Program Notes
Guest speaker: Lorenzo
Today’s podcast picks up with the third section of the workshop that Bruce Damer and I led on January 28th. This section features my second presentation of the day in which I try to live up to the advanced billing for the workshop which read: “Lorenzo will take us from 2013 into the emerging era of cyber-enhanced humans, immersed in a meme-space stranger than we can suppose.”
In the Occupy segment of the podcast I feature an interview with and a talk by Chris Hedges, including his criticism of the Black Bloc hooligans who are doing their best to destroy the Occupy Movement.
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST
Art by Randal Roberts (who provided the art for this podcast)
Description of the elements in “Fawkes” by Randal Roberts
Video of today’s podcast
What You Should Know About 2012: Answers to 13 Questions by John Hoopes, Ph.D.
Previous Episode
299 - Terence McKenna_ Beyond 2012 Part 2
Next Episode
301 - Terence McKenna_ Beyond 2012 Part 4
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And today is the 156th day of Occupy Wall Street.
00:00:39 ►
And to you wonderful souls who either purchased a copy of one of my books or made a direct donation to the salon, I sincerely appreciate your support.
00:00:42 ►
Hopefully you have already received a little thank you note from me.
00:01:06 ►
And right now I would like to read part of a note that I received from one of this week’s donors. Thank you. salon listeners in the area. I’m keeping my eyes open. I also appreciate the Occupy updates you have been posting. I am resolving to go by the Occupy Little Rock site and check things out.
00:01:11 ►
I admit I have not been up on this, but your posts have led me to look more into it.
00:01:15 ►
I have listened to lots of McKenna talks through the salon slash archives and read his book Food
00:01:21 ►
of the Gods recently. I particularly enjoyed the last two podcasts and hope one day to perhaps meet you and other salonners in person.
00:01:28 ►
For now, I feel connected through the podcast.
00:01:31 ►
Thanks again for all of your work, Stephen M.
00:01:34 ►
Now, the reason I wanted to read that message is because, as you’ll hear in just a moment,
00:01:39 ►
in my presentation at the recent workshop, I proposed that if you want and can get four or more people together,
00:01:46 ►
I’ll Skype into a mini salon of sorts.
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And you’ll hear more about it in a bit, but my thought is that this may be a way for people
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who still haven’t found any of the others in their area to have a reason to at least bring up the subject
00:02:00 ►
of the psychedelic community to sort of test the waters, so to speak.
00:02:04 ►
And I’ll pick up on this train of thought after we first hear today’s program,
00:02:08 ►
which is the next part of the Terrence McKenna Beyond 2012 workshop
00:02:12 ►
that Bruce Dahmer and I gave last month.
00:02:15 ►
As you remember, last week we heard Bruce’s first presentation of the day,
00:02:20 ►
and in the podcast before that we heard my opening presentation at the workshop.
00:02:25 ►
Right now we’re going to pick up after lunch and after the preview screening of Ken Adams’ new film about
00:02:30 ►
Terrence McKenna, which is where I came back for my second presentation. And for my friends down
00:02:36 ►
under, when you hear me say something to the effect that Captain James Cook discovered Australia,
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I humbly apologize because I know that the continent was already well populated with us humans when he arrived.
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He just happened to be the first European whose presence in those waters has been recorded.
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And I knew as I was saying it that Cook couldn’t have discovered Australia
00:02:58 ►
any more than Columbus discovered the Americas.
00:03:01 ►
But at the time, it seemed like too long a diversion to explain my inexact statement. And now that I’ve done so, my guess is that you’ll
00:03:09 ►
agree that this explanation is overly long and actually unnecessary for the
00:03:14 ►
most part. So, so enough of me. Let’s get on with the program, which of course is
00:03:20 ►
even more of me. Boy, after that film it’s kind of hard. I didn’t realize I was going to put myself in a position to follow Ken’s film.
00:03:29 ►
There’s one other movie I’ll tell you about this year that you probably won’t ever see,
00:03:34 ►
but there’s a documentary called The Stark Project,
00:03:38 ►
and unless they win something at Sundance, it probably won’t have a theater run.
00:03:42 ►
But most people aren’t aware of this, that when MDMA,
00:03:45 ►
or at the time, street name Ecstasy, hit the mainstream, ground zero of all places was Dallas,
00:03:52 ►
Texas, at a place called the Stark Club, S-T-A-R-C-K, and the Stark Project is what the documentary
00:03:59 ►
about, and I don’t know if I will make it in the film, they spent enough money interviewing me to
00:04:03 ►
hear about my nefarious ways.
00:04:05 ►
And if you want to hear about the dark side of my background, it will be in there.
00:04:09 ►
That’s all I’ll say about that.
00:04:12 ►
But as far as the movie that Ken just showed us, I’ve seen it now, well, that’s my third time.
00:04:19 ►
And I’m really starting to appreciate what he did as far as, like in the beginning, you know, the books and papers.
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And I was like, the trip coming on.
00:04:27 ►
And next time you see it, you’re going to see a lot of things like that, I think, that will strike your fancy you hadn’t noticed before.
00:04:36 ►
But here’s what I’ve been thinking about is, you know, Terrence McKenna was part of what he called the psychedelic resurgence,
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where psychedelics, you know, essentially they came into somewhat intellectual consciousness
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through Aldous Huxley.
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And then Timothy Leary, of course, was able to yank it away from the scientists
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and get it out onto the street, along with a lot of help in the 60s.
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And then, of course,
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all the war on drugs, everything shut it down. And it really got quiet till Terrence came around. And
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Terrence really was sort of a magnet that started pulling us all together. He’s pulled us together
00:05:15 ►
today. And I think that the next phase beyond Terrence being a magnet for the psychedelic
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resurgence, the next step is you. You are the next step in that link.
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You’ve started back in Eleusis 2,500 years ago or more,
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and it’s been a long stretch.
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And so how do you go about plugging yourself into the psychedelic resurgence?
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How do you help yourself find the others?
00:05:40 ►
And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking because I know Bruce has a number of these workshops planned,
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and besides the fact that I’m a hermit and I don’t like to leave our grandkids in it very much,
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I figured out that the amount of time it takes to prepare for one of these workshops
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and then travel and do it and recover the next day or so,
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in that time I could Skype in to 75 to 100 little mini salons.
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time, I could Skype in to 75 to 100 little mini salons. And so what I’m going to do is anybody,
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and this is ongoing for the rest of this year, anybody that has one of Ken’s films, because I wanted to focus it, if you get a copy of the film, and by the way, I’m not getting a commission,
00:06:20 ►
I’m doing this to find the others. If you have a copy of the film and you get some people over to your house,
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if you have four or more people, after you see the film,
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then I’ll Skype in and we’ll just have a Q&A and talk in a little mini salon.
