity.
00:26:37 ►
So that’s just a thought for everybody as a little bit of an intermission in this little broadcast.
00:26:47 ►
So why this obsession with a truly odd bearded elven Irishman of Coloradan origins? Is it his
00:26:57 ►
thought, his Copernican journeys into the mind, his mesmerizing performative voice, or just simply his special and precious weirdness.
00:27:07 ►
On April 3rd of this year of 2010, we held the first annual Terrence Day on the 10th anniversary
00:27:14 ►
of his passing, in the very room where in 1998 Finn, Ralph, and Terrence came to journey into
00:27:22 ►
my worlds. I do miss him and wished I’d had the chance to have another decade of exploration with him
00:27:29 ►
on all subjects and spaces.
00:27:31 ►
Today I say to Terrence, you did leave too darn soon,
00:27:36 ►
but you found your personal eschaton,
00:27:39 ►
and well you should now enjoy the many luxuries tended to by machine elves in their glimmering, invisible
00:27:46 ►
resort scape. So let me now wrap this all up and let you listen to that conversation back in
00:27:53 ►
February of 1999. One final thought, though. The essence of Terence’s dream, his ultimate trip,
00:28:01 ►
seemed to be embodied by the ultimate merger of humans,
00:28:05 ►
their technological creations, and the sublime constructions of visible language.
00:28:11 ►
The cyberspace is rendered in computers, and trip space is conjured out of the human brain.
00:28:17 ►
Those February days of delightful exploration, clothed in our avatars,
00:28:22 ►
while corporeally inhabiting a pole house on the
00:28:25 ►
site of the world’s largest volcano possibly represented Terrence’s closest approach to this
00:28:31 ►
dream. But who’s to say what Terrence experienced at the moment of his passing on April 3rd, 2000?
00:28:40 ►
After his last words, it’s all about love, and keep breathing, people, keep breathing.
00:28:48 ►
What kind of trip did Terrence then embark upon?
00:28:53 ►
Calling all little green men, calling all little green men,
00:28:58 ►
and the bejeweled Fabergé egg went, whirr, whirr, whirr, and took him deep through the crystal blue veil.
00:29:10 ►
And now I’d like to play a recording that is part of a conversation between Bruce and Terrence
00:29:15 ►
that took place in Hawaii in the meeting that they planned a few months earlier.
00:29:20 ►
And, by the way, if you would like to hear Terrence’s presentation at that Entheobotany conference in Palenque that came between their first meeting and the conversation we’re about to hear, you can hear it in my podcast number two, which came out about five years ago, but it’s still very much worth listening to, I think.
00:29:43 ►
Personally, I can’t stand to listen to any of my earlier podcasts.
00:29:48 ►
They’re really kind of embarrassing, but the talks in them are still worthwhile, I think,
00:29:51 ►
and so I’ve left them up there for a little while longer now.
00:29:58 ►
Anyway, let’s get to the conversation between Bruce and Terrence that Bruce described just a few minutes ago.
00:30:04 ►
When Bruce first sent me this recording to play, I told him that as much as I’d like to.
00:30:06 ►
It really wasn’t listenable.
00:30:09 ►
Just that loud generator hum was too much for me.
00:30:14 ►
But not to be deterred, Bruce enlisted the aid of our friend Amara, who, among many other talents, is a world-class recording engineer.
00:30:19 ►
And somehow, magic I think it was, she was able to salvage it for us to hear.
00:30:28 ►
So now let’s listen to a casual conversation among some very interesting people
00:30:29 ►
including Bruce Terrence, Finn McKenna, Christy Silnes
00:30:33 ►
and the man to whom we owe this recording
00:30:36 ►
the man who just happened to have his camera rolling at the time
00:30:39 ►
Jim Essex
00:30:41 ►
so if you want to render that,
00:30:47 ►
if this asteroid were to be converted into basic elements of delta destruction,
00:30:51 ►
you would dispatch a kind of lichen.
00:30:54 ►
It would be a kind of lichen that uses solar energy.
00:30:57 ►
And the code is the light that occupies that space
00:31:02 ►
and starts to then absorb the asteroid.
00:31:07 ►
And then it produces pollen, which goes out and it’s networked pollen.
00:31:13 ►
It’s in the Oort cloud as primandicis.
00:31:18 ►
And then life is off the Earth, and it’s a very different kind of life.
00:31:22 ►
It’s certainly not sentient life, certain that’s very some this for you
00:31:28 ►
stuck in his of course they needed
00:31:31 ►
me that I’m this is probably no
00:31:35 ►
fact me
00:31:40 ►
reported on so
00:31:43 ►
along you it’s where the ladder
00:31:46 ►
life is trying to climb out.
00:31:49 ►
Along the way, we’ll get great terraformers
00:31:51 ►
that will make lots of living space outside of Europe.
00:31:55 ►
But do you think you don’t sound like you’re
00:31:57 ►
of the school that thinks that we’re
00:31:59 ►
close to some kind of AI, and that when
00:32:03 ►
it goes over the threshold within a matter of hours,
00:32:06 ►
it will just inflate into some kind of thing that we can’t even relate to and will be of no interest to?
00:32:17 ►
No, I think, of course, it’s hard to find intelligence in consciousness.
00:32:23 ►
Of course, it’s hard to find intelligence in consciousness.
00:32:28 ►
I think that people underestimate the trial and error,
00:32:30 ►
the error-proneness of living processes.
00:32:36 ►
But on the other hand, the iteration speed of these machines,
00:32:39 ►
life is so static.
00:32:42 ►
But there’s a difference.
00:32:46 ►
The ecosystems that they’re living in are extremely arid.
