Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Biology seems to be a chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy so that it leaves the subatomic realm and can be present in a hundred and forty five pound block of meat.”
“Chaos is roving through the system and able to undo, at any point, the best laid plans.”
“Because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted together all its parts are becoming co-dependent.”
“National governments are under paid, under staffed, and under talented.”
“Don’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry… . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin’ out loud. It’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.”
“In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.”
“The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.”
“Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.”
Books mentioned in this podcast
Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes in Physics [Paperback]
by Nick Herbert
Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics [Paperback] by Nick Herbert
A Vision by W. B. Yeats
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352 - The Amazing Thing About Psychedelics
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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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Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. So now we’re going to listen to the final session of the 1994 workshop that Terrence McKenna led. In the last podcast we left off as the
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Saturday afternoon session ended, but after listening to the Saturday evening session I’ve
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decided not to podcast it, mainly because I’m quite sure that you would find it really boring. How can that be, you say? Terrence is never boring.
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Well, on that Saturday night, the entire session was given over to Terrence’s class on how to use the TimeWave software on a PC.
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And basically, it was a computer instruction class where much of the time was spent with Terrence saying things like, now press the up arrow key, now press the enter key, and exciting things like that. But trust me,
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I really don’t think we’re missing anything by skipping the Saturday night session. Now I hope
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that in a few minutes when you hear Terrence making a joke about being recruited by the mushroom and where he says, they recruited me.
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And then he goes on to say that they eventually moved him into public relations.
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Well, I do hope that you’re discerning enough to realize that he was joking about this.
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However, as we all know, there are a few paranoid people out there who are quite convinced that
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Terrence and Leary and Sasha
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and the whole lot of them are all CIA mind control agents that are out to get you and me.
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And now that I think of it, if someone is that paranoid, they probably think that that’s true of me too.
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After all, I was a lieutenant commander in the Navy and I held a top secret security clearance.
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In fact, maybe I should
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even suspect myself. Did they turn me into a Manchurian candidate? Or better yet, maybe I
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should just stop being so goofy and simply play the final recording of a workshop given by Terrence
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McKenna in December of 1994. And this conversation took place early on a Sunday morning, by the way.
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As old pilots like to say, I think we’re turning final here.
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These weekends tear past with amazing rapidity, and I was lying in bed last night
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thinking of everything that was not said
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and it seemed like hardly anything was said
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I don’t know what that means
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in myself personally
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I’ve noticed in the last year or so
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a sense that the vision or the thinking about our circumstance
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has become almost for me like a full-time job i i really don’t want to go anywhere and i don’t
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want to do anything i just want to hold the understanding in my mind.
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And I don’t know exactly where this is leading.
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It’s probably leading to writing more books
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and doing less traveling.
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In terms of launching various memes,
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I think they’re pretty well launched.
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The idea that the psychedelic experience
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needs to be given a place
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in the social toolkit,
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the idea that we need to
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seriously revision our relationship
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to nature and the future,
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I think all these things have come a distance
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yeah
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I’m real curious about one thing, why is it important for you to do this?
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I wonder myself
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you mean am I the
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alien ambassador whether I like it or not
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well often when asked this question I’ve said Alien ambassador, whether I like it or not.
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Well, often when asked this question, I’ve said, you know, it beats honest work.
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I mean, my brother is a PhD in three subjects and works in hard science. And I don’t think it’s brought him immense happiness, not that he’s despondent,
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but I was always kind of a slider, you know.
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And certainly when I reached La Charrera in 1971,
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I had a price on my head by the FBI.
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I was running out of money.
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I was at the end of my rope
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and then
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they recruited
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me
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and said you know with a mouth
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like yours there’s a place
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for you in our organization
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and
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you know
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I’ve worked in deep background
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positions about which the less said the better and then you know I’ve worked in deep background positions about which the less
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said the better and then
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about 15 years ago they shifted me into public
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relations and I’ve been there
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to the present
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I think ideas
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get me high
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and I like the feeling of understanding.
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And I love diversity to the point of weirdness.
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I mean, I…
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There’s more to it than that for you,
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because, you know, being tuned into ideas
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and turned on by ideas is one thing,
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but you can keep it just to yourself. The sharing of it something else i think that’s what i’m getting why you do that
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well one thing is i’m really fast and i i think of myself as a pretty savvy person easily led into false dogma.
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And yet, this is such a strange idea.
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And so it’s basically a plea for help.
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It’s not a cult.
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It’s not that I want you to join me in believing in this.
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It’s that this is so outlandish that join me as a scientist would join a research
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team and let’s cut it to pieces and show that it was simply a misunderstanding of information
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theory coupled with bad mathematics spliced onto a weak ontology or something like that you know because this
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I could
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live with the time wave
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if I only had to read
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about it in time magazine
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and that it was being developed
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by Negroponte and
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Pregosian the thing that
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sets up the cognitive dissonance
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for me is that I
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from the point of view of most people,
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thought it up.
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And I am so aware of my limitations
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that to me that’s the strongest argument there is,
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that it’s malarkey.
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You know?
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And yet that’s not a fair argument against an idea.
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In rhetoric that’s called the ad hominem argument, the argument to the man. That’s when you get up and say, well, we shouldn’t
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follow Jesse Helms because he’s short and ugly. You know, that’s not allowed. That’s a below the
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belt move. So, and then I read books like Thomas
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Kern’s The Structure of
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Scientific Revolutions
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and it says you know this is how it
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happens some guy
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marginal
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not at the center of the field
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and
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somewhat at loose ends but usually
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with a broad education
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gets it, you know.
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I mean, it happened to Einstein.
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He was a telegrapher.
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It happened to Alfred Russell Wallace.
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He was a surveyor who couldn’t make a living,
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and so he went to Indonesia to collect butterflies
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for the British Museum.
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And we could multiply these examples ad infinitum.
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But I have spent a lot of time educating myself
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about what it would mean if this were true.
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In other words, how big a revolution is it?
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And it’s an enormous revolution.
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The implications are staggering
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for example
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if it’s true
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that time is a fluctuating
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variable as this so
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strongly argues
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then science as practiced
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for the past 500 years
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is out the window
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because that kind
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of science is based on the concept of experiment
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and experiment has built into it the concept of what’s called a restoration of initial conditions
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that means you can go back to the start and run the experiment again this saying, as Heraclitus said, you never step
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into the same river twice.
