Program Notes
Guest speaker: Timothy Leary
[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]
“More changes have taken place in the last twenty five years, unquestionably, than in any period of human history. Just as I said an hour on the Greenwich map is a century, a decade these days seems to be a century. Can you remember the ancient history of the 1960s?”
“If you change the techniques of child rearing, if you change the very philosophy and techniques in the daily, moment to moment way that children are brought up, hey, listen, never mind university, you’ve changed that culture.”
“The average post-1946 kid by the age of five had experienced a hundred times more realities, more dramas, more history, more geography, more hype, more propaganda, you name it, than the wisest, oldest, most traveled human beings of the past.”
“To a ‘factory philosopher’ a machine to think is a machine to perform many repetitious tasks.”
“Information, information is the air and the water and the bread and the shoes of the future.”
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Transcript
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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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And in case you’ve been thinking that maybe something’s wrong with your iTunes listing of podcasts from the salon,
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since it’s been three weeks since my last podcast, well, there’s nothing wrong with your connection.
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I’ve just been away for a bit, trying to come up with some new dreams, schemes, and adventures,
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all of which I’ll have more to say about in some future podcasts.
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But right now, I want to thank two of our fellow salonners
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who didn’t take three weeks off like I did,
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but instead sent us some of their hard-earned cash
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to help with the expenses here in the salon.
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And those wonderful people are…
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Forrest R., who also wrote to say,
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Thanks for the podcast.
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It gladdens my heart to know that there are, hopefully,
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more psychedelic-based people out there than I originally thought.
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Although I’m having a difficult time finding a new tribe in my new home here in Berkeley.
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Thanks again, Forrest.
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And you know, it’s really a shame that it’s so difficult to find the others in a city like Berkeley,
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where there must be more psychedelic people per capita than anywhere else in the world.
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So don’t give up hope, Forrest.
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Our other donor is my longtime friend, Margaret W.
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And Margaret, just last week I was just reminiscing with our mutual friends,
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Ron and Claudia Little, who, by the way, I featured in podcast number 218.
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And we were talking about some of our adventures together with you.
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But I’ll save those stories for a less public venue.
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Anyway, Margaret and Forrest, hey, thanks again for your support of the salon.
00:02:04 ►
Anyway, Margaret and Forrest, hey, thanks again for your support of the salon.
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We certainly wouldn’t be here without you and all of our other donors, supporters,
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and you very kind souls who bought a copy of my pay-what-you-can novel, The Genesis Generation.
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Now, if you remember where we left off, we had a kind of a long run of Terrence McKenna talks,
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followed by my last podcast, which mainly featured Ram Dass.
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So today I’m going to play another talk by Timothy Leary.
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And then my next podcast next week will feature one of the talks that Bruce Damer gave in the UK this past summer.
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And following that, well, I really want to hear another talk from this big box of as yet unheard, This is the end of the show. Tim Leary talk that I found. After sorting through several tapes from the Timothy Leary archive that were sent to me by Dennis Berry and Bruce Dahmer, and by the way, thanks again to both of you,
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I found a recording of a talk that Dr. Leary gave in Santa Barbara, California on the 28th of January
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in 1985. According to the notes made by Renee, who helped digitize this material, the title on the
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tape was, From Mind to Supermind, The Next Steps. And once again, we hear how wonderfully optimistic
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Dr. Leary was at a time when we were only just 15 years short of the new millennium, or 25 years ago if you prefer.
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Although we now can see how hopelessly naive he was at the time, I still find his youth-filled optimistic enthusiasm quite refreshing.
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And I’ve also left in his 1985 description of the potential of the personal computer,
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which you may find to be somewhat naive and simple, but if you Google 1985 personal computer, which you may find to be somewhat naive and simple,
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but if you Google 1985 personal computer technology or something like that,
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you’ll quickly discover that the World Wide Web wasn’t even on the radar screen back there.
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A lot of technological ground has been covered in the past 25 years,
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and I think it speaks well of Dr. Leary to be so enthusiastic about it,
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considering how primitive the tech was at the time.
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And while we’ve heard his time travel story about the westward migration to the California coast
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a couple of times before, I’m playing it once again to honor my own ancestors,
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who began our family’s westward migration from Germany and Ireland,
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which ended with me sitting here on a hillside looking over the Pacific Ocean.
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So please don’t take offense if you live east of here.
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After all, it’s only a metaphor.
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And better yet, why don’t you just pull up stakes and move out here yourself?
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How could that be any more difficult than staying where you are right now?
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I guess I’d better get off this soapbox here.
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I don’t really know where all that came from.
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I’m probably just trying to rationalize my own decisions.
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But the truth is that life is exceedingly different out here on the West Coast
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than it was for me in other parts of the country that I’ve lived in.
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And that includes the Midwest, the East Coast I’ve lived in, and that includes the Midwest,
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the East Coast, the Deep South, and even Texas, where I practiced law for a while.
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So I have given a few other areas a close look, but what’s different out here on the
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coast is that I can be as eccentric as I know how to be, and nobody even notices.
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Of course, I’m a rather conservative freak now that I think about it. But enough of me,
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let’s now join the audience on a January day in 1985 in Santa Barbara, California,
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just as Dr. Timothy Leary is being introduced by an obvious admirer.
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an obvious admirer.
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After dinner with this gracious gentleman,
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it’s an honor to introduce someone
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with an abundant personality
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and ample intelligence
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to go around several times,
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Dr. Timothy Leary. I’m very happy to be here.
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I think that this is the right place and the right time to boldly and intelligently and wisely move into the future.
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It’s a very special place and a very special time for all of us.
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The place, of course, is good old United States of America.
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good old United States of America. For the last 200 and some odd years, it has been the ideal of freedom and innovation and pluralistic thinking. I went to Europe a couple of years ago and talked to people and have the pleasure of meeting many international visitors in the L.A. area.
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And it’s clear to me, and I’m sure you’ll resonate in agreement when I say that America today is still the hope of the world.
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It still represents the ideal of the future, of progress,
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of evolution. But on top of that, we’re lucky enough to be in California.
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I have done a study of a profound mystical science called neurogeography.
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Do you like that one?
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Which I try to demonstrate using demographics that for the last 4,000 years,
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human intelligence, human vigor, human courage, human individuality has been moving an unbroken line from east to west.
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Asia and the Middle East and Athens and Italian Renaissance, France, England, East Coast United States.
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east coast United States.
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To make this point, I sometimes like to think that when you consult a map and you see the so-called Greenwich lines, you know, denoting the time zones,
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Pacific time, mountain time, central time.
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My friends, I submit that these are not hours, but centuries that are being delimited.
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And when I go back east, I consider time travel.
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Washington, B.C., for example.
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Some of my more cabalistic demographers and neurogeographers like to say that your zip code or your area code in your first three digits probably tell more about you than you’d ever dream.
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So much for place.
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Now, time.
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Obviously, what a wonderful time to be alive. The last 15 years of this extraordinary, volatile 20th century. Boy, what a century it’s been, huh?
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And it hasn’t quit. As a matter of fact, to quote one of our more popular Americans, it ain’t got started yet.
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And the next 15 years that are going to saw us, launch us in the 21st century are going to be, I’m sure,
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I don’t want to be advocating anything that I don’t believe in here,
00:10:21 ►
I’m sure it’s going to be the most exciting time of all.
00:10:26 ►
Now, more changes have taken place in the last 25 years,questionably than in any period of human history. A decade, just as I said, an hour on the Greenwich map is a century.
00:10:35 ►
A decade these days seems to be a century. Can you remember the ancient history of the 1960s?
00:10:43 ►
the ancient history of the 1960s.
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Can you remember back in the Werner Erhardt new generation 70s? It does, from the exalted altitude of the 80s, seem long, faraway decades.