00:32:51 ►
They’re basically life living in these very narrow tubes connected by very chancet processes.
00:32:54 ►
And the wires.
00:32:56 ►
The wires, yeah, and the servers and things.
00:32:58 ►
That’s how it stays.
00:33:00 ►
Whereas an ocean, you know,
00:33:03 ►
an ocean with a billion trillion parallel processes and black smokers and superplumes going up and carrying hydro is a massively different ecosystem.
00:33:15 ►
Where you can have a lot of things happening at once and at the same time a lot of reactions happen at the same time.
00:33:21 ►
I think the error rate is always the crippling factor.
00:33:27 ►
For instance, we invent all the science fiction, we invent something that eats all silicon
00:33:33 ►
and it comes down to the earth and it eats all carbon based lives and we’re all gone.
00:33:37 ►
I think it doesn’t happen because general purpose things are hard to they’re really
00:33:45 ►
ill suited for survival
00:33:47 ►
and then when you’re specific
00:33:49 ►
purpose you’re
00:33:51 ►
prone to lots of errors
00:33:52 ►
so I don’t think
00:33:55 ►
this would be a planet eater
00:33:56 ►
I don’t think it was
00:33:59 ►
a planet eater scenario
00:34:01 ►
so much as the idea that
00:34:03 ►
once something became sentient it would immediately
00:34:08 ►
design something beyond itself and that you would get a cascade of self-perfecting machine
00:34:16 ►
intelligences that would leave your go over the horizon before you knew what was going on I think
00:34:23 ►
and this is the theme of the next bio conference,
00:34:25 ►
which we’re completing the sponsorship
00:34:27 ►
with the Holland Australia, it’s called biogenesis.
00:34:30 ►
That every life form is the code, the previous ones,
00:34:34 ►
the ones like the cell absorbing.
00:34:36 ►
The mitochondria.
00:34:38 ►
The mitochondria.
00:34:39 ►
Things are built that way.
00:34:41 ►
So for instance, human life is an organism,
00:34:46 ►
is a bolus of biological organisms
00:34:50 ►
surrounded by metabiological forms called culture.
00:34:55 ►
In fact, there’s a way to regenerate a Frankenstein
00:35:00 ►
that’s separate from all that.
00:35:02 ►
It’s always going to contain the errors and the powers of the previous.
00:35:09 ►
Now, of course, if we generate nanite lichens,
00:35:12 ►
a code base that will be in the source,
00:35:14 ►
it will be so simple it will be like a slime bag.
00:35:19 ►
And it wouldn’t achieve consciousness complexity.
00:35:22 ►
They would achieve the ability to survive on an art cloud surface
00:35:26 ►
and evolve through error and process
00:35:30 ►
over probably tens of thousands of years,
00:35:34 ►
reach a certain…
00:35:35 ►
But they may evolve to become giant coral-like slime molds
00:35:39 ►
and just simply consume resources,
00:35:43 ►
because that’s what life seems to do when it enters a new ecosystem, consume a lot of things.
00:35:47 ►
But doesn’t it also tend to modify the ecosystem to make it easier on itself?
00:35:52 ►
And that when at a thousand megahertz for ten thousand years, you don’t really know what you’re going to come back and find. Yeah, I agree.
00:36:05 ►
And I think that what will happen in around 2040 or 2050,
00:36:10 ►
the transmissions between the organisms, the biots,
00:36:15 ►
suddenly will not be interpreted anymore.
00:36:19 ►
For the first few years, they will be spreading across objects.
00:36:23 ►
Even asteroids and bits and pieces of dust
00:36:25 ►
this big is enough for a colony, as long as it’s got certain ingredients and it’s facing
00:36:30 ►
the sun. So you’ll be able to actually track and understand and then suddenly the messaging,
00:36:38 ►
like Tom raised here, will get something you can’t understand anymore. And there’s no way
00:36:42 ►
for anyone to interpret what communications
00:36:46 ►
about they’ll understand fundamentals or operating system calls that the
00:36:54 ►
origins of we making kind of housekeeping but there will be a metal
00:36:58 ►
language that evolves that would be contextualized for the organism.
00:37:05 ►
Yeah, and it will be like bird calls.
00:37:09 ►
And that will be the moment where we have first contact.
00:37:14 ►
In two weeks, there’s a conference called Contact 16,
00:37:17 ►
which is a 16th annual Jim Fennero’s conference.
00:37:21 ►
It’s anthropologists and space scientists and science fiction writers
00:37:25 ►
that meet every year and talk about this kind of stuff.
00:37:28 ►
This is what I’m going to talk about.
00:37:30 ►
Where will it be held?
00:37:31 ►
It’s in San Jose.
00:37:33 ►
And NASA aims one day for the whole thing.
00:37:36 ►
And I’m going.
00:37:38 ►
You’re going.
00:37:38 ►
The three NASA guys came out and I was the first to come to a clean operation.
00:37:46 ►
He was one of our neighbors, right?
00:37:48 ►
He lives behind steel gates.
00:37:50 ►
This guy is the commander.
00:37:52 ►
He’s busy generating money for people.
00:37:54 ►
We’ve been meeting for four hours.
00:37:56 ►
I called and asked, we’re coming.
00:37:58 ►
We sent the email.
00:38:00 ►
We said we weren’t coming, but we are.
00:38:02 ►
We’re glad to be there.
00:38:04 ►
We’ve got a man from Magma Hills in California. And they steal gates and drag them back if they show up.
00:38:07 ►
And Hayden came back before.
00:38:09 ►
And those guys were so tough.
00:38:12 ►
I was feeling dumb when he said,
00:38:14 ►
at least those guys have got their head detectors up.