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And consequently, the idea
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of repetitive
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experiment is shown to be
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intellectually bankrupt.
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You could almost say…
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Scientists have already recognized that.
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Well, some have and
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some haven’t.
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The idea that you would specify in a physics experiment
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that it should be done only when the moon is in Scorpio to obtain the correct results would get
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you well give me an example of a time-dependent physical experiment recognized by science.
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I mean, you know, dropping a ball out of the Tower of Peace?
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Well, it doesn’t matter what time you do it.
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Precisely.
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That’s my point.
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That’s my point.
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That we could almost say of science
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that it is the study of those phenomena so crude that the time in which they
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occur does not affect them and so falling balls uh you know gas diffusion simple things it doesn’t
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matter where in time they occur but things like the building of an empire,
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the waging of a war,
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the evolution of a species,
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the conquest of a biome by a new set of genes,
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these things, timing is everything
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and dictates success or failure.
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Did you want to say something?
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Yeah, that’s a very interesting point
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because the anthropic,
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the Greek anthropic cosmological principle
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argues that life evolved at about the right time.
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If things had started up a little bit later, a little bit sooner, at least around this sun,
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it wouldn’t necessarily have gotten a kickstart.
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The conditions were no longer quite right.
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The incubator was set to just the right temperature
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when the gases were at just the right concentrations and so on.
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was set to just the right temperature when the gases were at just the right concentrations and so on. And Stephen Gould has pointed out that we couldn’t even play the tape over again
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if you started off with life at one of the early conditions three and a half billion
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years ago and then ran it forward again, we wouldn’t have ended up with people and we
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wouldn’t have ended up with the kinds of species we have. There are too many bifurcation points that can take place along the line. So there’s actually
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two points there.
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Yes, well, this is essentially what this is saying. Ordinary science says that evolution
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proceeds by the random mixing of genes then subject to natural selection dictated by environmental parameters.
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And out of that you do get a creative advance or an advance into morphological complexity,
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but very slowly.
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And I think that what the time wave shows
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is that the deck, the cosmic deck,
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is stacked in favor of novelty
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so that it isn’t 50-50 every time you throw the dice
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that it’s going to go toward entropy or order.
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Actually, order is favored.
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And so order emerges and is conserved over time.
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Or novelty, I prefer the term novelty
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because to me chaos doesn’t signify disorder.
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I view it in the new way.
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Well, anyway, maybe that’s enough about that.
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I didn’t intend such a long opening statement.
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It must be this coffee.
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What you were saying sounds like,
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I think it was just recently,
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a couple of months ago,
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the Hubble constant,
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the Hubble telescope
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has thrown things in question.
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And, you know, I think,
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have you pursued that?
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Yes, I follow all that very carefully.
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I touched on it in my lecture
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by implication last night.
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It was in my mind when I said
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how so much of science recently has been about answering
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the question, when? When? There is huge controversy raging at this moment in astrophysics because,
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well, here’s the background. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble studied variable stars
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in an effort to establish what are called
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absolute or reliable candles
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for measuring cosmic distance,
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knowing that if he could very accurately calibrate
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the radiance of this certain type of star
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that then he could calculate
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how that radiance would diminish at distance.
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And there is a number involved with Hubble’s name
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called the Hubble constant.
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And if you set it high,
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the universe is young. Did I get it right? And if you set it high the universe is young
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did I get it right?
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and if you set it low
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the universe is old
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and furious battles are now raging
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because there is data coming in
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both from the Hubble telescope
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ironically
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named after Edwin Hubble
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there is data coming in there
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that is supporting the idea
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I believe that using standard
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mathematics the universe
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is young
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in fact paradoxically
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younger than
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some of the oldest stars
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in it which
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doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
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Conversely, from a different set of instruments,
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looking at a different part of the radio
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or electromagnetic universe,
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low Hubble constants values are coming in,
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implying that the universe is 18 to 22 billion years old
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rather than 6 to 8 or 8 to 10.
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And as far as the time wave is concerned,
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I was looking at this and I realized
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I should issue a press release and make a prediction
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and say that according to my calculations the age of the universe is precisely x and then see where
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these other people come down I I think the time wave favors the idea that the universe is about 17 and a half billion years old and and that is in agreement
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with the data that is not containing internal contradiction i find the idea of a universe
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eight billion years old almost as unlikely as a universe 4 306 years. I feel real cramped in a 10 billion year old universe. That is not enough.
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Well, I was just thinking that if the Hubble constant had a variation in time, that would
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probably describe it. Maybe your formulas might point to how it might vary in time. Or we have a locally varying Hubble constant.
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Well, yes, you raise a whole bunch of interesting issues here.
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Look at how presumptuous science is.
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First of all, all of modern physics is based around the concept of constants.
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The central, and some of these are non-dimensional constants,
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but some are not, like the speed of light.
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Well, the speed of light has been measured on this planet since 1906.
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Less than a hundred, just under a hundred years of measurement in a multi-billion year old universe carried out on one planet and from this you make the grand statement that the speed of light in all times and all places will obey this law of velocity? Give me a break. It’s just a kind of a joke.
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And yet to admit that there is a problem here would seriously undermine the premises of science.
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Things are worse than that.
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Throughout the 20th century,
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of course, the speed of light has been measured many, many times.
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Now, the same value is rarely obtained.
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Now, all of physics depends upon this being a universal constant.
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So when you point out to them that the same value is rarely obtained,
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they wave their hands and say, ah, well, this has to do with the limits of the instrumentality, a term which will not be further defined.
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and they’re just hitting around it, right?
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So at first you, the uneducated layman,
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you think, well, that makes sense.
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I suppose they’re just hitting around it.
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But then you go back and you look at these measurements of the speed of light and you know what?
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They don’t cluster around a point.
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Since 1906, successive measurements of the speed of light
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seem to imply that it’s incrementally going slightly faster.
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The set of data points is drifting slightly across the thing.
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Well, now, how, if it’s at the limits of the instrumentality,
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can you possibly explain that?
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Well, this became such an issue in the astrophysics community,
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and check this out
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that what they did is in 1972
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they defined the speed of light
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and they said
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this is the speed of light
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and all future calculations
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should use this number
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regardless of what the instruments
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are telling you.