00:06:34 ►
And I think that the details of this are going to have to evolve and work out,
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but I would hope that eventually we could connect several of them
00:06:41 ►
and we could start finding the others that way, just in a small scale. But if you have a reason to talk to a friend at work and say
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hey I got this cool movie and we’re going to play it tomorrow night and
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this old guy is going to Skype in and talk about it. It’s a reason
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why to ask somebody today. That’s one of the
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you need somehow a reason why to bring the subject up
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around the water cooler or whatever.
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And this might be a way to do it.
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So we’re going to test this and try it.
00:07:09 ►
And as many, and I don’t know quite how we’re going to coordinate it.
00:07:13 ►
It’ll evolve.
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There’ll probably be a website.
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I think we should record them and put them up there.
00:07:17 ►
And it’s essentially you’re going to, what Bruce was saying, the Q&A that Terrence sparked,
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the real meat of those workshops came
00:07:27 ►
from the people themselves who were talking and ideas got passed around. So I’m going to see if
00:07:31 ►
maybe we can’t spark something like that. And so that’s the project going forward here this year.
00:07:36 ►
So if you’re interested in that, you know, give me an email and we’ll give it a try.
00:07:42 ►
Now, last summer, when Bruce talked me into doing this, you know, it’s real easy to say, okay, yeah, let’s just put something down and we’ll send it to Esalen.
00:07:50 ►
And on the outside chance they take it, then we’re in.
00:07:53 ►
And then we’ll figure out what we’re going to do.
00:07:54 ►
So the sentence I got sucked into somehow, I don’t think I wrote this.
00:08:06 ►
It says, Lorenzo will take us from 2013 into the emerging era of cyber-enhanced humans immersed in a meme space stranger than we can suppose.
00:08:12 ►
And so I worked on that this summer because we were getting ready.
00:08:16 ►
We thought we were going to do this on Orcas Island in the end of September,
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and that didn’t come together.
00:08:22 ►
And all of a sudden, all the work I’d done this summer, I essentially threw it out and started over because two things happened.
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One, and I’ll talk about that secondly, but it is the Occupy Wall Street movement.
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That is a very strange meme space.
00:08:39 ►
But the other thing that happened is on the technological front, because I’ve been doing research and talking to Bruce about the future and, you know, 2013 and technologically cyber enhanced humans.
00:08:52 ►
And then about two months ago, my friend Claudia, Claudia Little, who you’ve heard speak about cannabis in the podcast, Claudia got a new cell phone and gave me her old one.
00:09:04 ►
Now, I’ve got a kind of a phone phobia I don’t have a phone myself and I don’t
00:09:08 ►
like talking on the phone and I don’t want to go into all those details but
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so I never have had an iPhone you know and you know I know what they are I
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know everybody has one because I walk around the street like you do
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and I no longer see any eyeballs I see heads down like that all the time.
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And we were out walking at the beach a couple months ago, and there’s a man walking down the
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beach, and his little boy is holding onto his shirt, looking up, talking to him, but his father
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is looking like that, walking along the ocean, you know. And I was at a park with one of our
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granddaughters, and a woman comes in, a little girl, maybe three,
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trying to get her mother to engage with her, but her mother is just sitting on the bench
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with her iPhone. And so I’ve had a real problem, you know, thinking about these until Claudia gave
00:09:56 ►
me this thing. Now, I’ve never hooked up phone service, but this thing is fantastic.
00:10:04 ►
I see why they’re like that.
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And like the second day I had it, you know, I didn’t have any apps on it or anything.
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And I just have it hooked up to Wi-Fi.
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So I took it over to the grandkids’ house.
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And the little one, three and a half years old, not quite.
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She says, oh, do you have such and such a puzzle?
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It’s an app.
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And I said, no, I don’t have that.
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And I said, I think I know how to do it.
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She said, give it to me’t have that. And I said, I think I know how to. She said,
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give it to me. She goes to the app store. She says, put in your ID, your password here. And then see,
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that’s free. And so you can get it installed. She installed an app on my iPhone. Now, I used to be a
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programmer. I was a geek. I just spent a lot of time on interface design. These things are incredible, you know.
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And so I do understand what’s going on with them, that when I was growing up,
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the most technologically advanced science fiction thought my friends and I had is we didn’t think it was possible,
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but wouldn’t it be cool to have one of those two-way Dick Tracy radios?
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If you’ve seen, not many people remember that, but those of us that do.
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That was my wildest high-tech dream.
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And then I get this thing.
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So when I just decided not to bother talking much about cybernetically enhanced humans, because we are. I don’t see how you should want to wait for anything beyond 2013,
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- These things have so much incredible power in your hand that, you know, granted,
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they say next year the new UN Wi-Fi standard is for the speed to be 500 times 3G. So, you know, things are going to get faster.
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They’re going to get smaller.
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But how could you want more than what we have?
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You know, that you’re in the middle of a conversation with somebody
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and they, well, let me look that up.
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You know, they are truly amazing devices.
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Now, what’s the world going to be like
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when everyone in the world is connected to the
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internet? And for me, I have a little indication of that because today there are more human beings
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connected to the internet than were alive on the day I was born. So, you know, that’s really
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something. And of course, the world’s a lot more crowded than on the day I was born, too. And I’ve been noticing that a little bit. But I think that, you know, there’s good things and bad things about
00:12:30 ►
tech. And I’ve got a little soundbite I want to play that there are two people that are going to
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talk in it. One is Terrence and the other is Aldous Huxley. Now, Aldous died in 1963, even before ARPANET.
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And, of course, Terence died in 2000, which was five years before the iPhone.
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And yet, here’s what they had to say about tech.
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This sense of which so many people have and which I think one sees in so many societies,
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this sense that man is being subjected to his own inventions, that he is now the victim of his own technology
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and the victim of his own applied science,
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instead of being in control of it.
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We and I, we are intellectuals,
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trapped in a world of too much information.
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Innocence is gone for us.
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But technology is the real skin of our species.
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We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of
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cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.
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I was originally going to ask for your comments
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about how you feel about this right now, but we’re running a little behind. So instead,
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I’m just going to ask you to interiorize that tonight a little bit and think about it.
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How do we find a balance between the constant like this and ignoring our kids and this incredible
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world of tech that we’ve grown into? You know, the world is really different because of tech.
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And, you know, if you think about the fact that Terrence McKenna was really kind of a forward-looking guy,
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but he died before there was an iPhone, before there was Skype.
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And now the power, you know, here’s the power, I think, that we have in our hands that, you know, we’re just taking it for granted.
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But on the 17th of November, during the 34,000-person march in Manhattan where they marched to the Brooklyn Bridge,
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there was a young man named Tim Poole.
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He’s a homeless kid from Chicago who made it to New York.