00:38:18 ►
It’s so surprising.
00:38:21 ►
Well, there’s a lot of study going on of the genetics that controls birdsong
00:38:26 ►
and how it localizes and what’s actually going on,
00:38:30 ►
and it begins to look like there’s a pretty seamless process
00:38:35 ►
right straight through to complex language,
00:38:39 ►
that it’s just a mutation of this signal generating impulse.
00:38:46 ►
I think language will tell us the date.
00:38:52 ►
We have something not necessarily sentient,
00:38:55 ►
but something that is no longer of anything we can understand.
00:38:59 ►
And it will be from that point on an attempt to contact this mass,
00:39:04 ►
this bolus that will be in that point on an attempt to contact this mass, this bolus that will
00:39:06 ►
be in the ring around the solar system.
00:39:12 ►
And it will be tracked.
00:39:15 ►
And it will become the second Terran ecosystem.
00:39:19 ►
And they will do work to support us.
00:39:25 ►
They’ll render down comets and feed mass drivers or whatever.
00:39:30 ►
They’ll do things like any good farmer with his seeds and his crops.
00:39:36 ►
There’ll be a lot of unpredictability of where they’re going.
00:39:39 ►
These nano-colonizations of earth cloud material that originally is established for mineral recovery?
00:39:48 ►
Probably.
00:39:52 ►
For fuel construction.
00:39:57 ►
Why the outer solar system?
00:39:59 ►
Why not the astral system?
00:40:02 ►
There’s not enough elements, a variety of elements.
00:40:04 ►
I think the Jovian system is going to be interesting.
00:40:07 ►
That’s where the action is.
00:40:09 ►
That’s where the action is.
00:40:11 ►
So many interesting satellites
00:40:13 ►
and there’s so much incredible electrodynamics
00:40:18 ►
and magnetodynamics in that system.
00:40:21 ►
If you want to do anything to Mars,
00:40:23 ►
you’ve got to drop a whole lot of water onto it.
00:40:26 ►
But they’re obsessed with Mars.
00:40:28 ►
I think it’s a mistake.
00:40:31 ►
But NASA, again,
00:40:34 ►
I think if you picked any planet
00:40:36 ►
that was reachable in reasonable budgets
00:40:38 ►
in spacecraft sizes,
00:40:39 ►
Mars is it.
00:40:40 ►
Venus is kind of a lost cause.
00:40:43 ►
No reason to go there.
00:40:45 ►
They mapped it to the radar map.
00:40:48 ►
Mercury is too strange and small.
00:40:51 ►
It’s basically a moon.
00:40:53 ►
It has an atmosphere that forms in 20 seconds when the sun comes up.
00:40:58 ►
The atmosphere is four inches high and it phases on the other side.
00:41:01 ►
And it’s a four-hour day.
00:41:04 ►
So Mercury’s not…
00:41:05 ►
But it is tidally locked to the Sun.
00:41:08 ►
So you do have this intrusion on your eye, too.
00:41:11 ►
Yeah, the Sun’s half the size of the sky.
00:41:14 ►
But Mars has got enough stuff.
00:41:17 ►
It’s got volcanoes and old oceans, I guess, and ice caps.
00:41:23 ►
And the next one hour is Jupiter and Earth’s
00:41:26 ►
too hard to get to.
00:41:28 ►
And they’re worth it.
00:41:30 ►
They’re going to drop Galileo into the Ionian atmosphere
00:41:35 ►
in August.
00:41:36 ►
Aren’t they?
00:41:37 ►
What do you mean by that?
00:41:38 ►
Well, it’s a really crippled space.
00:41:41 ►
Actually, Galileo has an example of early bio.
00:41:44 ►
It’s a model.
00:41:45 ►
I remember seeing Galileo getting packaged to be launched on the shuttle.
00:41:52 ►
This is the shuttle after Challenger, so it never shipped out with JPL.
00:41:56 ►
I went to JPL to see the spacecraft get crated up.
00:42:00 ►
The high-gain antenna, which is this great big mesh thing,
00:42:04 ►
it’s like a TV satellite dish, it’s all folded up.
00:42:07 ►
And when they did launch it three years later, it never opened.
00:42:11 ►
So instead of huge bit stream and bandwidth and all kinds of power,
00:42:18 ►
they had to work with some…
00:42:20 ►
A low-gain antenna the size of a pizza pie.
00:42:24 ►
Well, they had to slingshot around.
00:42:25 ►
Because the big audience didn’t work.
00:42:26 ►
You’re right.
00:42:27 ►
They had to slingshot around.
00:42:29 ►
Well, the mistake was the following, which is interesting.
00:42:32 ►
When the shuttle blew up,
00:42:34 ►
NASA was no longer permitted to carry liquid-fueled upper stages in the cargo bay,
00:42:40 ►
which they considered too dangerous.
00:42:41 ►
They had to carry a solid fuel.
00:42:43 ►
It’s safer, but it packs
00:42:45 ►
very little punch.
00:42:47 ►
It doesn’t generate much
00:42:49 ►
thrust, about a third.
00:42:51 ►
So they had to design a new way to get to Jupiter,
00:42:54 ►
which could go around Venus twice
00:42:55 ►
and steal some of the angular momentum
00:42:57 ►
of Venus by slingshying around it,
00:42:59 ►
coming back again and getting faster.
00:43:02 ►
They’re stealing from the planets.
00:43:04 ►
And then they pass the Earth twice.
00:43:07 ►
And on the way into the sun,
00:43:09 ►
the high-gain antenna,
00:43:10 ►
which was still wrapped up,
00:43:12 ►
got heated and flexed and shrunk
00:43:14 ►
and flexed and shrunk.