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An momentous turning point
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in the evolution of scientific thought.
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At last, nature itself is deemed
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no longer necessary for the study of nature
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and in fact it just gets in the way
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anyway i can go on at great length about the foibles of science but
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it’s just fun to rib them yeah we’re back to scholasticism i guess but um by the same argument
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couldn’t you say how long is a year especially when you’re talking about births of universes
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in which Earth’s revolving
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around suns haven’t yet evolved
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to measure the year that we’re now measuring
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the whole schmear in?
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Well, you mean why
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I’m not sure I understand you. Do you mean
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why do we place so much emphasis
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on the year count
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in the theory?
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Well, it doesn’t really.
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What it depends on is a 384-day cycle,
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which if you were to press me, and I guess you are,
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as to why is it a 384-day cycle,
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well, it’s 13 lunations, yes,
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but there’s something mysterious going on there, and probably a good Newtonian could explain it to us. And they believe that the year length, that the year is slowly shrinking.
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And that about a billion years ago, the year length would have been about 384 days.
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And I suspect that the evolution of DNA,
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that there must have been,
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that the fact that the DNA runs on 64 and the I Ching runs on 64
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and this number 384 keeps coming up
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in relationship to the lunation
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and the possible solar year length,
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I think that essentially the DNA
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must have frozen in itself
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a kind of picture of the various orbital and geomagnetic resonances
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that existed in the solar system or in the terrestrial environment
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at the time it came into existence.
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I mean, that’s just my guess, but it would fit.
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Do you see what I mean?
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And then the fact that it’s 13 lunations,
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the moon is despun, tidally despun.
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That’s why we always see one face locked on the earth
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because it makes one revolution
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in the time that it makes one orbit.
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And that’s the consequence of that.
00:23:03 ►
And it may be that well I’m not sure what I’m trying to
00:23:10 ►
say but that there was a coupling of some sort between the sun earth moon system a billion years
00:23:16 ►
ago that made a 384 day year possible but my point is before that when we’re talking about
00:23:25 ►
the time between
00:23:27 ►
the big bang and planets
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how long is a year?
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well my assumption is
00:23:34 ►
that the real
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formative cycles
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are quantum mechanical
00:23:39 ►
in dimension
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in other words we talk about
00:23:43 ►
a 384 day cycle then we talk about a 384-day cycle, then we talk about a six-day cycle,
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then an hour and 35-minute cycle, and then a minute and a half or something. But it’s the
00:23:55 ►
cycles below, say, 10 to the minus 12 seconds. In other words, the whole universe I assume is some kind of amplification
00:24:06 ►
of quantum mechanical
00:24:08 ►
instability
00:24:08 ►
and you and I have talked about how
00:24:12 ►
biology
00:24:13 ►
seems to be a chemical
00:24:15 ►
strategy for
00:24:17 ►
amplifying quantum mechanical
00:24:20 ►
indeterminacy so that
00:24:22 ►
it leaves the subatomic
00:24:23 ►
realm and can be present, you know, in a 145-pound
00:24:28 ►
block of meat. I mean, that is what it is. The phenomenon of free will is quantum mechanically
00:24:37 ►
amplified determinacy in this complex chemical system that we call organic life. So the year thing isn’t important.
00:24:48 ►
What’s important is probably something down in the realm of Planck’s constant,
00:24:53 ►
some slip in the cosmic machinery at a very basic level
00:24:59 ►
that was then exploded and amplified out into the phenomenal universe.
00:25:04 ►
I mean, the real question is why
00:25:06 ►
there is anything at all. You know, I mean why that, this state was preferred over a
00:25:12 ►
state of pure nothingness which would appear to be the bottom of the energy well. Yeah.
00:25:19 ►
You’ve done a lot of thinking about morphological resonances of different sorts and And there’s one that I’ve encountered that I really can’t shake loose.
00:25:28 ►
I wonder if you have a comment on it.
00:25:30 ►
Reading about the brain, the estimates of the total number of galaxies is about 100 billion.
00:25:35 ►
And as you read about cosmology, you read that the average spiral galaxy is thought to have 100 billion suns in it.
00:25:42 ►
And the total number of galaxies in the universe is estimated to be around 100 billion suns in it, and the total number of galaxies in the universe
00:25:45 ►
is estimated to be around 100 billion.
00:25:47 ►
And I recently encountered the estimate
00:25:49 ►
that the total number of biomolecules in a cell
00:25:52 ►
is about 100 billion.
00:25:54 ►
And it seems like this coincidence keeps coming up,
00:25:57 ►
and maybe it’s related to Paul Dirac’s idea of a large number.
00:26:01 ►
Well, I think it is true that emergent properties come out of
00:26:07 ►
large aggregations the always the textbook example is you know if you have
00:26:14 ►
two h2o molecules that’s water but you don’t have wetness wetness doesn’t emerge until you have thousands
00:26:26 ►
of H2O molecules
00:26:28 ►
and so the wetness of water
00:26:32 ►
is a property which only emerges
00:26:34 ►
when you have millions of these molecules together
00:26:38 ►
and it does appear that
00:26:41 ►
complex neural nets
00:26:43 ►
have to be above 9 billion operating subunits.
00:26:48 ►
And so, you know, it may be that,
00:26:51 ►
I mean, definitely we are pushing toward criticality
00:26:54 ►
in many, in any area of measurement.
00:26:59 ►
For example, you know,
00:27:00 ►
if you look at the curve of energy release
00:27:03 ►
or the population curve or the
00:27:07 ►
curve of information production or the curve of advancing velocity you see that many of these
00:27:16 ►
curves will become asymptotic in in the near future and that’s what i mean when I say we’re headed into this domain of boundary dissolution and hyper-novel inflationary evolution, you could almost call it.
00:27:35 ►
Yeah?
00:27:36 ►
On asymptotic?
00:27:38 ►
Isn’t that, well, asymptotic is when it’s not doubling every time you measure it,
00:27:45 ►
it’s being squared, isn’t that it, each time?
00:27:49 ►
So it goes logarithmic, asymptotic,
00:27:53 ►
and then there’s another term for an even more rapid expansion.
00:27:59 ►
Yeah?