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He was camped out in Zuccotti Park, but by the 17th, he had no home
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because they threw him all out the two days before.
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But he had a little, well, he had a Galaxy S2 is what he had.
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And he had that phone hooked up to the net.
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And I’d been watching Tim for months.
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He was one of the live streamers.
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And he had an extra battery pack.
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He was one of the live streamers, and he had an extra battery pack.
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On that day, he webcast live, live stream for something like 17 or 18 hours.
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And I hung with him the whole time that he walked in all these different marches,
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and people would run and get him water.
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They’d hold his phone while he’d go to the bathroom.
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This guy, by the end of the night, now this is in Manhattan,
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which is a real center for the media, and yet he was the only one covering it.
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The other press never really made it. And by the end of the night, the websites of Time Magazine, Al Jazeera, BBC,
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Al Jazeera, BBC, and a couple others all had embedded his feed.
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And by the time he got to the Brooklyn Bridge, just holding that little camera up like that and talking,
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he had over a quarter of a million people in his phone.
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Now, here is a homeless kid living on donations, and he scooped every major media outlet in manhattan now that’s the kind of power we have in our hands right now uh we’ve got power to you know granted uh i can’t do anything
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like ken did but i could make little grandfather videos in the tech that you’re talking about
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we can do all kinds of things and i think now is the age that we we can start letting our
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creativity out,
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even if we’re just kind of stumbling and crawling.
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We don’t have to be masters at it.
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But by able to create some of these video things,
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I think at least with video and sound, is really important.
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And we’re all capable of doing it.
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We all have the tech now.
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So I don’t think we have to wait till 2013 to be cybernetically enhanced humans. I think
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right now we have got so much more tech than we can even use. How many of you have used 10% of
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the features on your word processor? You know, there’s so much stuff there. We’ve got all kinds
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of power at our fingertips, and now we’re fighting each other. So how do we use this to go ahead?
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So we get to the meme, the meme space, stranger than you can suppose.
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And I propose that the Occupy movement is that because never before, I don’t think, in human history,
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have there been so many people so pissed off and in touch with one another.
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The live streaming is something that’s really pulled a lot of these Occupy movements together.
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In fact, the other day, a week or so ago, they occupied Congress.
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And there were only about 2,000 people showed up, but there were like 40 live streams coming
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out of that.
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And Tim Pool’s been traveling around the country teaching people how to do this.
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He’s now got an OcuCopter.
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He’s got his own little drone.
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You can get a drone at Radio Shack that has a high-def camera in it
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and is controlled by your iPhone for $289.
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And just think of that.
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So when the police barricade him off he’s got his own drone
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and he’s a hacker
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and he’s hacked it so it can be handed off
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to 50 different people
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and if it loses control it flies home
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and lands itself
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so these kids are so far ahead
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of the establishment
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that the tech is in the hands of the people
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and I think that is really important
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particularly with what’s going on.
00:18:27 ►
And I don’t want to take much time on this right now to talk about it,
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but I really – and I’ve taken a lot of flack from some of my listeners
00:18:37 ►
because they don’t want to hear about the Occupy movement.
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Well, get used to it.
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You know, this is going to be with us for the rest of
00:18:45 ►
well, for the rest of my life. I don’t think there’s going to be a week that I don’t hear
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something about Occupy. This is something that Bill Moyers and what’s his name with the Pentagon
00:18:56 ►
Papers? Ellsberg. Daniel Ellsberg and Bill Moyers both have stated that in their lifetime, there has never been anything even close to what’s going on.
00:19:09 ►
This is something that is really worth paying attention to because it’s going to change the world.
00:19:15 ►
It’s not going to change politics.
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It’s going to change the world.
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The culture of the planet is changing.
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And, you know, I watched in New York, I watched in
00:19:26 ►
Madison, I watched in Salt Lake City, and they have these chat rooms next to the live streams.
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And people from Tunisia and Egypt are in the chat rooms talking to the people in Salt Lake saying,
00:19:39 ►
hang in there. You know, it’s just amazing. It’s a global movement. And it’s it’s the young people are the ones who are going to do it.
00:19:47 ►
But there’s a lot of old people involved, too. A lot of the old 60s mentality is there.
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My friend Bill Radzinski in Manhattan, you know, he’s got a bad hip. He’s got a pacemaker.
00:19:58 ►
He went out and marched on the 17th for a few hours and then called me afterwards, you know. So what I’m trying to
00:20:05 ►
impress on people is that you don’t have to go camp out somewhere. You don’t have to even like
00:20:11 ►
what’s going on. But I think it’s really important to pay attention to what’s going on because
00:20:16 ►
there’s some very profound changes that are going to be taking place. It’s not that people haven’t
00:20:21 ►
been pissed off and complained about things before, but now it’s and it’s not that people haven’t been pissed off and complained about things before but now it’s and
00:20:26 ►
and it’s probably been going on globally maybe just about as much but now with the internet and
00:20:32 ►
with all of the technology people realize they’re not alone and that’s i think that’s the thing that
00:20:38 ►
terence did for all of us is that we realize we’re not the just because we’re the only one at
00:20:43 ►
thanksgiving dinner that’s a weirdo we’re not alone there’s because we’re the only one at Thanksgiving dinner that’s a weirdo, we’re not alone.
00:20:46 ►
There’s a lot of other Thanksgiving dinners that have weirdos sitting at the table too.
00:20:50 ►
And so I think that if you pay attention to it, you’ll find a place to fit in because it’s about transformation.
00:20:58 ►
And that’s really what the psychedelic community is about, transformation of consciousness.
00:21:05 ►
communities about transformation of consciousness and once any individual transforms their own consciousness then they start doing things that changes things and maybe helps other people
00:21:10 ►
you know at at the uh when i was living in dallas before i found the stark club i was an irish
00:21:18 ►
catholic republican lawyer i was a i was a major activist in the Republican Party. I went to functions at H.L. Hunt’s house where Bob Hope was the emcee.
00:21:28 ►
You know, I was to the right of Attila the Hun.
00:21:32 ►
But then I found the psychedelic community, and now I’m an anarchist.
00:21:38 ►
You know, so the…
00:21:40 ►
That’s what I… Probably the only thing I’ll make the movie is I walked in the club,
00:21:49 ►
an Irish Catholic Republican lawyer, and I walked out still Irish.
00:21:53 ►
But I won’t go into that story right now.
00:21:56 ►
But, you know, these drugs can be dangerous if you’re a Republican
00:22:02 ►
because you might not be one after you’re done.
00:22:08 ►
And, you know, a lot of people are talking about apocalypse and this whole 2012 meme and the apocalypse. But if you look up the
00:22:12 ►
word apocalypse, the definition is an unveiling,
00:22:16 ►
which means the revelation of something heretofore unknown. So
00:22:20 ►
even if you want to use a negative word like apocalypse for the change going on.