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Now, so much is happening, and has happened, and is going to happen, that sometimes
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we all get a little freaked when we’re moving from one culture, from one or more cognitive
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maps or models. Everything seems to be up for grab. That’s been the twentieth century.
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It started with quantum physics and Einstein, and it’s been accelerating. At times of great change like this, when there doesn’t
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seem to be solidities that we had before, many of us often get quite upset. So I think
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that one thing I’d like to suggest tonight is, as we move into the next 15 years, into the 21st century,
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it’s going to be the better part of wisdom to be kind to each other, because no one really knows where it’s going.
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I mean, could you have predicted four years ago what’s happening today?
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I couldn’t, and I consider myself, I try to be a futurist.
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And I consider myself a, I try to be a futurist.
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Now, one title that I considered for my talk tonight has something to do with the evolution of intelligence in individuals and species.
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I thought about titling my talk, High Technology.
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But I thought that might be misunderstood.
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So I’m going to stick with the evolution of intelligence in individuals and species.
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Now, these are four very hot and controversial concepts.
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Evolution, intelligence, individual species.
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Very important concepts because I submit
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your theory of intelligence is your game plan for your life.
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It’s your blueprint as to where you’re going, where you think you came from, and what the guideposts are.
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Now, the notion of the evolution of intelligence, again, is controversial.
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Until very recently, the notion that intelligence could evolve or that intelligence could evolve in individuals would be considered quite extraordinary.
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I was trained as a psychologist 25 years ago, and if anyone’s intelligence score changed, well, something wrong with a test or maybe a person was cheating.
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The idea was you were stuck with an IQ, and if you tried to change it, you were kind of breaking the rules. And of course, the notion of an
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individual evolving, again, is a notion that although it’s very ancient and has been passed
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on by the oral tradition from master to student for several thousand years, the notion of
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individual growth and personal evolution kind of caught us a little by surprise in the busy
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West, as you know, a couple of decades ago.
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Now, I’m going to cover a lot of territory tonight.
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I hope to spray you and ricochet you and avalanche you with new ideas and new models
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and new metaphors and hopefully a few new good stories. Now, if I seem to ramble, well,
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Well, I admit to, you know, brain damage.
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I’ve started out with a hundred billion neurons, most of which I haven’t learned to use yet.
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And I think about pruning down a little bit. But I’m not rambling.
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Every metaphor, every fact is part of a mathematical mosaic.
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And to give you a little picture of how this is going to unfold,
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I’m going to rely upon a wonderful cliché, a very utilitarian model that’s very chic right now.
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It’s this notion that we’re moving into what’s called the information society, the age of intelligence, the age of communication,
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and that we’ve just left or are leaving, some of us are at least, some of us have been expelled from
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the industrial society, the smoke-sack economy, and that this, of course, was preceded by
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the feudal or the agricultural age.
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Now, like any three-part division of everything, this little model is useful, but it’s also
00:16:04 ►
dangerous, so let’s be,
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we’re not going to get carried away by it. But I’d like to very briefly review for you
00:16:10 ►
the different theories of the evolution of intelligence in the individual in the last
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three stages of human evolution. Okay,, you remember that under feudalism, there was no concept of evolution.
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God made it, bang, one swell swoop.
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There’s no talk about intelligence under feudalism, because God is the author of everything that has to be said.
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And there’s certainly no concept of the individual under feudalism.
00:16:53 ►
As you know, in a feudal society, we are all part of a flock or of a collection that is guided by a supernatural power.
00:17:09 ►
Okay, now, there was no concept of intelligence under feudalism.
00:17:15 ►
In a feudal society, there’s one main frame, knowledge information processor in any village or town,
00:17:24 ►
and that tends to be
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in the palace of the of the Duke or the Cardinal and the access to this main
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frame illuminated manuscript of course was reserved to socially alienated nerds
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called monks who spoke the machine language, which was Latin.
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And indeed, if any of us tried to write or even to change,
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or even if a clerk or a scribe or a monk changed,
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either by accident or by deliberation, one word, oh, it was considered heresy,
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because you’re changing the divine writ.
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because you’re changing the divine writ.
00:18:16 ►
Now, it will come as no surprise to you in a sophisticated place like Santa Barbara when I tell you that there are probably more people in the world today who are committed to a fundamentalist feudal philosophy and religious orientation by far.
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I think there are more than any other theory.
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Fundamentalist Islam is making a tremendous resurgence, as we all well know.
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And the word Islam means submission.
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as we all well know.
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And the word Islam means submission.
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And recently some Iranian friends of mine told me that in Iran,
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the Ayatollah Khomeini has just come out with a new book.
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Now, it’s not a new book.
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It’s an old book, and they pasted his name on it.
00:19:05 ►
And it tells you how to live your life from moment to moment,
00:19:10 ►
which hand to use in the normal biological functions of daily life,
00:19:13 ►
how to enter a room, which foot to put forward.
00:19:18 ►
And, of course, relationships between individuals and society,
00:19:25 ►
between men and women, are highly, highly orchestrated and surrounded with regulation.
00:19:39 ►
Now, in this country, there are millions of people who believe in the total authenticity of the Bible.
00:19:44 ►
Fundamentals who truly believe that every word in the Bible is the word of God.
00:19:52 ►
Now, I don’t agree with this, but I have to accept the fact that there are probably 30, 40, 50 million Americans who are sharing this wonderful country with me.
00:19:57 ►
And so with great respect, I have to understand their position.
00:20:02 ►
They’re not going to go away. I’m not going to go away.
00:20:08 ►
I think, though, that in the context of this little evolutionary trip we’re taking tonight,
00:20:15 ►
we should remember that in the theory of evolution, theory of intelligence, theory of individual,
00:20:21 ►
in the fundamentalist version of the Bible is that there was an evolution.
00:20:27 ►
It was all started, well, Bishop Usher.
00:20:33 ►
Didn’t Bishop Usher say that it was all done in the year 4006 B.C. at 9 o’clock in the morning sometime in June?
00:20:50 ►
the morning sometime in June. And the universe and the stars and the planet Earth and the oceans and the land and the creepy crawly things were created by one fiat, by Jehovah.
00:21:06 ►
Jehovah made the ultimate destination resort called the Garden of Eden.
00:21:11 ►
And you remember how it goes.
00:21:17 ►
Essentially, and I’m paraphrasing here, which could be called heresy,
00:21:28 ►
that I’ve made this Garden of for you. Go for it.
00:21:38 ►
I’ve made Eve to serve you. Go for it.
00:21:43 ►
Do anything you want, except for two food and drug regulations. See this tree. This is the tree. Now, I’d
00:21:53 ►
like you to listen to this. This is the tree of knowledge. And the fruit thereof is a controlled
00:21:59 ►
substance. And you are forbidden to in any way ingest of the fruit of the tree of knowledge,
00:22:07 ►
lest the blinds fall from your eyes, you see through good and evil, and become a god like me.
00:22:13 ►
You don’t want to do that, and Adam said, no, sir.
00:22:18 ►
This tree here is the tree of recombinant DNA, life extension.
00:22:27 ►
Was it Dr. Peltier that discussed this?
00:22:33 ►
Cloning, protein diets.
00:22:37 ►
In other words, it’s the tree of mortality,
00:22:39 ►
and you’re forbidden to eat of this lest you become immortal.
00:22:44 ►
Now, the concept of original sin, of course, derived
00:22:47 ►
from the heretical step that was taken by Adam and Eve to eat of the fruit of the tree
00:22:57 ►
of knowledge. Now, this is very relevant to the topic I’m going to discuss today, which
00:23:01 ►
is the evolution of intelligence. I must tell you right in front that I consider myself a secular humanist.