00:27:59 ►
When I read futurist books on futurists,
00:28:02 ►
and I’ve been to several things like that,
00:28:05 ►
they talk very similar to what you’re saying, the radical changes that are coming,
00:28:09 ►
but they’re looking at all the denominators of what they feel would cause this.
00:28:14 ►
And their sense of chaos is what you’re talking about in a different way,
00:28:19 ►
economic chaos, health chaos, earth is hidden from tremendous people
00:28:25 ►
in the cities, the concentration
00:28:28 ►
of so many people
00:28:30 ►
together in these megalithic
00:28:31 ►
centers of humanity
00:28:33 ►
and are so disconnected with their
00:28:35 ►
who, what man is
00:28:38 ►
that they’re saying
00:28:40 ►
the same thing that you’re saying
00:28:41 ►
in a different way, I mean they are saying
00:28:44 ►
the same thing
00:28:44 ►
yes, well, I mean, they are saying the same thing.
00:28:50 ►
Yes, well, you see, they feel that they own the planet.
00:28:52 ►
And so they’re very alarmed.
00:28:56 ►
I mean, wouldn’t you be if it were your property?
00:28:59 ►
And you say, my God, what is going on?
00:29:02 ►
We have to get hold of the neighborhood. But my faith is that the horse knows where it wants to go,
00:29:12 ►
and we’re all being carried along for the ride.
00:29:15 ►
And Mitsubishi, the Catholic Church,
00:29:19 ►
whoever wants to try and control it is welcome to try.
00:29:24 ►
But it’s a perverse thing.
00:29:26 ►
I mean, we who think of ourselves as little people imagine that owning the earth must be a great pleasure,
00:29:37 ►
but actually, you know, the number of ulcer tablets being consumed in the chancelleries,
00:29:44 ►
of ulcer tablets being consumed in the chancellories,
00:29:46 ►
burses, and embassies of this planet seems to argue that thinking you own the world
00:29:49 ►
is an enormous headache and aggravation.
00:29:54 ►
The chaos is roving through the system
00:29:59 ►
and able to undo at any point the best laid plans all kinds of things are happening first
00:30:07 ►
of all there are all these fields of research ranging from cryogenics
00:30:13 ►
nanotechnology psychedelic pharmacology disease control machine human
00:30:20 ►
interfacing you know you could just list these things endlessly. And at any moment,
00:30:25 ►
one of these fields could make a breakthrough so fundamental that everything would be changed.
00:30:32 ►
And we have, you know, 50 of these irons going in the fire all the time. At the same time,
00:30:39 ►
because the planetary culture is becoming ever more closely knitted
00:30:46 ►
together, it’s all
00:30:48 ►
its parts are becoming
00:30:49 ►
codependent. So
00:30:51 ►
for instance
00:30:53 ►
an earthquake which
00:30:56 ►
destroys central Tokyo
00:30:57 ►
would ruin the economy
00:31:00 ►
of Belgium because the
00:31:02 ►
retraction of Japanese capital
00:31:04 ►
from world markets
00:31:05 ►
would set up reverberations that
00:31:08 ►
would be felt everywhere
00:31:09 ►
the system is being
00:31:12 ►
slaved ever more
00:31:14 ►
tightly to various
00:31:15 ►
portions of itself
00:31:17 ►
crop failure in Russia
00:31:20 ►
causes
00:31:21 ►
you know strikes in
00:31:23 ►
Argentina and so forth and so on.
00:31:25 ►
And this will accelerate.
00:31:28 ►
Well, then the task of management somehow is to bring this coalescing system through this transition period
00:31:38 ►
without the whole thing getting so much vibration built up into it that it falls apart. And so it’s very alarming to see barbarism uncontrolled in the world,
00:31:52 ►
to see people being pushed into boxcars on their way to extermination camps and all this.
00:31:59 ►
This means that the global control systems are in danger of breaking down. And I think that the world corporate state is running hard to keep up. National governments do not understand what is going on. National governments are underpaid, understaffed, and undertalented.
00:32:21 ►
and under-talented.
00:32:25 ►
World corporate divisions of various sorts
00:32:27 ►
do understand what is going on,
00:32:29 ►
but they are in the process
00:32:31 ►
of taking power
00:32:32 ►
from the national states
00:32:34 ►
as rapidly as possible
00:32:36 ►
in order to use that power
00:32:38 ►
to manage the planet
00:32:41 ►
in a somewhat less ideologically
00:32:43 ►
hysterical fashion. I mean, they want to make
00:32:47 ►
money, you know, but that’s a different thing than wanting to convert everybody to Islam,
00:32:52 ►
Marxism, or National Socialism, or something like that. I’m fascinated by management because it’s
00:33:00 ►
the large-scale understanding and integration of of human systems and that’s the real challenge
00:33:06 ►
I mean it’s all very fine to take
00:33:08 ►
these mathematical
00:33:08 ►
models and
00:33:11 ►
describe the behavior of the
00:33:14 ►
dripping faucet as
00:33:15 ►
was done very creatively
00:33:17 ►
but the purpose of
00:33:20 ►
all this modeling is to eventually
00:33:21 ►
take control of our own
00:33:23 ►
relationships to each other and to the
00:33:26 ►
world and to the future and to you know to future generations it’s somewhat paradoxical though
00:33:33 ►
because management would appear to be key yet what we’re talking about managing can’t be managed
00:33:41 ►
no but what can be managed is our anxiety about it in other words I think of
00:33:48 ►
it as though what we’re in is an aircraft a cultural airfoil moving through history and
00:33:55 ►
the challenge is change your sup with camel into an F-18 in flight
00:34:05 ►
because we’re going faster
00:34:08 ►
and faster and faster and
00:34:09 ►
Q forces, vibration
00:34:12 ►
are beginning to build up
00:34:14 ►
on all the airfoils
00:34:15 ►
and so what we have to do
00:34:18 ►
is transform the
00:34:19 ►
cultural engine or
00:34:21 ►
the forward acceleration into the temporal
00:34:23 ►
medium will burn the wings off and
00:34:26 ►
rip the airfoil apart what you’re talking about is metamorphosis would you comment on
00:34:31 ►
examples of metamorphosis in nature to what’s going on there well the perfect example is of
00:34:37 ►
course insect metamorphosis which if you read my book the true True Hallucinations, and I think it’s mentioned in The Invisible Landscape,
00:34:46 ►
there was a great deal of talk about insect metamorphosis at La Charrera.