00:22:23 ►
And you know, it’s interesting that all of this is popping up in around the 2012 meme,
00:22:30 ►
particularly because if you study Carl Kalman, you know, he had a different date.
00:22:33 ►
His date was October 2011 for the big event.
00:22:37 ►
Well, he didn’t miss it by much, if you want to say Occupy Wall Street started in September 17th.
00:22:42 ►
So, you know, that is something that’s changing.
00:22:44 ►
Now, the Occupy movement isn’t just Occupy Wall Street started in September 17th. So, you know, that is something that’s changing. Now, the Occupy movement isn’t just Occupy Wall Street.
00:22:49 ►
Before Wall Street was occupied, there were demonstrations in Spain with 500,000 people there, in Italy, in Greece.
00:22:58 ►
I mean, this is a worldwide thing going on.
00:23:00 ►
And, of course, you haven’t missed the Arab Spring at all. And some of the people from the
00:23:05 ►
Arab Spring and from the Spanish occupier demonstrations flew to New York and spent the
00:23:11 ►
summer from August 2nd until September 17th planning all this. This is not just a casual
00:23:17 ►
accident. People like David Graeber have been going around for 10 or 11 years talking about this.
00:23:22 ►
The chants that you’re hearing on the street,
00:23:31 ►
you heard them up at the World Trade demonstrations in Seattle about 10 years ago.
00:23:33 ►
So this has been bubbling under the surface,
00:23:38 ►
and I really think that the tech is one of the things that changes it right now.
00:23:39 ►
The tech is bringing this together.
00:23:43 ►
And even, you know, people are saying, well, what’s going on?
00:23:45 ►
Nothing’s happening with the Occupy.
00:23:46 ►
They don’t have an agenda.
00:23:47 ►
They haven’t put out demands or anything.
00:23:54 ►
But if you recall this past summer, all you heard about in the news was the budget deficit, you know,
00:23:56 ►
and they were fighting that and they weren’t going to vote for it. Well, just last week, without any discussion as a routine matter, they raised the deficit by another $1.2 trillion.
00:24:05 ►
No strings attached.
00:24:06 ►
Obama can do what he wants.
00:24:07 ►
But what’s all the talk now?
00:24:09 ►
Income inequality.
00:24:10 ►
At Davos, Switzerland, where all the financial elite met this week,
00:24:15 ►
income inequality and the potential demise of capitalism
00:24:20 ►
were the two number one and two things on the agenda.
00:24:23 ►
So this is being paid attention to.
00:24:26 ►
Occupy Congress happened, and the next day the SOPA Act was taken off the table
00:24:32 ►
and put back in its cage.
00:24:33 ►
So, you know, yeah.
00:24:35 ►
But we’ve got to stay vigilant.
00:24:37 ►
You know, there’s another one that they’re talking about now.
00:24:40 ►
That one’s gone now too, I think.
00:24:41 ►
But ACTA is the next one.
00:24:44 ►
So, you know, we’re not going to be able to let our guard down.
00:24:47 ►
But ironically, after all of this 2012 meme that some of us have been trying to kind of say,
00:24:54 ►
hey, you know, that’s too apocalyptic, it’s end of the world, you know,
00:24:57 ►
it’s like the Y2K revisited and then there’s going to be 2020 or whatever.
00:25:03 ►
Well, something is happening in 2012, besides the election that’s going to be a 2020 or whatever. Well, something is happening in 2012.
00:25:06 ►
Besides the election that’s going on, this whole under, not underground,
00:25:12 ►
but this rumbling just beneath the surface is starting to come to the surface.
00:25:17 ►
So something’s up.
00:25:19 ►
And if you want to, well, first of all, and I’ll try to remember to post this on the website,
00:25:25 ►
John Hoops wrote an article for Psychology Today,
00:25:28 ►
and it’s called The 13 Things You Need to Know About 2012 and the Mayan Calendar.
00:25:33 ►
And I’ll try to make sure we can get that more public because it really puts things in perspective
00:25:38 ►
that for the most part, everything that’s popularly written about the 2012 and the Mayan calendar is all made up.
00:25:46 ►
It’s just all coming out of people wanting to sell books. The scholarship is quite different
00:25:51 ►
from what you’ve been reading. So that’s something you might want to look into. However, there’s
00:25:54 ►
always the danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so let’s make it a good prophecy if we’re
00:26:01 ►
going to fulfill it. Now, there’s something else going on in the sky besides
00:26:05 ►
the calendar coming to the end of 2012 this year, which comes to the end of the year every year,
00:26:11 ►
I guess, doesn’t it? And normally we just get a new calendar and replace it, which is what I’m
00:26:16 ►
going to do this year. But there is actually an event taking place in the heavens that has both
00:26:23 ►
some astronomical significance and some historical
00:26:26 ►
significance. And it’s called the transit of Venus. How many of you are aware of the transit
00:26:31 ►
of Venus? Oh, good. That’s quite a few. People don’t talk about this much, but, you know,
00:26:40 ►
the transit of Venus is like an eclipse. If Venus is bigger than the moon, so if it was closer to us,
00:26:46 ►
it would fully eclipse the sun when it went across it.
00:26:49 ►
But as a result of it being so far away, it’s just a little dot that goes across the sun.
00:26:54 ►
The transit of Venus across the sun is one of the most,
00:26:58 ►
it’s the longest spaced returnable astronomical observation, one of them that we use.
00:27:05 ►
It comes in cycles of two, and there’s two cycles of two that take 243 years.
00:27:12 ►
And the last cycle of two is going to complete in this pair June 6th of this year.
00:27:21 ►
It transited in 2004, and now it’s transiting again in the middle of 2012.
00:27:27 ►
And that’s the time frame for a transit of Venus.
00:27:31 ►
Nobody alive today will be alive for the next one because it’s over 100 years from now.
00:27:36 ►
So that’s the astronomical event.
00:27:40 ►
Here is the historical significance of that.
00:27:50 ►
event. Here is the historical significance of that. During the first transit pair that humans really became aware of from a scientific basis and tracked, and they were really looking into it,
00:27:57 ►
during that eight-year period is when Magellan circumnavigated the globe and, beyond all doubts, laid to rest the flat Earth.
00:28:06 ►
I mean, everybody from that moment on, the Earth was round.
00:28:10 ►
It’s a planet.
00:28:10 ►
It’s a globe in the air floating through space.
00:28:13 ►
That was solidified in human minds during that transit in the 1600s.
00:28:19 ►
During another transit, the first global cooperative scientific experiment took place.
00:28:29 ►
To where James Cook, it’s when, you know, they say, well, he discovered Australia and Hawaii and all.