00:23:11 ►
As a humanist, I believe that there’s extraordinary untapped divinity or potential in every human being,
00:23:21 ►
and taking the Socratic or even the Oriental position that the aim of human life is to access or activate or boot up this sense of inner intelligence and inner virtue and inner power.
00:23:37 ►
So I’m glad as a humanist to glorify Adam and Eve.
00:23:43 ►
to glorify Adam and Eve.
00:23:47 ►
I’m proud to be descended from a species,
00:23:50 ►
the first members of whom were a man and a woman,
00:23:55 ►
who stood up and ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
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Now, of course, they tend to blame poor Eve for this.
00:24:01 ►
If they hadn’t known for Eve,
00:24:05 ►
the straight-air Adam would probably be still there in the Garden of Eden.
00:24:14 ►
I’m rather proud to be descended from Eve and her friend Adam.
00:24:25 ►
Now, we can’t date the onset of the feudal religions.
00:24:33 ►
We suspect that they started at that wonderful time in human history when a new technology had developed called the domestication of animals.
00:24:37 ►
But probably 25,000 years ago.
00:24:43 ►
But we can date with precision the onset of the next stage of human growth, evolution, when the Industrial Age began,
00:24:46 ►
it was the year 1456.
00:24:49 ►
That was the year, as you probably know, when Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press
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which made possible the portable, home, inexpensive micro-book.
00:25:07 ►
micro book
00:25:07 ►
good good good
00:25:11 ►
i imagine
00:25:13 ►
and looking over his dream
00:25:15 ►
there’s some evidence for my speculation that
00:25:18 ►
top manager was very pleased with good grades invention it was fabulous to have
00:25:21 ►
a printing press
00:25:22 ►
you could take the bible you could read it in thousands of copies and send it to all the branch offices all over Europe.
00:25:27 ►
The first four uses of the printing press were word processing.
00:25:35 ►
Scribes loved it.
00:25:38 ►
Spreadsheets, accounting sheets.
00:25:41 ►
That was good for the taxpayers and the treasurer, the checker. The third
00:25:48 ►
use of Gutenberg’s printing press was in database, the archivists, the scribes, the history of
00:25:54 ►
the kingdom. And the fourth was telecommunications. You could send the stuff all over the kingdom
00:25:58 ►
or the Holy Roman Empire. I suspect that top management back in those days didn’t realize that if
00:26:07 ►
you allowed human beings to have in their own home small micro-books, you might dramatically,
00:26:17 ►
almost instantly, change human nature. Indeed, that’s what many of us think happened. There are two interesting aspects, very relevant to today’s high technological society,
00:26:30 ►
buried in the history of the printing press.
00:26:35 ►
See, what language, if the average person was going to read and write the Bible,
00:26:42 ►
it couldn’t be in Latin because Latin was the machine language.
00:26:47 ►
So it had to be translated into the language of the people.
00:26:50 ►
Perhaps you don’t remember that Luther translated the Bible into the folk language.
00:26:56 ►
And Luther faced this problem.
00:26:59 ►
There were 19 dialects of German in what’s now the German linguistic area.
00:27:05 ►
High Dutch, Low Dutch, Saxon, Bavarian.
00:27:10 ►
Luther had to decide which language to translate the Bible in.
00:27:18 ►
He decided on the dialect of the court of Saxony, because that was his patron.
00:27:25 ►
And that one single decision created the German language,
00:27:29 ►
created the German culture, created the so-called German soul.
00:27:32 ►
And as von Herter has said, the soul of Germany is in that language.
00:27:35 ►
Same thing happened in England.
00:27:36 ►
When Caxton wanted to translate the first book into English,
00:27:43 ►
every county in England had its own dialect. As a matter of fact,
00:27:47 ►
in the late 15th, 16th century, there were over 3,000 major dialects in Europe, and they
00:27:55 ►
still are, as a matter of fact. In England, one dialect per county, what were they going
00:27:59 ►
to do? A housewife in Kent, we’re told, couldn’t understand a businessman from London unless
00:28:04 ►
they spoke Latin, which was the church language, or French, which was the language of the aristocracy.
00:28:08 ►
So Caxton decided to use the language of the London court, which created the English language, which then, within a century, created that incredible monument, that mountain of human intelligence, the English literature, created Shakespeare.
00:28:28 ►
So we now have a situation in the late 19th and even the mid-20th and late 20th century.
00:28:33 ►
There are certainly probably around a billion people on this planet who speak English,
00:28:38 ►
not as well as Richard Burton, all because of a decision made by Caxton.
00:28:45 ►
He could have chosen French, which would have been the popular conservative Tory thing to do,
00:28:50 ►
and Richard Burton would be speaking French.
00:28:53 ►
Now, another implication of the printing press is this.
00:29:01 ►
Once you learned how to read you could write
00:29:05 ►
now remember under feudalism
00:29:09 ►
you ain’t supposed to write
00:29:11 ►
there’s only one author
00:29:12 ►
in fact the second commandment says
00:29:14 ►
thou shalt not have raven images
00:29:16 ►
and the first commandment says
00:29:19 ►
thou shalt not have any author
00:29:20 ►
strict copyright going there. Who was the first person to sit
00:29:32 ►
down and say, hey, I can use this new technology to create my own ideas? We know about the
00:29:41 ►
Gutenberg Bible, but we don’t know who that first or who that…it probably happened all over Europe. Because when it says Buckminster Fuller, my great teacher and
00:29:50 ►
seer, once said, when it’s backbone time, it backbones, and when it’s steamboat time,
00:29:57 ►
it steamboats. And when it was time to start writing books, it happened, I’m sure, all over
00:30:02 ►
Europe. But certainly, we know that within one generation
00:30:05 ►
there were something like 20 million books in Europe.
00:30:08 ►
That’s staggering.
00:30:09 ►
That is really instant mutation in human intelligence.
00:30:14 ►
From this new technology, the microbook,
00:30:18 ►
came not just reading and writing and literacy,
00:30:21 ►
came freedom of thought.
00:30:22 ►
Immediately, the Protestant Reformation, people sitting down and making their own interpretations of the Bible,
00:30:29 ►
immediately led to science, the Renaissance, the return of the Athenian humanism.
00:30:37 ►
It led to the rights of man and woman.
00:30:39 ►
It led to, eventually, the Declaration of Independence in this country.
00:30:43 ►
It led to technology.
00:30:44 ►
to eventually the Declaration of Independence in this country. It led to technology. It led to the Industrial Revolution because the book, by definition, was the first manufactured object.
00:30:50 ►
Crank them out, crank them out, crank them out. And then we got the basic factory, smokestack,
00:30:58 ►
assembly line culture that we’ve all grown up in. Now, at every stage of human evolution, there’s a new concept of evolution.
00:31:13 ►
The theory of evolution that developed in the industrial society is rather amusing.
00:31:18 ►
It’s so predictable and so understandable. At the height of the British Empire a hundred years ago,
00:31:23 ►
fellows like Darwin came along and they knew exactly what evolution was all about.
00:31:29 ►
God was a…
00:31:30 ►
Well, there was no…
00:31:31 ►
They didn’t want any kind of a personal god.
00:31:33 ►
They didn’t want a plan.
00:31:34 ►
They didn’t want any sort of a peevish deity interfering with human affairs.
00:31:39 ►
They said there’s no…
00:31:40 ►
The universe is a big machine.
00:31:41 ►
God is probably a big clockmaker up there.
00:31:48 ►
And it’s all mechanical chance.
00:31:54 ►
Survival of the fittest, people eating, they eat the small, and it just grinds out.
00:32:07 ►
You know, until very recently, we were told that life on this planet wasn’t created by God.
00:32:08 ►
It was no act of creation at all.