00:43:15 ►
It was never designed to be
00:43:16 ►
going to the inner solar system.
00:43:18 ►
It was supposed to go straight out
00:43:19 ►
on the Express.
00:43:21 ►
And when they tried to open it up
00:43:22 ►
on the second time,
00:43:23 ►
it came out like this.
00:43:26 ►
It was a screw-up. It was a huge screw up. The mission planner said it’s too many dollars down the tube and
00:43:31 ►
for the congressional hearings and the scrapbook and we figured about something else.
00:43:35 ►
On the way to Jupiter they re-did its brain because it has an operating system and software
00:43:42 ►
is very configurable. They changed Galileo’s brain to
00:43:46 ►
think differently, process
00:43:48 ►
differently, and see differently,
00:43:50 ►
and hear differently.
00:43:52 ►
By the time it got to Jupiter, it moved this tiny
00:43:54 ►
little pizza pie dish,
00:43:56 ►
and it had a re-entry
00:43:58 ►
vehicle, this sort of
00:43:59 ►
saucer-like quad that would be dropped into
00:44:01 ►
the Joby Amateur. They’d never
00:44:04 ►
be able to do that in their lifetime.
00:44:06 ►
One would like to lose that.
00:44:09 ►
And they got to the Jovian system,
00:44:11 ►
and by that time they had learned to see
00:44:13 ►
in these jailbar methods,
00:44:17 ►
they would take strips out of the sky,
00:44:20 ►
and then the ground controllers would say,
00:44:22 ►
look, there’s more rings going across.
00:44:24 ►
Or now take smaller strips and compress them as much as you can
00:44:29 ►
and then send the trickle into this.
00:44:31 ►
And so they couldn’t change the hardware,
00:44:34 ►
but they could change the software.
00:44:35 ►
And Galileo was sort of a very early 20th century metaphor
00:44:39 ►
of the digital bio moving out,
00:44:43 ►
being transmitted massless, more of all, into a receiver.
00:44:47 ►
It was smarter when it got there than when it left.
00:44:52 ►
So then it all made it?
00:44:54 ►
Yes, it’s been in orbit for two and a half years.
00:44:56 ►
But they had to stream these pictures back instead of in real time.
00:45:00 ►
It takes months for the data to come back. It’s like eight bits of news.
00:45:09 ►
It’s like crazy.
00:45:12 ►
But they’ve done fantastic science.
00:45:14 ►
They dropped the probe.
00:45:16 ►
They ran the recorder and recorded.
00:45:19 ►
The probe went down to the Jogging Atmosphere,
00:45:21 ►
down to level nine, like that, and collapsed
00:45:23 ►
because of the pressure.
00:45:25 ►
It was on shoots.
00:45:30 ►
And now they’re going to do a close approach.
00:45:32 ►
It’s only four times higher than the highest volcanic plume above Io,
00:45:35 ►
because Io is sulfur volcanoes.
00:45:37 ►
And they’re going to do it only four times,
00:45:38 ►
and then graze the top of the volcanic plume,
00:45:41 ►
and it may not survive.
00:45:43 ►
But they’re going to try to do as much as they can
00:45:45 ►
and get the best.
00:45:46 ►
And it may just sort of burn it, destroy it.
00:45:49 ►
But it’s like journey from being,
00:45:53 ►
like go to being burned is all taped
00:45:56 ►
and that comes back, right?
00:45:57 ►
Yes, bit by bit.
00:46:00 ►
And it’s been in orbit.
00:46:02 ►
The Joby system is like its own solar system.
00:46:04 ►
It’s been in orbit for three years, three and a half years,
00:46:08 ►
just sweeping by different moons.
00:46:10 ►
But what you really need out there is several tons of state-of-the-art imaging equipment
00:46:16 ►
and all kinds of fancy steering engines.
00:46:20 ►
What an interesting system.
00:46:23 ►
Yeah.
00:46:24 ►
This mission to Saturn is pretty ambitious.
00:46:27 ►
Cassini is the last big, heavy mission. Six tons of the space program.
00:46:33 ►
And it’s going to drop a thing over the atmosphere of Titan that will land on the surface.
00:46:40 ►
Titan isn’t Saturn yet? Titan has the only room in the atmosphere.
00:46:45 ►
There may be methane hydrocarbon oceans sometimes.
00:46:50 ►
With house-sized tar blocks in the greatest surfing courses.
00:46:57 ►
600 foot wings.
00:46:59 ►
On tar?
00:47:01 ►
It’s like Solaris Titan. It’s a really strange world.
00:47:05 ►
Yeah, it’s an oddball.
00:47:08 ►
And yet, the funny thing,
00:47:10 ►
all of it, our moon, we’re an oddball.
00:47:13 ►
Our moon is way out of proportion.
00:47:15 ►
It’s way too big.
00:47:17 ►
That’s why they think now that
00:47:19 ►
our moon is here because of a massive collision.
00:47:23 ►
There’s no way the Earth could have captured
00:47:24 ►
something inside the moon, so we’d have to have had a very bad hair day. is it here because of a massive collision? There’s no way the Earth could have captured something
00:47:25 ►
inside of the moon, so we’d have to have had a very bad hair day.
00:47:29 ►
A Mars-sized object crashed into the Earth.
00:47:32 ►
And it separated.
00:47:33 ►
Melted.
00:47:34 ►
And all the other stuff.
00:47:36 ►
Duffed up into orbit.
00:47:38 ►
And then it…
00:47:39 ►
Condensed into this kind of system.