00:28:35 ►
But his whole purpose was to take the scientists down to Australia for the transit of Venus
00:28:39 ►
because there were scientists all over the world on different continents from different countries
00:28:50 ►
because there were scientists all over the world on different continents from different countries cooperating for the first time in essentially almost real time on a single project. And it was a coming together of human minds for a single purpose.
00:28:55 ►
And that happened during that transit of Venus.
00:28:58 ►
During another transit of Venus is when the World Postal Service finally got inaugurated and put into place.
00:29:04 ►
So then anybody in the world could send a letter to someone else in the world.
00:29:09 ►
And so there has been some human significance during these eight-year periods.
00:29:14 ►
So what has happened from 2004 till now?
00:29:17 ►
Well, among other things, we have wireless.
00:29:20 ►
We have the iPhone.
00:29:21 ►
We have Facebook.
00:29:22 ►
We have Twitter.
00:29:23 ►
And we have these live videos.
00:29:26 ►
You know, I don’t see how anything could be more of a coming together of humanity than, say, Skype.
00:29:33 ►
You know, I can Skype my grandkids in Florida.
00:29:36 ►
I can Skype my friends in Australia.
00:29:38 ►
And the kids like Tim Poole can carry a little iPhone with a quarter of a million people from all over the world watching him.
00:29:45 ►
So we have really gone from seeing the world round to seeing it’s a small little marble because we can get our arms around it in a single day with all of these technologies.
00:29:57 ►
So I think that right now with what’s going on, if you just find your favorite role,
00:30:05 ►
maybe it’s to ignore the Occupy movement and tell everybody, be a naysayer and say,
00:30:10 ►
don’t pay attention to it because that’ll get attention to it too.
00:30:13 ►
So, you know, it doesn’t really matter what you do,
00:30:17 ►
but I think that you should really kind of pay attention to what’s going on here.
00:30:22 ►
I think it’s very much more important than you think.
00:30:26 ►
And as I see things evolving,
00:30:29 ►
what I think that we might want to reread and look into a little bit
00:30:34 ►
is an essay that Terence wrote.
00:30:36 ►
It’s in several places.
00:30:38 ►
The copy I have is in Robert Forte’s book,
00:30:40 ►
In Theogens and the Nature of Religion,
00:30:42 ►
which has a number of great essays.
00:30:44 ►
But in it, Terence has one that he calls Psychedelic Society. book, Entheogens and the Nature of Religion, which has a number of great essays.
00:30:48 ►
But in it, Terrence has one that he calls Psychedelic Society.
00:30:55 ►
And there’s a lot of things in there that I find very, very fascinating.
00:31:01 ►
But in getting ready for today, one of my thoughts was I want to come up with one thing of Terrence’s I’m not going to carry into 2013 and one thing I am
00:31:05 ►
going to carry the thing I’m not going to carry is 2012 because one way or another either it’ll
00:31:10 ►
be the end of the world or it won’t be but if it is then I hope everybody comes up and says
00:31:15 ►
I told you so I told you so but I don’t think they will but I think that the thing that he
00:31:23 ►
said in there the one thing that has struck me the most and is worth more than anything he’s given me,
00:31:29 ►
is just a little one-liner.
00:31:30 ►
He said, if you believe something, you’re precluded from believing the opposite.
00:31:36 ►
And so you’ve limited the scope of your mind by one half.
00:31:40 ►
And since then, I have tried to shed all my beliefs and turn them into working hypotheses.
00:31:46 ►
I just put a new label on them.
00:31:48 ►
But it’s a lot easier to change a working hypothesis than a belief, simply because you’re not married to the things in the same way.
00:31:56 ►
And, you know, he had some other things.
00:31:57 ►
He says that, you know, that psychedelic experience is about abandoning belief for experience.
00:32:07 ►
psychedelic experience is about abandoning belief for experience. And so, you know, you can believe that, oh, there’s a bunch of hippie kids camping out in an Occupy Park, or you can go experience
00:32:13 ►
standing on a corner and having people come by, honk, and give you the peace sign, and see how
00:32:17 ►
much support there is for this. There’s experiences to be held, to have all across a whole wide range of things in the society today.
00:32:27 ►
And he ended that that essay saying we need to be exemplars that live as far into the future as possible.
00:32:37 ►
And, you know, that means something different for every one of us because we all have different concepts of the future. And, you know, if I
00:32:45 ►
thought about living as far into the future as possible, well, for me, that’s tomorrow now.
00:32:50 ►
I don’t try to, I try to live intensely in the present. You know, the past is past. It’s gone.
00:32:56 ►
It doesn’t exist. The future doesn’t exist. Here and now is all that we really have. It’s just a
00:33:01 ►
lot of here and now strung together. Now, I think there are some paths to
00:33:05 ►
a psychedelic society that also blend in with the Occupy movement, and you can pick one. I’m just
00:33:11 ►
going to kind of list them here in case you haven’t heard of them. One of them is the transition town
00:33:17 ►
movement. I know Mary C. knows about it. Who else knows about the transition? Oh, good. Whoa,
00:33:22 ►
look at that. That’s really impressive.
00:33:26 ►
I’m so happy because this started, I guess, in the 90s in England.
00:33:30 ►
Is that right?
00:33:31 ►
And basically, it’s people who are preparing for a post-carbon world or a really expensive gas world.
00:33:40 ►
And they’re coming together in little communities, hopefully where they can walk to each other. And they’re talking, exploring things about community gardens and a whole range.
00:33:50 ►
They’ve got books and workshops and things like that.
00:33:52 ►
But basically, it’s people looking to the future saying, how can we live on this planet a little more sustainably?
00:34:00 ►
I mean, that’s the bottom line. And if you think it isn’t going to be an emergency, the only economists that really clearly predicted the 2008 crash has predicted that gas, the oil this year, will get to 7 a gallon in the U.S.
00:34:18 ►
So transition town really might be more important than we think, quicker.
00:34:22 ►
Another thing is alternative currencies.
00:34:22 ►
really might be more important than we think, quicker.
00:34:24 ►
Another thing is alternative currencies.
00:34:28 ►
There are like 1,000 alternative currencies in the U.S. already, and people are starting them in different ways and form shapes,
00:34:32 ►
and you can do it all legally,
00:34:34 ►
and that’s something that you might want to look into
00:34:36 ►
because if you’re using an alternative currency,
00:34:39 ►
you’re keeping as much money out of the military industrial prison complex as you can,
00:34:45 ►
and I think that’s important.
00:34:46 ►
There are cul-de-sac communities forming where people are finding neighborhoods
00:34:50 ►
where houses are being foreclosed, and instead of having a commune,
00:34:55 ►
they’ll buy up all the houses in the cul-de-sac and then get a community garden.