00:34:52 ►
I’ve always, and I’ve never received a satisfactory answer
00:34:57 ►
to the question put to evolutionary biologists,
00:35:01 ►
how do you account for the metamorphosis of insects,
00:35:04 ►
where, like in the case of butterflies,
00:35:08 ►
hundreds if not thousands of genes
00:35:11 ►
have to be coordinated perfectly
00:35:14 ►
to take a caterpillar,
00:35:17 ►
dissolve all its body tissue,
00:35:21 ►
and have it completely reconstruct itself
00:35:24 ►
as another kind of organism.
00:35:25 ►
I’m trying to imagine an evolutionary scenario of gradual mutation
00:35:31 ►
that would give you that is, I can’t do it.
00:35:36 ►
It must have happened largely instantaneously
00:35:39 ►
in a single massive rearrangement of hundreds and hundreds of genes and we
00:35:47 ►
don’t see that much in animal life we see large-scale polyploidy in plants so
00:35:54 ►
maybe this happened in or in animal tissue only once or twice in the life of
00:35:59 ►
the planet but it gave this insect adaptation which is astonishing you know and in a way what we’re
00:36:07 ►
doing is repeating that metamorphosis on a on a metaphorical as well as physical plane i mean we
00:36:15 ►
are rather like worms and we have built a society that is somewhat you know might ungenerously be described as a carrion pile but there
00:36:29 ►
is apparently in us the capacity to evolve to this other form and there is
00:36:35 ►
as long as we’re roving through exotic biological metaphors here there is a
00:36:42 ►
phenomenon in biology called neoteny neoteny is the
00:36:47 ►
preservation of juvenile characteristics into adulthood and we as a primate
00:36:54 ►
species exhibit advanced forms of neoteny this is why we are hairless to
00:37:00 ►
adulthood this is why our skull to body ratio remains infantile compared to other primates
00:37:08 ►
throughout life. It’s why we require such a long period of physical upbringing. Well, there are
00:37:17 ►
certain animals that will remain in the juvenile stage their entire lifetime unless certain environmental parameters
00:37:28 ►
shift and what i mean by that is say you have a kind of uh of uh salamander well it exists as a
00:37:40 ►
kind of a tadpole its entire life and for generations it can do this
00:37:47 ►
living as a tadpool but if the pool dries up the organisms in the pool at
00:37:55 ►
that time suddenly discover that they have the capacity to develop lungs and
00:38:01 ►
crawl out onto the land and they do even though perhaps
00:38:05 ►
this hasn’t been done in that neighborhood for generations and I think
00:38:11 ►
we are sort of in that position we have a capacity inside ourselves that we have
00:38:17 ►
not yet unfolded and we may not for a while when things really get nutty part of the getting nutty is that we will discover
00:38:29 ►
present in our human population all the time were mutants of certain types that had no
00:38:37 ►
evolutionary advantage as long as bourgeois society and judeo-christian ethics were in place but when
00:38:48 ►
that begins to shake and shimmer then these mutant types will emerge to the fore this is how evolution
00:38:58 ►
works by the way in animal populations the mutants are always present but they have no consequence unless the
00:39:06 ►
environmental parameters shift and give them then a special advantage and i think being able to see
00:39:14 ►
hyperspatially is the special adaptive advantage that psychedelic plants confer upon the people who use them. It is literally you see the world with different eyes
00:39:28 ►
and it’s going to make it possible for you to find your way
00:39:33 ►
through the future in a way that will be very difficult
00:39:38 ►
for people who are looking at the situation
00:39:41 ►
through the eyes of materialism, Newtonianism, positivism, and so forth.
00:39:48 ►
That’s the question I guess that keeps coming up to me.
00:39:51 ►
What are we supposed to do?
00:39:53 ►
Yeah, I keep thinking that too.
00:39:56 ►
Well, I keep saying, de-emphasize anxiety.
00:40:00 ►
Reassure people.
00:40:02 ►
You meet people who say, you know, I’m really scared.
00:40:04 ►
I’m scared about my job. I’m scared about my relay. I’m really scared I’m scared about my job
00:40:06 ►
I’m scared about my relay
00:40:07 ►
I’m scared, scared, scared
00:40:09 ►
don’t worry
00:40:11 ►
you don’t know enough
00:40:14 ►
to worry
00:40:15 ►
that’s God’s truth
00:40:19 ►
who do you think you are
00:40:21 ►
that you should worry
00:40:23 ►
for crying out loud
00:40:24 ►
it’s a total waste of time it presupposes Who do you think you are that you should worry for crying out loud?
00:40:27 ►
I mean, it’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation
00:40:31 ►
that it is in fact a form of hubris.
00:40:35 ►
You know, now what you do is just pay your bills
00:40:38 ►
and, you know, pack heat if you need to and don’t worry.
00:40:43 ►
That’s all.
00:40:46 ►
Yes.
00:40:47 ►
Someone just told me, don’t worry, don’t take it so seriously
00:40:51 ►
because none of us are going to get out of life.
00:40:54 ►
Well, no, that’s a more dismal conclusion.
00:41:00 ►
Worry is praying to the devil.
00:41:01 ►
That’s great.
00:41:02 ►
Worry is betting against yourself.
00:41:04 ►
You know, Weepo Yang,
00:41:06 ►
a great Chinese Taoist
00:41:08 ►
who wrote many, many commentaries
00:41:10 ►
on the I Ching.
00:41:11 ►
He was asked at the end of his life
00:41:13 ►
what was his conclusion
00:41:15 ►
of a life of studying the I Ching.
00:41:19 ►
And he said,
00:41:20 ►
worry is preposterous.
00:41:23 ►
That was it.
00:41:24 ►
If we are serious about who we are
00:41:27 ►
and not ashamed of our dreams,
00:41:31 ►
then we have to build on the scale of solar systems.
00:41:35 ►
I mean, we have the imaginative power
00:41:38 ►
to be a galactarian civilization.
00:41:41 ►
It’s just that we have a pissant control of energy
00:41:46 ►
at the moment
00:41:47 ►
but if there’s somebody out there
00:41:49 ►
who needs consulting
00:41:51 ►
you know somebody who does have
00:41:53 ►
hyper light drive and time
00:41:56 ►
travel but just doesn’t know what to
00:41:58 ►
do with it ask us
00:42:00 ►
we are very
00:42:01 ►
creative
00:42:02 ►
and I’ve tracked this very closely in the literature.