00:47:41 ►
And where we’re going, and hopefully…
00:47:44 ►
Condensed into our moon of system. And where we’re going, hopefully… We can’t start until I’m ready.
00:47:45 ►
Yeah.
00:47:46 ►
The biotic group goes back through time.
00:47:50 ►
We go to fossil sites.
00:47:53 ►
We went to the Cambrian fossils of the first shell,
00:47:56 ►
the first weird creatures that had body parts.
00:48:00 ►
And then we saw the human fossils in Cambridge,
00:48:03 ►
and the professors in the modern day.
00:48:08 ►
And the next trip we’re going to go back to 3.5 billion years ago to Western Australia,
00:48:15 ►
where you have two interesting things.
00:48:17 ►
You have the oldest evidence of life that certainly…
00:48:21 ►
The stromatolites.
00:48:23 ►
The stromatolites and the material chemical traces.
00:48:27 ►
The stromatolites are these towers
00:48:28 ►
that were the
00:48:30 ►
smokestack polluters that became here.
00:48:33 ►
They’re colonial forms
00:48:34 ►
of mushy crops that have
00:48:36 ►
glucuronium and alginate on top.
00:48:39 ►
Because if you went back
00:48:40 ►
to the earth then you’d have to wear a spacesuit
00:48:42 ►
because there’s no oxygen.
00:48:45 ►
So these things lived around all the continental margins of these towers,
00:48:49 ►
and they pumped oxygen out of the atmosphere.
00:48:52 ►
It was a very poisonous, very toxic substance.
00:48:55 ►
And in Shark Bay at Hamelin Pool, if you lie down at night next to where the strongs are,
00:49:00 ►
there’s this last remaining living sperm that come out like coal.
00:49:03 ►
You get high in the oxygen.
00:49:06 ►
There’s a living
00:49:07 ►
colony of this thing.
00:49:09 ►
What are its sides made of?
00:49:11 ►
It’s hard as rock.
00:49:14 ►
What happens is the top
00:49:16 ►
is this mushy layer
00:49:17 ►
sizing up to
00:49:19 ►
3 billion individuals per square inch.
00:49:23 ►
Then underneath
00:49:24 ►
there’s, yeah, it’s colonial.
00:49:25 ►
It would have been the only thing that you could see
00:49:27 ►
with your own eyes if it was obviously alive for
00:49:29 ►
two billion years of Earth’s history.
00:49:31 ►
And underneath there’s chemosynthetic stuff
00:49:34 ►
that
00:49:35 ►
basically
00:49:36 ►
stromatolites suck iron oxide
00:49:40 ►
and calcium out of the atmosphere
00:49:42 ►
and build these towers
00:49:43 ►
that are below it.
00:49:45 ►
Ocean levels rise and fall in these times,
00:49:48 ►
and these towers support the top of the pond.
00:49:51 ►
And their heart is rock.
00:49:53 ►
Half the iron ore in the world is from that life.
00:49:56 ►
Those are like bodies.
00:49:59 ►
Life made the continents.
00:50:02 ►
So life, the earliest life on Earth,
00:50:06 ►
built the American Railroad. That’s right.
00:50:08 ►
That was a biological process.
00:50:11 ►
The accretion of iron.
00:50:13 ►
Iron and not oxidized iron.
00:50:17 ►
So what happens is the stromalics pumps and pumps and pumps.
00:50:21 ►
Albumats is what they’re called, but these are mats on a stick.
00:50:23 ►
album and home these are not some state and they home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home home and poisoned out. The Earth’s been through many mass extinctions. This one was a real horrific one
00:50:46 ►
because any cell, single-cell organism
00:50:49 ►
that could not handle incoming high densities of O2,
00:50:53 ►
which is very poisonous,
00:50:55 ►
basically ripped the cells apart.
00:50:58 ►
And so there was this mass extinction,
00:51:00 ►
and there were a few cells that had absorbed
00:51:02 ►
the syncytometacondria that could absorb the oxygen
00:51:04 ►
that turned it into an energy factory.
00:51:07 ►
One in trillions of cells.
00:51:10 ►
But they then, all present life was traced back to the survivors of that challenge.
00:51:22 ►
When you go jogging or something,
00:51:23 ►
and suddenly your body runs out of oxygen
00:51:26 ►
and your muscles switch back to the old system
00:51:30 ►
of metabolizing chemo-syndetically.
00:51:33 ►
You get lactic acid and it makes you sore
00:51:36 ►
because you’re going back to the ancient system
00:51:38 ►
before mitochondria to get energy quick.
00:51:42 ►
But at a price.
00:51:43 ►
And so stromatolites, there’s this tiny pond they found.
00:51:48 ►
It’s very saline, and they’re there.
00:51:51 ►
They’re there, and they’re 3 billion years old.
00:51:53 ►
3 billion years, and they’re saline.
00:51:55 ►
Just fine. Thank you.
00:51:57 ►
And we’re going to go there and save them.
00:51:58 ►
And this is first life.
00:52:01 ►
This is the first significant… It’s a colony. It is the first first it’s a column okay
00:52:09 ►
and spermatozoa back to 3.5 billion years in the earliest evidence of life
00:52:14 ►
is 2.8 six billion years so they’re very close to and that the impacts that
00:52:19 ►
meteorite impact stopped about 3.. So life actually popped up pretty quickly after the…
00:52:29 ►
Within 100 million years after the cometary and full sea.
00:52:34 ►
Full waters, water, and we didn’t have the surface of the Earth getting all molten every
00:52:39 ►
once in a while. And something hit it too hard. But we’re going to thank the stromatolites for giving us oxygen
00:52:46 ►
and apologize for the fact that we’re putting all the CO2 back.