00:34:59 ►
So it’s a little community, but it’s not a commune community,
00:35:02 ►
but they do share a lot of things.
00:35:03 ►
That’s another one.
00:35:05 ►
Community gardens are getting very big. And then time banks. Time banks have been around for a
00:35:11 ►
decade or more now, and they’ve been approved by the IRS as a non-taxable transaction because
00:35:16 ►
you put time in. And I might go babysit for somebody. She might go do some web work for somebody who might clear the garden for somebody or cut the lawn.
00:35:30 ►
And all of those hours go into the time bank, and then you can spend the hours for something else,
00:35:34 ►
like the elderly are getting driven to their doctor’s appointments,
00:35:39 ►
and in exchange they’re doing babysitting or whatever.
00:35:42 ►
It actually kind of began over in Japan with the young people moving to the cities
00:35:46 ►
and getting a friend to take care of their parent back in their hometown,
00:35:50 ►
and then they would wind up taking care of somebody in the city.
00:35:53 ►
And so the time banks are something that also are growing.
00:35:56 ►
So there’s all kinds of opportunities that don’t involve protesting and camping out and things like that,
00:36:01 ►
but these are ways that we can start changing things.
00:36:01 ►
and camping out and things like that.
00:36:04 ►
But these are ways that we can start changing things.
00:36:08 ►
And a psychedelic society isn’t a society where drugs are legal and everybody does drugs all the time and stuff like that.
00:36:11 ►
It’s where people learn to think outside the box.
00:36:14 ►
People are looking for experience, and they’re not following gurus and stuff like that.
00:36:19 ►
So I think that’s the direction that we’re heading in, and I’m very excited about it.
00:36:25 ►
For the first time in a really long time, I’m excited about where I’m going.
00:36:30 ►
Now, let’s see if I can find my notes here.
00:36:33 ►
There we go.
00:36:37 ►
Oh, okay.
00:36:38 ►
Got lost.
00:36:39 ►
There’s a Transition LA movement.
00:36:42 ►
I mean, you can plug in on the Internet.
00:36:44 ►
Oh, is there?
00:36:45 ►
All over the city. Oh, really? So there’s Internet. Oh, is there? All over the city.
00:36:46 ►
Oh, really?
00:36:46 ►
So there’s little pockets of it.
00:36:48 ►
Yes, all over the city.
00:36:49 ►
Yeah.
00:36:50 ►
Yeah, I’m on the Transition San Fernando Valley.
00:36:56 ►
Another one.
00:36:57 ►
Naomi?
00:36:58 ►
Yeah.
00:36:58 ►
You too?
00:36:58 ►
Transition Marvista Venice, also in Culver City.
00:37:02 ►
They all have their own little pod.
00:37:03 ►
Wow.
00:37:04 ►
See?
00:37:05 ►
You know, it’s really growing a lot more than I thought.
00:37:07 ►
So cook up with some of these people here if you live in this area and see if you can.
00:37:13 ►
Bendicino as well.
00:37:15 ►
So it is underway.
00:37:17 ►
And, you know, that you don’t have to say the word occupy.
00:37:21 ►
You can say the word transition, and it’s a lot less tense.
00:37:25 ►
to say the word occupy, you can say the word transition, and it’s a lot less tense. But I think one of the things that us here today should just pay attention to, because we’ve done
00:37:33 ►
it already, is we have self-selected ourselves. I mean, you’re self-selected to be here. We’re
00:37:39 ►
self-selected to expand our experiences, our range of thinking, our consciousness, if you will.
00:37:46 ►
And when we expand our consciousness, it expands the consciousness of the whole species,
00:37:52 ►
the noosphere consciousness.
00:37:53 ►
So I think what we’re doing is we have self-selected to bring the archaic consciousness
00:37:58 ►
back to our species, back to this planet.
00:38:01 ►
And in the spirit of the Internet, in fact, I forgot to bring my copy.
00:38:04 ►
Wait, I’ve got a copy here.
00:38:06 ►
I want to read a couple real short things.
00:38:13 ►
And this, I have a subsection
00:38:18 ►
I call The Awakening of the Neosphere,
00:38:21 ►
which is what I believe
00:38:22 ►
is actually taking place right now.
00:38:24 ►
And in 1998, and there’s an error in the book that says 1988, but in 1998, Ralph Abraham
00:38:32 ►
wrote a book called The Evolutionary Mind, in which he wrote, I believe that the World
00:38:37 ►
Wide Web is, as a matter of fact, the Neogenesis of the Neosphere.
00:38:42 ►
And then even earlier, right after World War II,
00:38:46 ►
Teilhard de Chardin was writing, and this is at a time,
00:38:50 ►
I think there were like five, really five mainframe computers on the planet,
00:38:53 ►
and there were no computer networks.
00:38:55 ►
This is a long time ago.
00:38:57 ►
He wrote, no one can deny that a network,
00:39:00 ►
a world network of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever-increasing speed,
00:39:07 ►
which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us.
00:39:12 ►
With every day that passes, it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively.
00:39:20 ►
And that’s the key.
00:39:22 ►
I think that the decade of the me’s are over and i think we have to think
00:39:26 ►
collectively if we’re going to pull our species through this and i close this chapter talking
00:39:30 ►
about the enlightenment of homo cyber which i’ve now changed to homo divinus but that’s
00:39:36 ►
another story the day will come and many of us now alive will see that day when only historians
00:39:43 ►
will be talking about the Internet.
00:39:46 ►
As you know, the Internet is only a convenient way of describing the ever-growing and ever-interconnecting network of networks
00:39:52 ►
that carry our voice, video, and data communications.
00:39:56 ►
Without even noticing it, we will quit thinking about how our machines and ourselves are all interconnected,
00:40:02 ►
and instead we will focus on the content of our
00:40:05 ►
communications. The day will also come when the expanded sense of awareness that shamans and
00:40:12 ►
psychonauts seek in entheospace will be more widely experienced, for people will be using
00:40:19 ►
the portal of deep cyberspace, cyberdelic space, to launch their minds into the unlimited realm of entheospace
00:40:26 ►
where Gaian consciousness exists.
00:40:29 ►
As more and more minds constantly jump in and out of entheospace,
00:40:33 ►
the possibility arises for order to spring from this chaos of mind,
00:40:37 ►
and it is this new order I see as the awakening of the noosphere.
00:40:41 ►
It is anyone’s guess as to what form this new order will take.
00:40:45 ►
It might become manifest in a kind of super psychic awareness we all share, in essence,
00:40:50 ►
a truly global consciousness. Should ever such a moment occur, it would be fair to say that moment
00:40:56 ►
is also when the evolution of global consciousness actually begins. And had I wrote that, written
00:41:02 ►
that today, I’d write a little more up to date, but that was
00:41:05 ►
written in 99 actually. So I think that we can see with the tech and the awareness and what’s
00:41:12 ►
going on, people have been talking about this for decades and longer. Like Terrence says, we’re
00:41:18 ►
going down the birth canal right now. We’re really just getting started as a thoughtful species.