00:32:10 ►
It was an accident.
00:32:14 ►
Something like this.
00:32:19 ►
Long time ago, boys and girls, about four and a half billion years ago,
00:32:22 ►
in the pre-Cambrian slime on a Saturday night,
00:32:28 ►
there were some ammonia molecules having your party with some methane molecules,
00:32:31 ►
and they invited some hydrogen boys and oxygen girls,
00:32:34 ►
and a terrible thing happened.
00:32:37 ►
The place got hit by lightning, and they all began to reproduce.
00:32:45 ►
William Miller in Chicago replicated this experiment. They passed electricity through prebiotic chemicals and did indeed create some of the proteins that were precursors to life.
00:32:57 ►
But come to think of it, this Darwinian theory of evolution, you know, it’s not very inspiring.
00:33:07 ►
evolution, you know, it’s not very inspiring. It doesn’t make me feel, you know, I want to throw back my shoulders and zoom into the 21st century. It’s all an accident. Four and
00:33:11 ►
a half billion years of accidents, accidents building bigger and stronger rapists, I mean.
00:33:19 ►
Also, I find very insulting the theory that I was taught, and I still accept some of our biology courses
00:33:25 ►
today, how you and I were conceived according to the neo-Darwinian theory. You and I were
00:33:32 ►
conceived when your father deposited 400,000 spermatozoa into your mother’s reproductive
00:33:47 ►
400,000 spermatozoa into your mother’s reproductive tract.
00:33:51 ►
I submit the word reproductive.
00:33:53 ►
How smokestack, huh?
00:33:58 ►
I don’t consider I was reproduced or produced. I like to think that I was created, and I’m sure you were too.
00:34:01 ►
and I’m sure you were too.
00:34:05 ►
I much prefer the notion of my father putting four or five hundred thousand sperm
00:34:08 ►
into my mother’s recreational tract.
00:34:12 ►
Yeah.
00:34:15 ►
Then, of course,
00:34:18 ►
according to orthodox theory,
00:34:22 ►
bang, started the biggest
00:34:24 ►
mock spit swimming race in history,
00:34:26 ►
500,000 swimmers only doing the Australian crawl.
00:34:29 ►
Get out of the way, man.
00:34:31 ►
It’s an enormous male macho playing fields at Eton, right?
00:34:35 ►
You train your kids.
00:34:37 ►
You’re born in a factory, and you’re the old before until recently.
00:34:41 ►
You were fed on factory hours, and you went to a school like a factory, and
00:34:47 ►
your function was to produce and perform for the factory society, and you called yourself,
00:34:51 ►
identified yourself by your role, I’m a doctor, I’m a lawyer, I’m a mechanic, I’m a UAW worker,
00:34:56 ►
in terms of how you fit. And of course, you had to be replicable, dependable, loyal, prompt, on and on and on. Now, we can date the beginning of the so-called New Age, the
00:35:09 ►
post-industrial age, again very precisely. I submit to you it happened in 1946. 1946
00:35:14 ►
is a magical, magical year. 1946 is the end of World War II. It was the year of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which meant there could never be another world
00:35:28 ►
war, or there would be just one more world war.
00:35:33 ►
1946, being the end of World War II, meant that all those wonderful new electronic toys
00:35:39 ►
that had developed, like radar and sonar and the first computers which were used for bomb
00:35:43 ►
sites, could now be turned over to the civilian population.
00:35:49 ►
1946 was another magical year because in that very year
00:35:54 ►
something happened that still nobody can figure out.
00:35:58 ►
The birth rate in Australia, America, Canada,
00:36:01 ►
and New Zealand doubled.
00:36:04 ►
Now, you know, you just don’t screw around with birth rates,
00:36:08 ►
if you’ll pardon the expression.
00:36:12 ►
You know, doubling a birth rate
00:36:14 ►
means that millions and millions of people
00:36:16 ►
somehow have the same procreative impulse at that same time.
00:36:21 ►
Everyone thought, see, all the evidence was
00:36:23 ►
that in adult societies, birth rate drops.
00:36:25 ►
They thought right after World War II,
00:36:26 ►
bing, bang,
00:36:27 ►
guys came home and so forth,
00:36:29 ►
down a little bump that they expected
00:36:30 ►
it would continue to go down.
00:36:32 ►
Instead of 36 million,
00:36:32 ►
you’ve got 76 million Americans
00:36:34 ►
born between the years 1946 and 64.
00:36:36 ►
It’s called the baby boom.
00:36:37 ►
It’s called the pig and the python
00:36:38 ►
moving across the American 20th century
00:36:40 ►
like an enormous pig and a python.
00:36:42 ►
This avalanche of 76 million
00:36:44 ►
babies, children, teenagers, college kids, yippies, yuppies.
00:36:54 ►
Now, another thing happened in 1946, which is extremely interesting.
00:36:58 ►
In that year, the Bible of the information age was written.
00:37:04 ►
The Bible of the earlier age, of course, is the verse Vibles.
00:37:08 ►
The Bible of the industrial age probably would be Newton’s Principia.
00:37:12 ►
I don’t know.
00:37:12 ►
You might say it’s Henry Ford’s manual for Model T Ford.
00:37:15 ►
I don’t know.
00:37:17 ►
The Bible of the Information Age was written in 1946 and was entitled, very shrewdly and obviously, looking back,
00:37:24 ►
it was entitled The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care,
00:37:30 ►
written by Dr. Benjamin Spock,
00:37:33 ►
who has been blamed by many conservatives for causing all this trouble.
00:37:38 ►
I’m glad to see someone else get the blame.
00:37:44 ►
And the blame. And the credit. Dr. Spock did something really profound. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe
00:37:57 ►
he was just playing a part, he was just that person that enunciated this new doctrine.
00:38:03 ►
But he did something, think about it,
00:38:05 ►
that is obviously going to change human nature and culture.
00:38:08 ►
If you change the techniques of child rearing, if you change the very philosophy and techniques,
00:38:14 ►
the daily, moment-to-moment way that children are brought up, hey, listen, never mind university,
00:38:22 ►
you’ve changed that culture.
00:38:24 ►
Never mind university. You’ve changed that culture.
00:38:31 ►
Now, what Spock did, as you well know, had never been done, to my knowledge, in human history. He said to parents, and I was one of them, we read it like a Bible.
00:38:35 ►
We called it the Bible.
00:38:36 ►
He said, treat your kids as individuals.
00:38:41 ►
I mean, never in animal history or human history, one thing everyone agreed upon, you know,
00:38:48 ►
the kids have to be trained and have to be, no matter what you have to do, you have to
00:38:53 ►
get them to learn how to play the game, whether it’s spinning webs or whether it’s making
00:38:57 ►
nests or whether it’s, you know, performing in a factory.
00:39:03 ►
Spock said, feed them on demand.
00:39:08 ►
Don’t feed them according to schedule.
00:39:10 ►
Now that right away, you see,
00:39:11 ►
was setting the…
00:39:13 ►
The industrial society can’t work that way.
00:39:17 ►
You know, you’ve got to feed.
00:39:18 ►
You can’t feed people in an industrial society on demand.
00:39:20 ►
You have to have your kids,
00:39:21 ►
wake them up, feed them at 12,
00:39:23 ►
feed them at 8, feed them at 4.
00:39:24 ►
Listen, you can’t have a situation in which there’s an assembly line and at 11.02 I say,
00:39:28 ►
Well, baby, I’m going to break now for lunch.
00:39:31 ►
I’ll be back in three hours.
00:39:34 ►
You’ve got to eat when the bell rings, just like Pavlov’s conditioned rats.
00:39:41 ►
You’ve got to come back.
00:39:42 ►
You know, not to belabor the point.