00:42:08 ►
And up until about five years ago, time travel definitely, if you were writing about that, you were a squirrel.
00:42:16 ►
Nobody was talking about that.
00:42:19 ►
And since then, Scientific American has devoted an entire issue to it.
00:42:22 ►
Scientific American has devoted an entire issue to it
00:42:24 ►
Nick Herbert who I do
00:42:27 ►
not consider a squirrel wrote
00:42:29 ►
an excellent book about it
00:42:31 ►
there have been articles in
00:42:32 ►
physical review and
00:42:34 ►
it’s gone from
00:42:36 ►
it’s completely impossible don’t even
00:42:39 ►
think of it to
00:42:40 ►
well certain thought
00:42:42 ►
experiments can be imagined
00:42:44 ►
which do seem to imply,
00:42:46 ►
well, that’s how relativity got started, you know,
00:42:49 ►
talking about trains passing each other
00:42:52 ►
at the speed of light and what would happen then.
00:42:54 ►
It’s so hard to make people understand
00:42:57 ►
because we’re in this new age environment
00:43:00 ►
of fishy thinking.
00:43:02 ►
But the entities inside the DMT trance are real entities. I mean,
00:43:11 ►
they’re as real as you and I are. You would have trouble proving your own ontological validity
00:43:18 ►
if pressed by a skilled philosopher. So they’re as real as we are. Well, this then has to be taken seriously.
00:43:28 ►
Questions like, where are they?
00:43:30 ►
Who are they?
00:43:32 ►
What do they know?
00:43:35 ►
Because they’re intelligent.
00:43:37 ►
And we’re intelligent.
00:43:39 ►
And we’ve been yapping about space people
00:43:41 ►
and all this malarkey.
00:43:42 ►
You know, they are here.
00:43:44 ►
If flying saucers landed on the south lawn
00:43:47 ►
of the White House tomorrow,
00:43:49 ►
it wouldn’t be as weird as what happens to you
00:43:52 ►
when you smoke DMT.
00:43:54 ►
It would just be a news story,
00:43:56 ►
something for NASA to take over.
00:43:58 ►
Chomsky would explain it to us,
00:44:00 ►
the linguistic side, I mean.
00:44:02 ►
But you personally can meet the alien
00:44:06 ►
anytime you want
00:44:08 ►
and the culture can meet the alien
00:44:10 ►
anytime they want
00:44:12 ►
well are these things
00:44:15 ►
here for no reason
00:44:16 ►
are we just sort of
00:44:18 ►
they’re on their trip and we’re on our trip
00:44:20 ►
or have they come
00:44:22 ►
for us
00:44:23 ►
is there a message is there a purpose uh and and why does
00:44:29 ►
this seem so drenched in in in super technologies and intimations of time travel i mean uh are these
00:44:39 ►
things dead souls are they a future state of humanity that’s come back a hundred million years to the dawn ages
00:44:48 ►
of intelligence to observe, you know, the discovery of star flight? What is happening?
00:44:57 ►
It needs to be looked at. And, you know, I got, I went into this very deeply with shamanism,
00:45:05 ►
but shamanism is a set of culturally sanctioned explanations
00:45:10 ►
for people who didn’t know how to ask the kinds of questions we ask.
00:45:16 ►
And so you can only go so far with that.
00:45:19 ►
And eventually you realize, you know, Jung won’t help you,
00:45:23 ►
or Mercier Léod, not. You have to make sense of
00:45:27 ►
this on your own terms. It’s very unexpected that this would happen. I always assumed I would be an
00:45:40 ►
aeronautical engineer or something like that. I never thought, and I never thought that the culture
00:45:47 ►
would turn 90 degrees and discover in, you know,
00:45:52 ►
the biology of the planet and alien intelligence.
00:45:57 ►
I mean, that’s what the 20th century will probably be remembered for.
00:46:01 ►
And very few of us can even articulate it to ourselves.
00:46:06 ►
probably be remembered for and very few of us can even articulate it to ourselves you know in the way that the the 15th century discovered the new world the 20th century discovered the parallel
00:46:13 ►
continuum it begins with freud and noticing something about the fantasies of these viennese
00:46:19 ►
housewives and you know then jung splicing in the myths and then the surrealists
00:46:26 ►
and Iliad
00:46:27 ►
and then the drug people come along
00:46:30 ►
and Huxley and so forth
00:46:32 ►
until finally people say
00:46:33 ►
as that wonderful
00:46:36 ►
line in Rosemary’s Baby
00:46:38 ►
my god this is
00:46:40 ►
really happening
00:46:41 ►
you know yes
00:46:44 ►
what did you think
00:46:45 ►
over here
00:46:48 ►
I have a question
00:46:49 ►
from what I understand
00:46:52 ►
and I’m not a mathematician
00:46:53 ►
but
00:46:53 ►
they’re using formulas
00:46:55 ►
based on
00:46:56 ►
double pyramids
00:46:57 ►
and tetrahedra
00:46:58 ►
yeah
00:46:58 ►
well
00:47:00 ►
I think
00:47:00 ►
you know
00:47:01 ►
that these kinds of
00:47:02 ►
occult calculations
00:47:04 ►
this is a legitimate way to proceed.
00:47:06 ►
This is how Kepler modeled the solar system,
00:47:10 ►
was by putting the Greek perfect mathematical forms inside each other.
00:47:18 ►
But I am really aware from having worked 20 years on the time wave
00:47:23 ►
how woolly it gets out there in the numbers
00:47:28 ►
when you’re looking for correlations, you know.
00:47:32 ►
And there are a whole bunch of these things.
00:47:37 ►
There are the people in New Zealand
00:47:38 ►
with the world grid system.
00:47:41 ►
There’s the whole José Arguelles cosmology.
00:47:48 ►
There’s, Oshpensky was an early one
00:47:52 ►
in search of the miraculous. Yeats’ book
00:47:55 ►
of vision is a complex mathematical thing
00:48:00 ►
explaining the cosmos.