00:41:27 ►
And I think we need to dream.
00:41:28 ►
We don’t dream enough.
00:41:37 ►
You know, what would life be like on this planet if we could dream the most wild, crazy dreams and then make it happen?
00:41:41 ►
And that’s really what’s going on with virtual reality and things like that.
00:41:46 ►
Terrence in the movie talked about turning ourselves inside out.
00:41:51 ►
And I want to play a short soundbite now that’s actually by a guy named Fraser Clark.
00:41:53 ►
How many of you know who Fraser was?
00:41:55 ►
Yeah.
00:41:56 ►
Fraser was really the cornerstone of the underground,
00:42:00 ►
the countercultural community from the 60s on up until a few years ago when he
00:42:04 ►
died.
00:42:04 ►
He was very instrumental in the rave scene in England.
00:42:08 ►
He was all over the world, including he led the Zippy Tour of the United States.
00:42:14 ►
And this is from a talk he gave at Stanford University back in the early days of the rave movement.
00:42:20 ►
But what he does is he talks about Terence’s idea of turning ourselves inside out.
00:42:27 ►
And to me, this is the wildest dream possible for a psychedelic future.
00:42:33 ►
Well, the computers play right into that.
00:42:35 ►
Okay, this is a perfect place to end.
00:42:38 ►
I think McKenna talked about this a couple of years ago, Terence McKenna,
00:42:41 ►
and I used it last year as kind of what is the zippy vision of where we want to go to? What is the balance between
00:42:47 ►
technology and organic? Okay. Imagine
00:42:51 ►
a world in the future, a planet, where there isn’t one inch of concrete. It’s covered in
00:42:56 ►
rainforest, completely 100% natural.
00:42:59 ►
A naked couple walking across a clearing. Looked pretty much like
00:43:03 ►
us, maybe a little bit hairier, but naked.
00:43:06 ►
They pause, she bends down, lifts the flower without breaking it and puts it in her mouth,
00:43:14 ►
thereby making an electronic connection.
00:43:17 ►
Menus drop down in their eyes.
00:43:18 ►
They plug into a sort of global computerized brain.
00:43:23 ►
They go into a virtual reality super city.
00:43:26 ►
They make their deals.
00:43:27 ►
They go to college.
00:43:28 ►
They have all the whatever they’re doing.
00:43:30 ►
We have meetings in virtual reality.
00:43:33 ►
But in fact, we’re all living as naked apes back in the jungle.
00:43:38 ►
In other words, the whole technology has been inhaled into virtual reality.
00:43:43 ►
There’s no more concrete, no more physical buildings anywhere,
00:43:47 ►
instead of being exhaled on the planet.
00:43:49 ►
Now this, to me, this is a zippy vision,
00:43:51 ►
because I love nature, and I love the super city.
00:43:55 ►
The only thing I’ve got against the super city is that it’s killing off the nature.
00:43:58 ►
So if somehow we could put that into virtual reality, into cyberspace,
00:44:03 ►
then we’d crack it.
00:44:04 ►
So you see the vision, sometimes we call
00:44:06 ►
the zippy thing
00:44:07 ►
Holocaust aversion therapy. I mean, people
00:44:10 ►
things seem so bad
00:44:12 ►
that people have almost given up trying to change the planet.
00:44:14 ►
But if we could get them excited about where
00:44:16 ►
we could be and all the amazing things
00:44:18 ►
that are possible that we get through the current
00:44:20 ►
turbulence, and people could really
00:44:22 ►
get excited about the future we could have,
00:44:24 ►
then it would be like Holocaust aversion.
00:44:26 ►
We don’t want Holocaust.
00:44:27 ►
We want to get through.
00:44:29 ►
Okay, I’ll have to stop now.
00:44:30 ►
That’s the time.
00:44:32 ►
Thanks very much.
00:44:39 ►
So that’s Frazier and actually Terrence’s original idea.
00:44:43 ►
And the only thing I don’t like about it is I’d like to have shoes.
00:44:46 ►
I don’t like to go barefoot out in the forest.
00:44:49 ►
But it’s an interesting vision.
00:44:51 ►
And while it’s not really practical 100% like what he says,
00:44:57 ►
but we can do so much more by not spreading our carbon footprint everywhere.
00:45:03 ►
We can internalize a lot of these things.
00:45:05 ►
And virtual reality is one of the ways to do it.
00:45:09 ►
I think Skyping into workshops is a way to do it.
00:45:11 ►
I think there are a lot of things that we can do if we put our minds to it.
00:45:14 ►
I’m so excited to see how many people involved in the transition movement here.
00:45:18 ►
So for me, I have, you know, I’ve been here for a few years.
00:45:23 ►
I think Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term when I was born.
00:45:26 ►
And so I had pretty much given up hope this year, up until this year,
00:45:32 ►
actually until the Occupy movement started.
00:45:34 ►
I thought, well, it’s just going to be another, you know, more of the same, you know.
00:45:39 ►
The pendulum will swing back and forth.
00:45:41 ►
I don’t think so this time.
00:45:43 ►
I think things are going to really change,
00:45:46 ►
and I think that ultimately it’s going to get pretty spooky scary,
00:45:50 ►
but it will never get as spooky scary as some of the wild psychedelic trips we’ve had.
00:45:56 ►
So our role is to be the keel.
00:45:59 ►
We’re going to hold our species together in these rough waters
00:46:02 ►
because you just can’t get weird enough for us.
00:46:05 ►
So we’ll be fine. That’s all I have right now. Thank you.
00:46:17 ►
I would like to point out, too, that we talk about what can we do. You know, we’re sitting here. Well,
00:46:23 ►
we don’t have this. We don’t have that. but i’d like to point out that in this room today there are more people than were in the room that
00:46:30 ►
signed the declaration of independence and that made a difference in the world so it’s a matter
00:46:36 ►
of willpower of what you want to do and whether we know it or not we all are living our own personal myth, but we haven’t really consciously created it.
00:46:46 ►
Now, I started a few years ago. I have a three-step process for what I call running your life,
00:46:54 ►
and it’s create your own myth, live your own myth, and then the hard one is believe your own myth.
00:47:01 ►
Now, when I started the podcast, I put psychedelic salon in quotes and googled it,
00:47:08 ►
and there were zero hits. Now there are thousands of hits for psychedelic podfather,
00:47:14 ►
which some of the younger generation have named me. So I have created this myth of psychedelic
00:47:22 ►
podfather. I’ve been living it. But I have to tell you, I can’t quite believe it, you know, that I am no different from you.