00:39:46 ►
Another thing happened to this new generation that came along in 1946. It had never happened
00:39:51 ►
in human history before. From the time this generation climbed out of the cribs and crawled
00:39:56 ►
across the nursery with their little tiny chubby baby hands, they began dialing and doing the burp tune. That meant that the average post-1946 kid by the age of five
00:40:10 ►
had experienced a hundred times more realities, more dramas, more history, more geography,
00:40:14 ►
more hype, more propaganda, you name it,
00:40:18 ►
than the wisest, oldest, most traveled human beings in the past
00:40:21 ►
through electrons, electronic, do-do-do through electrons, electronic, change channels, which,
00:40:27 ►
of course, had the same effect that Gutenberg’s book had on human nature.
00:40:38 ►
See, none of us really realized that when we had our kids watching screens in which there were cloud clusters and
00:40:49 ►
vapor trails of electrons and told him changing and out of focus and pulling in
00:40:54 ►
and throwing up color we thought they were watching little you know little
00:41:00 ►
dramas like the dramas used to be on the movies or instead of watching movies
00:41:03 ►
really just like a movie and the hucksters on TV or just like the old snake well salesman hey come on
00:41:10 ►
that’s a color for you and yeah yeah breakfast of champions for you because you’re a champion
00:41:15 ►
kid you we it’s all for you ladies welcome on American side is here go for it because you’re
00:41:22 ►
perfectly you know I’m not we never realized that we were really creating a new literacy,
00:41:28 ►
which we can now call electronic literacy,
00:41:32 ►
where we’re creating a new means of intelligent communication,
00:41:38 ►
a new way of booting up or activating the human brain,
00:41:41 ►
which we will call the electronic literacy.
00:41:46 ►
Now, another date which is very important, I think, in the evolution of human intelligence
00:41:52 ►
and in the evolution of all of our lives in the next 15, 20 years, 1976.
00:41:58 ►
My gosh, that’s only nine years ago.
00:42:00 ►
1976, two hippies, long-haired hippies, I mean, who can imagine hippies, in a garage in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, did the old Gutenberg turn. They invented the personal computer.
00:42:27 ►
You could take it home.
00:42:30 ►
Now, there was an Altair and there were personal computers before, but no.
00:42:34 ►
It was Jobs, St. Stephen I and St. Stephen II, Jobs and Wozniak, who put this package together.
00:42:41 ►
And they called it, and isn’t it interesting, they called it the Apple.
00:42:48 ►
With a bite out of it.
00:42:55 ►
I got an 11-year-old kid who was, of course, totally hooked on electrons.
00:43:02 ►
Between the Apple and MTV, my God.
00:43:04 ►
between the apple and MTV, my God.
00:43:08 ►
Anyway, the joke around his school is,
00:43:11 ►
I think I can tell it here.
00:43:14 ►
If the 11-year-old is telling us, we can tell it here, right?
00:43:20 ►
Who’s the first human being to have a computer?
00:43:23 ►
Eve, how come?
00:43:24 ►
Well, she had an apple and a wang.
00:43:27 ►
Now, I cite that as—I know, I’m very wrong. I’m glad you’re getting rowdy here. I love rowdy cries.
00:43:35 ►
I’m getting you ready for the question-and-answer period. the member top management after Gutenberg thought hey the computer is
00:43:47 ►
wonderful person feels very wonderful for top manager word processing in that
00:43:52 ►
great we’re speeding typing spreadsheets that’s great we can balance your
00:43:57 ►
checkbook why you want to do that in what commands that then you have data
00:44:03 ►
bases and all that, and games.
00:44:06 ►
It’s true.
00:44:07 ►
One of the first books, the second book printed in English by Caxton was How to Play Chess.
00:44:15 ►
For those of you who don’t know much about chess, chess is an early form of Pac-Man.
00:44:20 ►
Got it?
00:44:21 ►
Got it.
00:44:23 ►
So you had games.
00:44:27 ►
from a Pac-Man. Got it? Got it. So you had games. And just as I posed the question, or
00:44:35 ►
posed the historical precedent, that it took some time for people to figure out that micro-books,
00:44:40 ►
after Gutenberg, were going to start people thinking, creating a new literacy, creating literacy of the people, creating a literacy which created nationalism, really, English and German and Italian.
00:44:51 ►
The same thing is going to happen again with the use of electronic language. To understand electronic literacy, or to understand the electronic human being, I’m forced to
00:45:10 ►
do this reluctantly.
00:45:11 ►
I’m going to have to violate a taboo.
00:45:14 ►
I’m going to have to talk about something that you’re really not supposed to talk about
00:45:17 ►
these days.
00:45:18 ►
I’m going to talk about that ultimate organ of elegance, pleasure, and revelation, the human brain. I hope you’re
00:45:30 ►
ready for that. A hundred years ago in Victorian England or Freudian Vienna, the body was the
00:45:40 ►
taboo. You simply couldn’t talk about the body to talk about a lady’s lower
00:45:47 ►
extremities, the word leg. And there has been and there still is a taboo about really understanding
00:45:54 ►
what the human brain is. You’re not supposed to fondle your brain or touch it or play with
00:46:00 ►
it or abuse it in any way, or hear it grow on your palms and you’ll end up in a mental hospital. The brain is all through this, my friend.
00:46:10 ►
But still, we’re being avalanched by new scientific discoveries about the brain. A man that I
00:46:17 ►
respect very much named Douglas Hofstadter wrote the book, Gertl Escherbach. I don’t
00:46:21 ►
even know that book. It’s about, yeah, it’s know that book it’s about really on some interesting book when the poet surprised it’s called the new definition
00:46:29 ►
of brains as the brain is best understood now we always change our
00:46:33 ►
concepts of human body and human brain and human nature as new technologies
00:46:37 ►
come along so a good way to think of the brain the human brain is a constellation of around 100 billion neurons.
00:46:47 ►
And each neuron, according to Hofstadter, and I’ve talked to other electronic gurus,
00:46:54 ►
each neuron is about the equivalent of a microprocessor.
00:46:57 ►
So when you get home tonight in the privacy of your own room, put your hand on your forehead.
00:47:04 ►
When you get home tonight in the privacy of your own room, put your hand on your forehead.
00:47:07 ►
You’re doing what?
00:47:10 ►
One hundred billion apples, and that’s some apples.
00:47:13 ►
Now, a new concept of human nature develops.
00:47:19 ►
You know, wow, if we have a hundred billion neurons, and each neuron is like a microcomputer,
00:47:22 ►
hey, who programmed your brain?
00:47:23 ►
Who programmed my brain?
00:47:24 ►
Why do I speak English instead of Chinese?
00:47:27 ►
Why do I, you know, what do I say?
00:47:29 ►
Oh, yeah, my mind are the programs.
00:47:38 ►
And who popped these sloppy metal disks into my A drive and B drive when I was too young to realize what they were doing to me, huh?
00:47:49 ►
The notion that maybe you can reprogram your brain, start to develop. But a wonderful, egalitarian, humanitarian concept of human nature develops,
00:47:56 ►
and you think of us as basically the carriers of this enormous knowledge information processing equipment,
00:47:57 ►
a hundred billion apples.
00:48:05 ►
It’s the ultimate of the old biblical and the old mystical notions of human nature as being almost divine because we’ve got this incredible computational knowledge information processing equipment.
00:48:12 ►
It’s a leveler. It’s the ultimate leveler.
00:48:14 ►
You know those kids in Ethiopia? You see them starving there?
00:48:17 ►
Or the kids starving in the slums of Calcutta?