00:48:02 ►
There seems to be something in us
00:48:07 ►
that we are systematizers
00:48:10 ►
we produce systems
00:48:11 ►
and these are integrated systems of means
00:48:15 ►
and the only thing you can do
00:48:18 ►
is lay them before your fellow monkeys
00:48:21 ►
and see what goes on
00:48:23 ►
and I usually am a reluctant
00:48:26 ►
participant I’m not much fun
00:48:29 ►
when it comes to weird ideas because I
00:48:31 ►
just pour cold water on them
00:48:33 ►
for instance right now my mail is running
00:48:37 ►
pretty heavily toward people who want to
00:48:40 ►
inform me about and convert me to
00:48:43 ►
the works of Zachariah Sitchin,
00:48:47 ►
who, and this is a, do you know who I’m talking about?
00:48:50 ►
Well, this is a complex cosmology.
00:48:53 ►
It involves five or six books.
00:48:56 ►
It involves a lost planet,
00:48:58 ►
which comes into the inner solar system every 35,000 years or so,
00:49:04 ►
which was responsible for Jesus and for,
00:49:08 ►
and it’s a whole thing. And people who I up to that point had considered sane,
00:49:15 ►
found it very interesting. And I was just, it was, you know,
00:49:21 ►
so I think the only thing
00:49:25 ►
and I am in this same position
00:49:27 ►
I mean someone could certainly react
00:49:29 ►
phobically to my
00:49:31 ►
thing so I think what you have to say
00:49:33 ►
about these ideas is they just
00:49:35 ►
have to be dropped
00:49:37 ►
out of the nest and
00:49:39 ►
you see what can fly
00:49:41 ►
and what can’t
00:49:42 ►
however then here’s a piece of advice which you may not need
00:49:49 ►
or want to hear, but this has worked for me and it’s not an orthodox piece of advice, but if you
00:49:57 ►
hear a claim that fascinates you or interests you, like a claim, well, just as an example,
00:50:07 ►
the face on Mars or the time wave
00:50:10 ►
or Zacharias Sitchin’s thing.
00:50:13 ►
Yes, you should read the person’s book
00:50:16 ►
and you should think about it on that level.
00:50:18 ►
But what you should also do is
00:50:20 ►
try to find out as much about this person as possible it’s very hard for people to hide
00:50:28 ►
their pasts and if it turns out that your particular revelator did some time in Tennessee
00:50:37 ►
for auto theft or was last seen fleeing Germany with a valise of cash, then you know.
00:50:46 ►
And this was very effective for me with the crop circles.
00:50:50 ►
An investigation of the histories of the major personalities
00:50:54 ►
was a journey into,
00:50:58 ►
well, I can’t even find words to describe it,
00:51:01 ►
but that’s the thing to look at.
00:51:03 ►
Look at the people.
00:51:06 ►
Look at their lives,
00:51:09 ►
their credit histories, their bank accounts,
00:51:12 ►
and then judge their cosmogonic visions.
00:51:16 ►
Some people would probably say that’s unfair,
00:51:19 ►
but in a sense it goes back to what I said a couple of days ago about aesthetics.
00:51:23 ►
The revelation of the mystery one thing is
00:51:27 ►
for sure it will not be tacky it won’t be tasteless you know it won’t be
00:51:34 ►
wearing sequins for God’s sake it won’t pass out 10% discount coupons. Sorry. Will it charge at all? I was at, I taught, where I pulled out is I was at one of these
00:51:54 ►
expos, you know, that are around. And I toured the thing. And if you ever go to one of those things, they are horrendous. I mean, Moldavite suppositories and just the damnedest stuff.
00:52:11 ►
And I was making my way through the booths,
00:52:14 ►
the various therapies, channelings, and revelations,
00:52:18 ►
and this young woman in a short skirt rushed out
00:52:22 ►
and took me by the elbow, and she said,
00:52:26 ►
Excuse me, sir, could I interest you in elective cosmetic surgery no and she said well
00:52:33 ►
how about the drawing for the Camaro no no but that’s all right. The marketplace has always been a noisy place.
00:52:47 ►
Yeah.
00:52:51 ►
This is just sort of to illustrate an example of this time stuff we’re talking about.
00:52:54 ►
Two years ago I was driving a city bus
00:52:57 ►
and when you drive a city bus
00:52:59 ►
you have a computer printout
00:53:00 ►
that tells you exactly what minute to be where.
00:53:04 ►
Now there’s not many jobs like that. So you what minute to be where. Now there’s not many jobs
00:53:05 ►
like that. So you always have to be aware of time. I had driven this route for three
00:53:11 ►
months and I left the terminus at the same time I’d always left. This is a trolley bus.
00:53:17 ►
It has a speed governor on it and goes on wires. You can’t go more than 60 clicks. It always takes within 30 seconds to get to the next
00:53:27 ►
timing point. One day I was meditating at work. My mother told me not to do this.
00:53:35 ►
And I left on time and I got to the timing point 6 minutes early and I picked up ten people. Now, I don’t know how that happened or what happened,
00:53:47 ►
but it seemed to me it was a slip in time.
00:53:49 ►
The next day, I’m sitting in the cafeteria.
00:53:52 ►
I have to go up to this bus, inspect it, and leave at a certain time.
00:53:55 ►
I’m eating a sandwich.
00:53:56 ►
I think, oh, I’ve got 15 minutes, and I look at the clock.
00:53:59 ►
It’s five minutes after I’m supposed to leave.
00:54:02 ►
So I freak out, run out, get on the bus,
00:54:04 ►
leave ten minutes later So I freaked out, run out, get on the bus, leave
00:54:05 ►
ten minutes later than I ever have, and get to where I’m going ten minutes earlier than
00:54:10 ►
I ever did. Now at the same time, I thought this was peculiar, so I started asking everybody
00:54:15 ►
I knew, and I found four people who had a routine such that they knew what time things
00:54:22 ►
happened. One guy always took an hour and 20 minutes to get to work, for example.
00:54:27 ►
He left one morning and he got there 45 minutes early.
00:54:32 ►
And I just offer this as an example of the fact that
00:54:36 ►
this idea of physics being constant
00:54:38 ►
has to do whether you believe it or not and pay attention to it.
00:54:42 ►
And if you change your own relationship to time and space,
00:54:47 ►
well, I took a whole
00:54:48 ►
busload of people with me.