00:52:51 ►
But plants like CO2.
00:52:56 ►
Yeah, Earth of two billion years ago
00:53:00 ►
was really weird
00:53:02 ►
because chances are the oceans were brown
00:53:04 ►
because they were full of
00:53:06 ►
incredible, the continents had no plants to hold the land together. So the outwash was
00:53:12 ►
eight times higher or more of huge river systems, degraded river systems, pouring off the continents.
00:53:21 ►
Brown oceans, the Himalayas and the Rockies are mountains that will never appear again
00:53:26 ►
because there’s never going to be that kind of deposition again.
00:53:30 ►
They’re unique.
00:53:32 ►
They’re creations of…
00:53:33 ►
In fact, they’re full of life.
00:53:36 ►
They’re finding more and more now that life and water
00:53:39 ►
are the reason we have plate tectonics in the first place
00:53:42 ►
and that we have mountain ranges.
00:53:44 ►
Why do life and water drive plate tectonics in the first place, and that we have mountain ranges. Why do life and water drive plate tectonics?
00:53:47 ►
They think that, well, there’s several sort of interlocking factors.
00:53:51 ►
One is that water lubricates.
00:53:55 ►
It allows this kind of continuous movement.
00:54:00 ►
Water also observed a lot of the crap that came through volcanism
00:54:04 ►
early in the Earth’s history,
00:54:06 ►
maybe for common impacts, created the oceans.
00:54:08 ►
That was a big sponge that damped up all this horrible, junky toxic stuff coming off the bottoms of the oceans.
00:54:17 ►
So it created a cleaner, not a clean, but a cleaner atmosphere,
00:54:22 ►
which in turn supported rain, which in turn supported all the outwash.
00:54:28 ►
And life sealed the continents in this hyper-sea of roots coming in the ocean and sealed all
00:54:35 ►
that land in so that the outflow and the erosion wasn’t done at all like it used to be. So
00:54:42 ►
future generations of mountains will be quite different.
00:54:47 ►
But now,
00:54:48 ►
in the last two years, they’ve discovered
00:54:49 ►
this fantastic, they’ve discovered
00:54:51 ►
these black smokers
00:54:53 ►
in the mid-80s with
00:54:55 ►
huge hot water
00:54:57 ►
full of sulfates and stuff
00:54:59 ►
pouring out of the bottom of the ocean
00:55:01 ►
and there’s tons of life in there and
00:55:03 ►
eating chemicals not needing sunlight.
00:55:07 ►
Bacteria?
00:55:08 ►
Bacterias and tube worms and crabs.
00:55:11 ►
Tube worms up to six feet long.
00:55:13 ►
And that’s eating the pollution.
00:55:15 ►
It’s eating the pollution.
00:55:17 ►
And they were always wondering
00:55:19 ►
how did, if life evolved around one black smoker,
00:55:22 ►
they don’t last long.
00:55:24 ►
They kind of go out.
00:55:27 ►
How did it get all across the planet? Because all the black smokers have about the same kind of light.
00:55:30 ►
And they found these, these little super polluters,
00:55:33 ►
which are underwater Mount St. Helens’ that happen in water.
00:55:38 ►
So think of Mount St. Helens’ massive ash thing,
00:55:41 ►
what happens under the ocean too, you get this blowout that happens
00:55:45 ►
of hot water that’s the same
00:55:48 ►
as a
00:55:49 ►
pyroclitic ash
00:55:51 ►
exploding. It comes out into
00:55:53 ►
up to 12 or 15
00:55:55 ►
miles across, balls
00:55:57 ►
of hot water that’s very hot.
00:56:00 ►
And they come blowing off
00:56:01 ►
as a mushroom cloud
00:56:03 ►
out of the ocean, and then they get caught by waves
00:56:06 ►
by currents and carried for hundreds of miles
00:56:09 ►
or a thousand miles
00:56:10 ►
and they’re full of life forms
00:56:12 ►
that have been carried
00:56:14 ►
in this express bus system
00:56:16 ►
and then they’re raining back down
00:56:19 ►
on other plumes
00:56:20 ►
so this kind of plume
00:56:22 ►
super plume system may have been
00:56:24 ►
the engine that created and transported life out there constantly.
00:56:31 ►
You know, volcanism, underwater volcanism.
00:56:35 ►
Our roots.
00:56:36 ►
That’s why we like jacuzzis.
00:56:39 ►
And volcanoes.
00:56:40 ►
Underwater volcanoes.
00:56:42 ►
Underwater volcanoes. Yeah, the world’s largest underwater volcano is about 22 miles that way. The world’s
00:56:52 ►
largest earthquake in 1997 was an 8.1 earthquake on that mountain. When they went down with bathyscaphe stuff afterwards, they said that
00:57:06 ►
the entire area had been totally rearranged, but they couldn’t recognize it. It’s only
00:57:13 ►
2,000 feet below the surface there. Having risen 12,000 feet, the ocean is 16,000 or
00:57:23 ►
14,000 feet deep there. If you ever get to Mars and see the great red of the old solar system volcanoes, I’ll
00:57:33 ►
look this long, 80,000 feet.
00:57:36 ►
The top sticks out of the atmosphere.
00:57:38 ►
So the atmosphere in the caldera is different.
00:57:42 ►
Now the land emission in there or something.
00:57:47 ►
That’s a… I didn’t realize that.
00:57:48 ►
It’s a giant.
00:57:56 ►
Yeah, the Hawaiian shield volcanoes are the closest thing to Earth on the Earth.