00:48:20 ►
Hey, listen, their bodies may be in ruin, but their brains…
00:48:24 ►
You know, the brain’s
00:48:25 ►
the last thing to go. The body, you know, the brain will knock off a foot or a finger,
00:48:29 ►
but the brain keeps itself going, you know, with the sugar at last. The last breath of
00:48:35 ►
oxygen that you ever breathe, your heart, the last squeeze of blood that your heart
00:48:41 ►
sends up is not going to go to your legs or your arms
00:48:46 ►
or even to your favorite genital organs. It’s going to go to your brain because the brain,
00:48:53 ►
well, I think you follow the neuro-politics there.
00:48:58 ►
Okay, now, if the kid in the slums of Calcutta has this enormous, you know, that’s $50 trillion worth of equipment that he or she’s got there.
00:49:10 ►
I mean, isn’t it wonderful?
00:49:12 ►
Well, maybe we can start learning how to program this equipment.
00:49:17 ►
Maybe instead of using people’s bodies as they did in an agricultural society or using people’s machines as we did in an agricultural society, or using people’s machines as we do in an industrial society, if we think of people as carrying this extraordinary knowledge
00:49:29 ►
passing around with them, we get, oh, you know, in other words, you can’t really be
00:49:34 ►
mad at anyone anymore.
00:49:35 ►
You know, the Ayatollah Khomeini, he’s got a perfect reign.
00:49:41 ►
At least he’s got 70 billion left, right?
00:49:44 ►
I know it’s hotter in those deserts over there.
00:49:47 ►
People like Chip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, they’ve got perfect brains.
00:49:54 ►
It’s the programming that messes it up.
00:50:00 ►
This is an ultimately optimistic, ultimately humanitarian, ultimately pluralistic notion, it seems to me.
00:50:09 ►
Now, I want to say a few more words about something that’s very necessary if you’re going to understand what’s going to happen in the next 15 years.
00:50:21 ►
The people that run things, top management, naturally are so busy running things that
00:50:26 ►
they don’t anticipate new things that come up.
00:50:29 ►
You get a new technology and either want to use it to go to war with or to tax people
00:50:37 ►
for or so forth.
00:50:41 ►
Nobody really understands what a computer is.
00:50:51 ►
And I’m sure there are many of you in this crowd, as I was about a year ago, who are computer phobics.
00:50:55 ►
I mean, all during the 60s and 70s, I hated computers.
00:51:01 ►
Computers were the mainframes of IBM, IRS, CIA, KGB.
00:51:03 ►
They were going to mutilate us and punch us and spindle us.
00:51:04 ►
You remember that.
00:51:06 ►
And we had no access to it. You had to have a clearance and an IBM card. The very word
00:51:12 ►
computer meant someone was trying to invade our privacy, manipulate us, control us. And
00:51:17 ►
in fact, they were so smart, that it was even worse, because all that smartness collected
00:51:22 ►
in top management and bureaucracy, it didn’t feel good at all, did it?
00:51:28 ►
And even today with the onset of the personal computer, the factory people, it’s all we’ve got to be very kind to each other and very compassionate.
00:51:38 ►
And naturally, the people in the industrial society, particularly those who are profiting from the industrial smoke sex study,
00:51:44 ►
are going to impose the values and the language of that culture upon
00:51:48 ►
the new culture.
00:51:49 ►
So the very word IBM, for example, means International Business Machine.
00:51:56 ►
One thing it ain’t is it’s not a machine.
00:51:58 ►
You know, machine is a thing with replicable parts.
00:52:00 ►
You’re talking about an electronic system.
00:52:03 ►
You know what the word
00:52:06 ►
computer really means? Look it up in the dictionary when you go home. My dictionary, I think it’s
00:52:11 ►
the Oxford Heritage, computare. The word computare means in Latin to think. So a computer is
00:52:22 ►
something you think with. A computer is something you think with.
00:52:26 ►
And then it goes on to say, a device
00:52:29 ►
which is used to perform repetitious tasks.
00:52:33 ►
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
00:52:34 ►
How factory can you get?
00:52:36 ►
Or which is used in industry, like for oil refining,
00:52:40 ►
or is used in research, like for missiles and so forth.
00:52:43 ►
In other words, to a factory philosopher, a machine to think is a machine to perform many repetitious tasks.
00:52:54 ►
But actually, when you think about it, a book, a good old paperback, wood pulp, rag and glue job.
00:53:03 ►
You don’t remember that?
00:53:05 ►
They print like that with ink.
00:53:09 ►
You can’t change it.
00:53:10 ►
We can do it with a book.
00:53:11 ►
It’s not very interactive.
00:53:11 ►
You can scrawl on the margin,
00:53:14 ►
which I sometimes do.
00:53:16 ►
You can try to write another book,
00:53:17 ►
but the author’s not going to read it anyway.
00:53:19 ►
Not much interaction there.
00:53:21 ►
But even that book,
00:53:22 ►
even the good old rag and glue wood pulp book,
00:53:26 ►
is a thinking machine. God knows it’s created this wonderful industrial society we have.
00:53:30 ►
But if you think about a computer as being a device for thinking, then what is a computer
00:53:38 ►
really? Now, we’ve been led to believe that even a personal computer is this enormous, enormous spaceship cabin of
00:53:48 ►
metal and plastic. Think about a computer. What do you think? You think about an enormous
00:53:52 ►
television set, terminal screen, right? Little dolls here, and you get in color, you get
00:53:57 ►
all those graphs. You notice all the TV commercials about computers, and it’s all people looking around at those pie-shaped graphs, like kiddies playing pie.
00:54:09 ►
I mean, anyway, that’s a digression.
00:54:12 ►
Okay, but here’s this terminal.
00:54:15 ►
Then you get a keyboard.
00:54:17 ►
Now, what does a keyboard and typing have to do with the thinking. All right, listen, I’ve come to really resent
00:54:26 ►
those three rows of QWERTY type,
00:54:29 ►
those Phoenician alphabet words.
00:54:31 ►
You know, the Phoenicians,
00:54:32 ►
4,000 B.C.,
00:54:33 ►
they came up with alpha, beta,
00:54:35 ►
you know, alpha, beta.
00:54:36 ►
Every time you go to,
00:54:37 ►
you look at a computer keyboard,
00:54:39 ►
I don’t care what that’s,
00:54:40 ►
an Atari Commodore 64,
00:54:42 ►
an IBM, whatever it is,
00:54:43 ►
and you see that keyboard, think of
00:54:46 ►
three rows of Phoenician soldiers with spears trying to keep you away from really understanding
00:54:51 ►
that this is a mini-brain or a mini-mind to think with.
00:54:56 ►
I think you’ll get my point, that to the industrial mentality, bigger is better.
00:55:04 ►
And indeed, the fifth generation of artificial intelligence, I don’t know if you follow this,
00:55:09 ►
but our government, the Japanese government, is spending over a billion dollars each, probably more,
00:55:14 ►
to what we call faking machines.
00:55:16 ►
It’s called fifth generation parallel processing.
00:55:20 ►
And their idea is so predictable.
00:55:22 ►
If we can get a building that goes from yodel to there with all this computational equipment,
00:55:29 ►
and we spend a billion dollars, well, it’s got to be smart, right?
00:55:32 ►
That’s the old fallacy of the mechanical age.
00:55:34 ►
Actually, an electronic computer thinking device is a chip,
00:55:43 ►
which you might call a micro-brain because it operates in the same language that
00:55:49 ►
your brain operates on.
00:55:51 ►
The brain doesn’t speak English.
00:55:53 ►
I know I’m not the anti-Anglophile here.
00:55:58 ►
The brain doesn’t speak Yiddish or even Gaelic.
00:56:01 ►
The brain speaks in clusters of off on possibilities probabilities it’s called
00:56:07 ►
quantum physical quantum mechanics that’s your brain operates that way so a computer is a chip
00:56:13 ►
and a screen and it’s some kind of device actually all you need is something to say
00:56:19 ►
yes the only type say no because no is when you’re not saying yes, right? All you need is a chip and a screen and some device to move that thing around on the screen.