00:47:30 ►
You know, I was at a conference just a decade ago sitting in the room saying, gosh, what am I going to do?
00:47:36 ►
I want to get involved.
00:47:37 ►
And I thought, well, I’ll go to Vietnam and go up to the Central Highlands.
00:47:40 ►
I know there’s mushroom cults.
00:47:42 ►
Nobody’s ever, you know, I don’t have any skill set to do that.
00:47:45 ►
And fortunately, my wife told me
00:47:46 ►
I was completely nuts.
00:47:48 ►
So I’m doing this instead.
00:47:50 ►
So I haven’t gotten to the believe part,
00:47:53 ►
but you, if you want to,
00:47:54 ►
you might want to give some serious thought
00:47:56 ►
that whether you know it or not,
00:47:57 ►
you’re living your own myth.
00:47:59 ►
So create your own myth,
00:48:00 ►
live your own myth,
00:48:01 ►
and then really try like heck
00:48:02 ►
to believe it if you can.
00:48:05 ►
Yeah, exactly. And I think if you do that, you’ll wind up a life with very few regrets.
00:48:12 ►
This is floating around the internet this past week, and maybe it’s because I’m getting older,
00:48:16 ►
I clicked through to read it. But from hospice workers collected what are the top five deathbed
00:48:22 ►
regrets. Number five, I wish that I’d let myself be happier.
00:48:27 ►
Number four, I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
00:48:31 ►
Number three, I wish that I had the courage to express my feelings.
00:48:36 ►
Number two, I wish I didn’t work so hard.
00:48:39 ►
But the number one deathbed regret that has been cataloged is,
00:48:43 ►
I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
00:48:52 ►
You know, that’s really tough.
00:48:54 ►
But you notice that of all those five, there wasn’t anything about having a job or saving money or, you know, it’s all about stuff.
00:49:03 ►
It’s not even about joining a movement.
00:49:04 ►
It’s about stuff that you really about joining a movement. It’s about
00:49:05 ►
stuff that you really do in your head. And that’s what psychedelic thinking is about. That’s really
00:49:09 ►
what we’re doing. So all the regrets were focused on things within their power, you know, and
00:49:15 ►
the tricky one is that last one, part of it, not the life others expect, because remember that old
00:49:22 ►
Ricky Nelson song, you know, you can’t please everybody, but you got to please yourself. Well, you know how, you know, I had a, well, he was a business
00:49:30 ►
partner. He was a very complex relationship, but he was one of the most charismatic people I’d ever
00:49:35 ►
met. And he really lived his life his way. But one night in a, in a fit of honesty, he said, you know,
00:49:42 ►
everybody wants to be like me, but nobody wants to be around me.
00:49:47 ►
And so there’s a delicate balance there.
00:49:50 ►
I’m going to play a soundbite here
00:49:52 ►
in just a minute,
00:49:52 ►
but first I want to read a Gandhi quote
00:49:54 ►
that I hope you’ll take to heart.
00:49:56 ►
He once said,
00:49:57 ►
what you do will be insignificant,
00:50:01 ►
but it is very important that you do it.
00:50:04 ►
And I want to play Terence’s comment on
00:50:06 ►
that right now. Are we ready? What the universe is, is a novelty producing and conserving engine.
00:50:15 ►
And if we define novelty as density of connectedness, then guess what? The human neocortex becomes the center of the cosmic drama
00:50:28 ►
because the human neocortex is the most densely ramified and connected material object known to exist in the universe.
00:50:39 ►
So after a thousand years of human marginalization
00:50:43 ►
suddenly through the injection of science,
00:50:48 ►
there is permission to believe that the cosmic drama really is about us,
00:50:54 ►
that we really do carry the load in this play,
00:51:00 ►
that this is a play about the career and preservation of novelty and complexity.
00:51:06 ►
And thus, we are central actors in that drama.
00:51:12 ►
And hence, if something were to happen to us and our enterprise,
00:51:17 ►
the universe would be vastly impoverished by that law.
00:51:23 ►
Well, I agree with that, Terrence,
00:51:25 ►
but let me ask you, how?
00:51:28 ►
How do we do it?
00:51:30 ►
By magic.
00:51:31 ►
By magic.
00:51:32 ►
By magic.
00:51:52 ►
So now we know how to do it. But all serious, all kidding aside, I think it is important to kind of consider what he says,
00:51:59 ►
because I have this tendency to say, oh, you know, I kind of live my life and, you know, it’s not that important.
00:52:05 ►
And, you know, if he what he says is right.
00:52:08 ►
And I have a hunch that maybe this enterprise of us, our species here on Earth is much more important than we think.
00:52:15 ►
That all we know right now, we know there’s billions, hundreds of billions of planets, but we haven’t met anybody there yet.
00:52:21 ►
So whatever is going on, as Bruce said, there’s all the computer systems
00:52:25 ►
on earth can’t even model this one neuron. And we’ve got a billion of them. So or trillion,
00:52:30 ►
I guess. So, you know, there must be something important about these brains and bodies and the
00:52:35 ►
minds that are are being carried around in them. So I think we should take ourselves kind of
00:52:40 ►
seriously. And I’d like to close by reading two paragraphs out of the Genesis Generation,
00:52:45 ►
my novel.
00:52:47 ►
And those of you who have heard it or read it,
00:52:50 ►
it’s from the Wizards Council scene.
00:52:52 ►
And this is Apache delivering these words.
00:52:56 ►
A thousand years from now, humans will most likely still be walking the earth,
00:53:00 ►
as we have done for over a million years already.
00:53:03 ►
Some of those future humans will have genetic links to us. However, our names and our deeds will have long since faded
00:53:09 ►
from living memory. Yet, that does not mean that we will be forgotten. For those future humans,
00:53:16 ►
those future reincarnations, will look back to the age that is just now beginning, and they will
00:53:21 ►
remember you. They will remember you not by name, but as having been
00:53:25 ►
part of a new generation of humans. They will remember you as one of the people who helped to
00:53:31 ►
build a civilization that should last for yet another thousand years. And those people of the
00:53:36 ►
future will be alive because they had at least one ancestor, maybe you, who is a part of what
00:53:42 ►
their historians will call the Genesis generation.
00:53:46 ►
This generation isn’t bounded by the age of its members.
00:53:49 ►
That isn’t how it’s defined.
00:53:51 ►
Members of the Genesis generation distinguish themselves by the way they think and the way they live.
00:53:57 ►
It is a state of mind, not a state of body.
00:53:59 ►
We are the people who are preparing the land for whatever comes next, a new foundation for a new civilization.
00:54:06 ►
And that is precisely what we are all about.
00:54:09 ►
You and I are the Genesis generation.
00:54:13 ►
Thank you.