00:57:58 ►
I’ve heard that when I was at Volcano Park,
00:58:01 ►
the volume encompassed by Maalou, which is…
00:58:03 ►
You could fit all this here in the inside. So in effect it’s the single
00:58:09 ►
largest structure on the planet. It’s created by one process. Yeah, it’s the world’s largest
00:58:16 ►
mountain by volume and if you measure it from its seabed floor it’s the world’s tallest mountain because it’s
00:58:26 ►
13,000 feet
00:58:28 ►
above the sea
00:58:29 ►
but 16,000 feet
00:58:31 ►
it rises from the ocean bed
00:58:34 ►
there’s a theory now
00:58:40 ►
as to why there’s a hot spot
00:58:41 ►
here is some kind of a harmonic
00:58:44 ►
constructive harmonic that’s going on.
00:58:48 ►
It’s actually breaking up the crust.
00:58:53 ►
And there may be one on the other side.
00:58:56 ►
At the exact antipodes of the one?
00:58:59 ►
Yeah, it may be lower.
00:59:01 ►
That’s why I have a regular.
00:59:05 ►
I’m sorry, we’ll of, well, what are the 10-day periods
00:59:07 ►
that are inside?
00:59:10 ►
Creating sort of the greatest
00:59:11 ►
products that their imaginations
00:59:13 ►
can generate.
00:59:15 ►
Is it
00:59:16 ►
to help ourselves,
00:59:19 ►
or is it to…
00:59:21 ►
I think it’s kind of a semi-conscious
00:59:23 ►
push for the drive that human beings have had to
00:59:29 ►
build and to make things, make life, and create.
00:59:33 ►
We’re creating tool-making things.
00:59:36 ►
Perhaps they don’t align, but they’ll make the next phase.
00:59:42 ►
I hate to talk about it. Yeah. So make the next phase. Mm-hmm.
00:59:46 ►
Yeah.
00:59:52 ►
I’m telling Dave, the maker of the world, that you were impressed.
00:59:54 ►
Yeah, we were greatly impressed.
00:59:56 ►
Thank him very much.
01:00:02 ►
I’m telling him that we’ll have a go and hope to see him in the next while. Gosh, I saw that digital camera on the next camera where the guy could just
01:00:10 ►
flip a switch and he could shoot a 90 second JKB or MPEG-NICI. It was incredible.
01:00:19 ►
It’s getting… and you can edit it.
01:00:21 ►
And he only paid like $500 for this camera, which is what I paid for mine a few years ago, and it doesn’t do shit.
01:00:29 ►
The way it is with this stuff and the speed of computers now, you can’t really run full video, so you just gotta do segments.
01:00:38 ►
But if you put on segments, the dialogue can be patched in and you get different angles and stuff like that.
01:00:44 ►
And it’s interesting, that. It’s interesting.
01:00:46 ►
That’s what it’s called.
01:00:47 ►
Church service.
01:00:48 ►
Church service.
01:00:53 ►
Virtual Christianity.
01:00:56 ►
Virtual religiosity.
01:00:58 ►
Virtual religion.
01:00:59 ►
That new time religion.
01:01:06 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:01:08 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:01:14 ►
Ah, good old Terrence.
01:01:16 ►
Don’t you just love it?
01:01:18 ►
Virtual Christianity, a Newtime Religion.
01:01:21 ►
Well, I’ll bet we both could do a few good riffs on that topic.
01:01:24 ►
But in the interest of time, I think we’d both could do a few good riffs on that topic.
01:01:27 ►
But in the interest of time, I think we’d better pass on to other things just now.
01:01:30 ►
Again, I want to
01:01:31 ►
thank Jim Essex for capturing this
01:01:34 ►
and other conversations with Terrence
01:01:35 ►
for us. We really appreciate
01:01:37 ►
your work on this, Jim.
01:01:40 ►
Also, I want to thank once again
01:01:41 ►
Amara Angelica
01:01:43 ►
for more than just the superb job of getting rid of the generator hum in today’s program.
01:01:49 ►
You see, it was in an article that Amara wrote for Mondo 2000 a long time ago
01:01:54 ►
that for the very first time I learned about this guy named Terrence McKenna.
01:02:00 ►
Had Amara never written that article or had I not come across it,
01:02:04 ►
there’s a good chance that you and I
01:02:06 ►
wouldn’t be here in the salon together right now
01:02:08 ►
so we both have more than one reason
01:02:10 ►
to send Amara our thanks and love
01:02:12 ►
for all she’s done to keep the world on its toes
01:02:14 ►
and I should also mention
01:02:16 ►
that she’s also a close associate
01:02:18 ►
of Ray Kurzweil’s
01:02:20 ►
so you’ve most likely been exposed to her work
01:02:22 ►
in other areas as well
01:02:24 ►
and how can we ever thank Bruce Dahmer for all he’s done and so you’ve most likely been exposed to her work in other areas as well.
01:02:30 ►
And how can we ever thank Bruce Dahmer for all he’s done and is continuing to do to preserve a record of some of the early psychedelic pioneers
01:02:33 ►
and the new psychedelic renaissance?
01:02:36 ►
And by the way, if you happen to live in or near London
01:02:39 ►
and would like to meet Bruce in person and exchange some ideas with him,
01:02:43 ►
you’ll find him on the evening of July 13th,
01:02:45 ►
that’s 2010 by the way,
01:02:48 ►
at the October Gallery at 24 Old Gloucester Street in London.
01:02:53 ►
His talk for the evening is titled
01:02:55 ►
Terence McKenna’s Elves, Eckhart Tolle’s Egos,
01:02:59 ►
and Bruce Dahmer’s Avatars,
01:03:01 ►
New Tools to Forge or Forgo a New Earth.