00:56:32 ►
Now, all of us in this room, I know, are concerned and depressed and worried about a very fretful and dangerous thing that we see happening in America and the world,
00:56:46 ►
a division into haves and have-nots.
00:56:49 ►
Some of the representations of that in that last election.
00:56:52 ►
Look around the world.
00:56:53 ►
We see this haunting.
00:56:55 ►
We look at Ethiopia.
00:56:55 ►
We see that increasingly, my gosh, if all my kids, he’s 11 years old,
00:57:02 ►
and everything he knows, they’re out pirating software.
00:57:04 ►
All my kids, 11 years old, everything he knows, they’re out pirating software.
00:57:10 ►
I mean, and but it’s an upper middle class situation.
00:57:11 ►
What about the third world? What about the kids in the the less fortunate, affluent neighborhoods who don’t feel that computers like having per Nikes?
00:57:19 ►
Not every kid’s got Nikes.
00:57:21 ►
Every kid’s got a computer, but not with this haunting, terrible division in American society of those that are getting smarter and thinking faster and learning to the new electronic literacy?
00:57:33 ►
And I tell you, we’ve just scratched the surface, see, of how we can accelerate intelligence with this new device.
00:57:40 ►
But I know, I’ve been told by…
00:57:43 ►
And I’ve talked to many engineers about this too, they say,
00:57:45 ►
yeah, it’s certainly possible, that we could have a computer, size of a time magazine,
00:57:50 ►
the whole thing is a screen with a few buttons down at the bottom, you lift up the screen,
00:57:54 ►
the cover, the stick in your pocket, and you go down, right down the street, go to high school,
00:57:59 ►
junior high school, with it, kindergarten.
00:58:01 ►
Inside, you put your little programs, you hook it up to a modem, so you hook it up kindergarten. Inside, you put your little programs. You can hook it up to a modem,
00:58:07 ►
so you hook it up to a phone, so you could actually bring up the New York Times, you
00:58:10 ►
could bring up the Library of Congress, you could bring up, you know, through your motor,
00:58:14 ►
you could be at the beach with it, and a little, works on a battery, and you could bring along
00:58:19 ►
the Encyclopedia Britannica, War and Peace, and Playboy magazine. Also, once it’s on a screen, once it’s on
00:58:29 ►
a screen, you can change it. You can react to it, interact to it. You can cross it out.
00:58:33 ►
You become a co-author. Anyway, it would cost, we’ve got the estimates now down to about
00:58:38 ►
40.
00:58:48 ►
Okay, now $40 I take as the crucial point
00:58:52 ►
because a pair of Nikes cost $40.
00:58:54 ►
Now, every poor kid has a pair of Nikes.
00:58:57 ►
And I’m sure even the most conservative,
00:59:00 ►
penny-pinching American would say,
00:59:02 ►
yeah, we want every American kid to have
00:59:05 ►
a pair of shoes, right? Well, one of your little pocket brains is going to cost less
00:59:12 ►
than a pair of Nikes. As a matter of fact, the only thing to do is to give them away.
00:59:20 ►
What do you mean, give them away? That’s breathing hard liberal, right? No, no, no. Going to save the taxpayer thousands of dollars.
00:59:27 ►
At the present time, the poorest kid in the United States who’s forced by law to go to school,
00:59:34 ►
he or she is 16, how many thousands of dollars do we spend on textbooks for those kids?
00:59:39 ►
By the way, the textbooks, they probably don’t read them, but we’re told that.
00:59:44 ►
Thousands of dollars will be spent by the poor taxpayer to level forests up in Canada,
00:59:48 ►
ship all their wood pulp down to Seattle, where it’s then converted into paper,
00:59:53 ►
and then ship and truck to Massachusetts, where the textbook is printed,
00:59:56 ►
and then shipped to the ghettos of Barrios or the poor sections of L.A., San Francisco, and so forth,
01:00:03 ►
where they’re not read.
01:00:04 ►
sections of LA, San Francisco, and so forth, where they’re not red.
01:00:11 ►
No, even the poorest kid would never steal another kid’s micro-brain.
01:00:13 ►
He’s like stealing a pair of second-hand shoes.
01:00:15 ►
Man, you don’t do that.
01:00:21 ►
Because it should be taken for granted in the United States of America, as the great vision of Jefferson and Franklin would remind us that every American kid, just
01:00:25 ►
like you’re supposed to breathe the air, the water is free, there’s basic food, every American
01:00:31 ►
kid has all the electrons he or she needs to keep the brain moving and changing.
01:00:36 ►
That information is the air and the water and the bread and the shoes of the future.
01:00:52 ►
Now, all sorts of social psychological changes are going to occur.
01:00:58 ►
Okay, I’ve taken you in the last 40 or 50 minutes from the age of feudalism and agricultural society
01:01:04 ►
through a very quick trip through the industrial society to the future.
01:01:09 ►
There are obviously hundreds of detailed issues, like just one, for example.
01:01:19 ►
Everything we know about economics and property and proprietorship has got to be changed.
01:01:27 ►
You can patent a book.
01:01:28 ►
You can own a piece of equipment.
01:01:30 ►
You can own land.
01:01:31 ►
You can own a machine.
01:01:32 ►
But it’s obvious you cannot own clusters of electrons.
01:01:37 ►
Let’s talk about freedom of information.
01:01:39 ►
They’re not talking about getting your FBI files from the government.
01:01:42 ►
Freedom of information means that information is basically free.
01:01:45 ►
You simply, at this point in time, in the future, you cannot monopolize patent or have copyrights on clusters of electrons.
01:01:55 ►
As soon as you take your book from a wood pulp print job and you put it onto a screen, you’ve lost the old-time copyright.
01:02:03 ►
Now, it’s no surprise to you.
01:02:06 ►
You know, there’s been a big boom in the last year on home videos.
01:02:14 ►
It turns out that lower-orbital class and working-class Americans are getting these VHRs,
01:02:21 ►
and they’re going to the rental stores and they’re pirating them.
01:02:26 ►
And the most moral, boring-in-Christian Americans instinctively know that the government has
01:02:32 ►
no right interfering with what you do in the privacy of your own home, no longer fool around
01:02:37 ►
with your electrons.
01:02:38 ►
Even though when they…
01:02:41 ►
When you’ve read these movies.
01:02:46 ►
It says right in the beginning, the FBI is watching you and don’t you try to pirate this.
01:02:51 ►
But good luck.
01:02:55 ►
Okay.
01:02:57 ►
I suggest we take a five-minute break now.
01:02:59 ►
We’re going to come back and have questions.
01:03:01 ►
And I hope we can really get some interesting dialogue going
01:03:05 ►
because my job is to stir you up a little bit,
01:03:09 ►
to challenge you, to…
01:03:12 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:17 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:23 ►
And so he says his job is to challenge you a little bit to, uh, to, uh.
01:03:30 ►
And yes, that’s exactly where the tape cut off.
01:03:33 ►
But I think you can probably fill in the blank and say that Dr. Leary’s job is to challenge you to think for yourself and to question authority.
01:03:42 ►
to think for yourself, and to question authority.
01:03:47 ►
Now, after three weeks, I’ve got a lot of things that I’d like to mention,
01:03:50 ►
but I’m going to save most of them until my next podcast,
01:03:52 ►
which should be out before very long.
01:03:56 ►
Right now, however, I need to remind you,
01:04:01 ►
along with our other fellow salonners who are listening to this podcast soon after I post it,
01:04:06 ►
to be sure that you remember the Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics Conference,
01:04:09 ►
going to be held in New York City next weekend. That’s September 24th through the 26th, 2010, in case you are hearing this sometime in the distant future.
01:04:18 ►
But even if you are hearing this years from now, maybe you should Google Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics, Thank you. botanist, ethnobotanist, and poet. And you can hear him in our podcast number 55.
01:05:06 ►
There are also about a dozen or so other speakers who will be there, and I’ll put a link to
01:05:12 ►
their website along with the program notes for this podcast, which you can find via psychedelicsalon.org.
01:05:19 ►
Now, one of the most important things that will happen at that conference is that a whole
01:05:24 ►
lot of people are going to find quite a few of the others,
01:05:27 ►
which is becoming more important every day.
01:05:30 ►
In fact, here’s a comment about finding the others that Ian posted in the comments section of the program notes for podcast number 242.
01:05:40 ►
Lorenzo, first of all, thank you so much for the psychedelic salon.
01:05:44 ►
I’ve been listening for about one year and gobbling up the goodies voraciously.
01:05:48 ►
What you do is extremely important, in my opinion, not just for all of us listening now,
01:05:53 ►
but for those in the future to have access to all the great info here.
01:05:58 ►
And as a little aside, I should mention that thanks to Bruce Dahmer,
01:06:03 ►
the Psychedelic Salon podcasts are going to be backed up on the Internet Archive at archive.org.
01:06:09 ►
And that’ll take place over a period of time here.
01:06:12 ►
Continuing with Ian’s post, he said,
01:06:15 ►
I just wanted to encourage your thoughts on any way of meeting the others using Meetup or whatever.
01:06:21 ►
I have recently moved to Sonoma County and am hoping to get connected with the
01:06:25 ►
tribe, who I expect are flourishing in this area. I know that you’re extremely busy, but I would
01:06:31 ►
very much appreciate any info about events or ways of connecting with the others. Thank you again.
01:06:36 ►
Be well, my brother, Ian. Well, thanks for that, Ian, and in future podcasts, I’ll continue passing
01:06:43 ►
along some of any new ideas, actually,
01:06:45 ►
that our fellow salonners come up with for finding the others.
01:06:49 ►
As I’ve said before, in my own case, I guess that probably 90% of my close psychedelic friends
01:06:55 ►
have all been people that I’ve met at conferences like Horizons.
01:06:59 ►
But we still need to find better ways to make connections for those of us
01:07:04 ►
who aren’t close enough to a conference to make it or who can’t afford to attend one right now.
01:07:08 ►
And the absolute fact of the matter is that we are everywhere, you know, we being the
01:07:14 ►
worldwide psychedelic community.
01:07:16 ►
And by the way, that includes our friends who have no intention of ever trying these
01:07:21 ►
medicines, but who nonetheless are interested in the ideas that our fellow psychonauts seem to bring back from their travels into entheospace. Thank you. You’ll be hearing from a lot more, particularly in the West Coast Festival Circuit.
01:07:51 ►
His name is Alcian Massive, and his musical style is hip-hop, reggae, and psychedelic.
01:07:54 ►
Quite an interesting mix, don’t you think?
01:07:58 ►
I’ll put a link to his MySpace page in the program notes for this podcast, but right now I’m going to sign off and then play a song of his that he entertained us with after dinner one night.
01:08:07 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:08:11 ►
Be well, my friends.
01:08:13 ►
And now here is Alcyon performing Spirit is Real from his CD titled Dreaming the World Awake.
01:08:48 ►
Dreaming the world awake. Resurrected place to charge your children People will find you waking up by the million Spirit is real, yeah, spirit is real No matter which path chosen
01:08:50 ►
The Bible has no look, so keep your third eye open
01:08:53 ►
Watch your mouth, cause every word that is spoken
01:08:56 ►
Is a life to heal when your spirit is real, yeah
01:08:59 ►
My eyes are open as I peer upon I surroundings
01:09:05 ►
Wife of a low soldier rising up from these here mountains
01:09:11 ►
Children of the earth we were made of the same stuff
01:09:14 ►
Of the universe in the image of a maker
01:09:16 ►
To love one another is a elemental nature
01:09:19 ►
Stand strong all along so Babylon can break your hope
01:09:23 ►
Cause them a keep fulfilling ya and filling ya with lies
01:09:26 ►
And deception as a weapon them be killing ya
01:09:28 ►
No longer shall we suffer upon the samsaric wheel
01:09:31 ►
My eye train that spirit is real, spirit is real
01:09:34 ►
Don’t let them tell ya different scriptures
01:09:37 ►
Or break the place of charge and change
01:09:39 ►
When people worldwide awaken and find a million
01:09:42 ►
Spirit is real, yeah, spirit is real
01:09:46 ►
No matter which path chosen
01:09:48 ►
The Bible has no look, so keep your third eye open
01:09:51 ►
Watch your mouth, cause every word that is spoken
01:09:54 ►
Is a life to heal when the spirit is real
01:09:57 ►
What is the one belief all tribes of the world
01:10:00 ►
Develop individually
01:10:01 ►
The catalyst for the communion
01:10:05 ►
Of your tribal community
01:10:07 ►
It’s the belief in spirits
01:10:09 ►
The intellectuals all around the world
01:10:12 ►
Wonder how this could be
01:10:14 ►
Another quantum physicist
01:10:15 ►
Could be unraveled a mess
01:10:17 ►
With the ultimate potentialities
01:10:19 ►
You see
01:10:20 ►
But a comfort makes me up
01:10:21 ►
And not a dirty money game
01:10:23 ►
They steal away the knowledge
01:10:24 ►
That this rising once again
01:10:26 ►
But I cannot see the fire when the deep is made of flame
01:10:29 ►
Rising once again, rising once again
01:10:31 ►
We are the catalyst
01:10:33 ►
We transform the system for the inside
01:10:35 ►
We activate the third eye with the white light
01:10:38 ►
The catalyst
01:10:39 ►
The quickest man you can deny
01:10:41 ►
We are made of the same light and we’re fighting on the same side
01:10:43 ►
Spirit is free
01:10:44 ►
Don’t let them tell your defense Scripture resurrected place to charge your children We are fighting on the same side I open, watch your mouth cause every word that is spoken is a life to heal when your spirit is real
01:11:06 ►
I go sip, press, just as spirits are walking, no longer shall we suffer cause the chains are broken
01:11:12 ►
They’re much under my ganja but they keep on smoking cause I know that my spirit is real
01:11:17 ►
So turn off your TV, throw away your Xbox, start planting ganjas, it’s growing out your trailer
01:11:24 ►
Stop me tell you what we do, we’re taking good for me.
01:11:27 ►
Start making a change up into your life and live it righteously.
01:11:29 ►
You are a body of light, body of love, reflection of eternal one.
01:11:32 ►
The breath of life below is above the trees, the stars above the sun.
01:11:35 ►
Soon come behold what them already told you.
01:11:38 ►
The white buffalo prophecy of the Lakota.
01:11:41 ►
When the number of the buffalo reached 13 Double income and everlasting peace
01:11:47 ►
From the mountains to the streets
01:11:48 ►
All across the nation
01:11:50 ►
The arrival of the seventh generation
01:11:52 ►
Spirit is real
01:11:53 ►
Don’t let them tell you a different
01:11:55 ►
Scripture resurrected places
01:11:57 ►
Charge your children
01:11:58 ►
People worldwide
01:11:59 ►
Awakened up by the million
01:12:01 ►
Spirit is real
01:12:03 ►
Spirit is real No matter. Spirit is real.
01:12:05 ►
No matter which path chosen.
01:12:07 ►
The Bible under looks to keep your third eye open.
01:12:10 ►
Watch your mouth because every word that is spoken is a life to heal when your spirit is real, yeah. Thank you.