01:03:06 ►
And here’s a summary of how Bruce plans on pulling these seemingly diverse topics together on this the
01:03:12 ►
10th anniversary of the passing of Terence McKenna we can now look back at
01:03:16 ►
his caperna and explorations of the mind with some hindsight and ask many
01:03:20 ►
questions what were his voyages into deeper conscious states all about?
01:03:26 ►
Do the machine elves really exist?
01:03:30 ►
How do his warnings about the current state of humanity play out today?
01:03:35 ►
But perhaps the most powerful insight gleaned from McKenna’s many journeys might be related to the more recent work of Eckhart Tolle and others on the ego.
01:03:41 ►
McKenna and Tolle both describe mind states in which the ego may be sensed briefly as a separate entity from oneself,
01:03:48 ►
providing momentary release and the sense of exquisite presence of the unencumbered self.
01:03:54 ►
For Tolle, the recognition that the ego is an interactor with an agenda
01:03:57 ►
is the key to the transformation of the individual and of planetary civilization.
01:04:03 ►
McKenna clearly describes the ego manifesting itself within elevated mental states,
01:04:08 ►
providing a possibly unique opportunity to understand and deal with it
01:04:13 ►
then and later in normal states of mind.
01:04:16 ►
If this is in fact a common experience, it could,
01:04:20 ►
in combination with regimens proposed by Tolle and others,
01:04:23 ►
give us a new vital tool to forge a new Earth.
01:04:27 ►
Dahmer will also bring into this mix the newly pressing issue
01:04:30 ►
of humanity’s increasingly intense exposure to technology,
01:04:34 ►
especially digital screens,
01:04:36 ►
and how that may be affecting a planetary change in mind state.
01:04:40 ►
Loading more of ourselves into avatars, social networks,
01:04:43 ►
and endless update interrupt streams
01:04:45 ►
may be dissolving or may be enhancing a species consciousness millions of years in the making.
01:04:51 ►
The future of us and our world is at stake in this giant unplanned experiment.
01:04:56 ►
So if you’re in the London area on the night of July 13th,
01:05:01 ►
you might want to take a spin around the October Gallery and meet Bruce Tamer.
01:05:06 ►
Now, there’s one more mutual friend of Bruce’s and mine who has a new book out.
01:05:12 ►
And his name is one that you’ve probably not heard unless you’ve been paying very close attention.
01:05:17 ►
But Ken Symington is one of the pivotal figures in the psychedelic community.
01:05:47 ►
Thank you. I’ll just say that in all my years on this planet, I’ve never encountered a wiser or more completely together person than Ken Symington.
01:05:50 ►
He’s my ideal man.
01:05:57 ►
And for many years now, Ken’s friends have been pressing him to write down some of the teaching tales that he has regaled us with over the years.
01:05:59 ►
But he wouldn’t even let us record them,
01:06:01 ►
saying that we’d learn better if we had to completely focus on the parable while it was being told.
01:06:07 ►
Fortunately, though, Ken has relented and taken pen in hand and recorded some of these little gems.
01:06:14 ►
The name of the book is Hyponymata, Stories, Fables, Memories.
01:06:19 ►
Now, I may be mispronouncing the first word in that title, Hyponymata.
01:06:24 ►
It’s spelled H-Y-P-O-M-N-E-M-A-T-A.
01:06:29 ►
But after trying to find a pronunciation guide in a half a dozen online dictionaries,
01:06:34 ►
I discovered that Ken not only used a word that’s hard to pronounce,
01:06:38 ►
it’s also not even in most of the big dictionaries, which is pure Ken,
01:06:42 ►
always making you dig a little bit for the answer.
01:06:46 ►
But as I’m sure you already knew, it simply means a book of notes and memories.
01:06:52 ►
Let me just read a few of the titles of some of the little pieces in this collection.
01:06:57 ►
One is Guided Tour Through the Deceptions, The Importance of Cats in Meditation and one of my personal favorite Ken stories
01:07:06 ►
How the World Became Sinful
01:07:08 ►
better known as The Invention of Sin
01:07:11 ►
and you can read these and dozens of other little fables
01:07:15 ►
in this great little book that is filled with treasures
01:07:18 ►
that you can use to entertain your friends for many years to come
01:07:21 ►
and besides being available on Amazon
01:07:24 ►
you can also get it directly from Ex Libris, the
01:07:27 ►
publisher.
01:07:29 ►
And by the way, in another week or so, the notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog will
01:07:33 ►
be operational once again, and I’ll be posting show notes for the dozen or so podcasts I
01:07:38 ►
haven’t documented yet, along with links to Ken’s book and things like that.
01:07:43 ►
For those of you who have offered to help me with the site,
01:07:46 ►
again, thank you very much.
01:07:49 ►
And I should let you know that after a lot of deliberation,
01:07:52 ►
I decided to simply rebuild it and keep it strictly for podcast show notes
01:07:56 ►
and save my other postings for the other blogs I keep.
01:08:00 ►
So if you want to get a look at my progress
01:08:02 ►
before I repoint the psychedelicsalon.org URL to the new site,
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you can just go to matrixmasters.net slash salon.
01:08:11 ►
It’s not very graphically fancy, and it doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles,
01:08:15 ►
but I think it’ll still serve its purpose.
01:08:19 ►
Well, that should do it for now.
01:08:21 ►
And so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you once again that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:08:28 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
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And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:08:41 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:08:44 ►
Psychedelic Salon web page, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:08:48 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon,
01:08:51 ►
you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
01:08:56 ►
which is available as an audio book that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:09:01 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:00 ►
Be well, my friends.