00:54:54 ►
Call Hollywood.
00:54:58 ►
It’s an example that
00:55:00 ►
something is slipping
00:55:01 ►
as people’s minds open up.
00:55:04 ►
I think there are roving discontinuities
00:55:07 ►
called cosmic giggles
00:55:09 ►
that are definitely there.
00:55:11 ►
The same thing happened to me twice.
00:55:13 ►
I gained once 20 minutes
00:55:15 ►
that I couldn’t have possibly gained
00:55:16 ►
and another time an hour and 15 minutes.
00:55:20 ►
Well, that’s very interesting.
00:55:24 ►
Too bad this is a population
00:55:26 ►
with such a high incidence of drug abuse
00:55:29 ►
is there a parallel
00:55:38 ►
to the concept of the
00:55:41 ►
eastern concept of the big mind
00:55:43 ►
and the network system
00:55:46 ►
that seems to me to be one.
00:55:48 ►
Well, yeah, one of the things
00:55:50 ►
I think that’s happening…
00:55:51 ►
Is there something going on there
00:55:52 ►
that may be relative to all this?
00:55:54 ►
The engineering mentality,
00:55:57 ►
the male engineering mentality,
00:56:00 ►
always is trying to duplicate
00:56:02 ►
in technology what already exists in nature.
00:56:07 ►
So, you know, back 15,000 years ago when the partnership society was in place
00:56:14 ►
and everybody was rigged out with psilocybin,
00:56:18 ►
they were participating in what I call the Gaian mind,
00:56:22 ►
the flow of energy and information
00:56:26 ►
between the human population
00:56:29 ►
and the rest of the animal and plant
00:56:32 ►
and natural world.
00:56:34 ►
Well, then we fell away from that
00:56:36 ►
into the existential condition of history,
00:56:39 ►
but it’s always stuck with us.
00:56:42 ►
And our desire to string wires wires to talk to each other over
00:56:48 ►
distances and send pictures and be integrated in our faith that data is somehow important
00:56:56 ►
is all part of this effort to mirror in our technology the guy in mind. It’s sort of like, you know, they say men always seek in their mates
00:57:07 ►
the image of their mother.
00:57:09 ►
Well, this was sort of happening for us
00:57:11 ►
on a cultural scale.
00:57:12 ►
In our technology, we’re always trying
00:57:14 ►
to create a path back into nature.
00:57:18 ►
And many people think of the internet
00:57:21 ►
or think of computers as masculine
00:57:24 ►
and so forth. They are not at all.
00:57:26 ►
It’s an incredible feminizing influence. McLuhan understood this very well. He
00:57:33 ►
believed that the worldwide rise of electrical networks could be correlated to the descent of
00:57:40 ►
the Holy Ghost. He thought we were living in the age of the Holy Spirit, that electricity
00:57:46 ►
is the Holy Spirit. And that’s abstract when you’re talking about telegraphs and that sort
00:57:53 ►
of thing. But when you’re talking about the internet, you realize, you know, we really are
00:57:57 ►
mental creatures. And so we are apparently creating a shamanic dimension
00:58:05 ►
that is culturally sanctioned
00:58:08 ►
because we say we don’t have to take a drug
00:58:11 ►
because we’re so phobic of drugs.
00:58:14 ►
But the smart people know,
00:58:17 ►
the pharmacologists and the nanotechnological engineers know
00:58:23 ►
that the difference between a drug and a computer is that
00:58:27 ►
you can swallow one and you can’t swallow the other one and that’s the only difference and
00:58:33 ►
they’re working to correct that problem the drugs of the future will be computers the computers of
00:58:41 ►
the future will be drugs you know there will be patches that you paste on your forehead
00:58:46 ►
or the back of your thumbnail
00:58:47 ►
so really
00:58:50 ►
and the other thing that keeps us calm
00:58:54 ►
is that we can see the electronic infrastructure
00:58:58 ►
we can see the phone lines
00:59:00 ►
we can see the boxes and the keyboards
00:59:03 ►
but that’s all about to disappear
00:59:06 ►
that very a very active frontier now is uh mind machine interfacing where you know basically by
00:59:15 ►
wrinkling your brow and squinting and squirming you run your software and uh the boxes can disappear and will disappear and I we’ve talked in these gatherings
00:59:30 ►
many times about and a very obvious future coalescence of technology where what you have
00:59:38 ►
when you’re eight years old or something is you have a very small operation which puts something like a contact lens
00:59:46 ►
not on your eye, but on the inside of your eyelid.
00:59:51 ►
It’s like a black contact lens.
00:59:53 ►
So that when you close your eyes,
00:59:56 ►
there are menus hanging in space.
01:00:00 ►
That’s your interface.
01:00:03 ►
That’s your doorway to the internet
01:00:05 ►
and then you just take off
01:00:08 ►
from your jump site out into cyberspace
01:00:12 ►
this is not out of reach
01:00:14 ►
believe me if it mattered as much as
01:00:17 ►
blowing up little brown people somewhere
01:00:19 ►
we would have it in our hands today
01:00:22 ►
it’s just a matter of committing capital investment and resources to
01:00:26 ►
the keyboard is is uh run by looking at the screen and the thing is tracking your eye movements there
01:00:36 ►
is no keyboard huh yeah it’s a bio biofeedback control of machines but not little PCs but world-spanning data
01:00:48 ►
networks that are in three dimensions and with graphically rendered
01:00:54 ►
environments that are extremely high density data that cannot in fact be told
01:01:00 ►
from reality except that it’s been put through such an outlandish design process that you could
01:01:06 ►
never mistake it for reality unless you were raised in international airport arrival concourses
01:01:13 ►
the advertising world has equipment in place that they can monitor where you look at
01:01:19 ►
certain products on a screen certainly you could that would be easy to do oh yeah this is all coming
01:01:26 ►
and so then the question is
01:01:28 ►
as the internet fades away
01:01:30 ►
in terms of boxes
01:01:32 ►
and flickering screens
01:01:33 ►
and becomes more and more
01:01:35 ►
transparent implants
01:01:39 ►
in your body
01:01:41 ►
then your identification
01:01:43 ►
will be total
01:01:44 ►
with this global environment. And you will
01:01:47 ►
think of yourself as a person with two minds, the individual mind and the collective mind,
01:01:56 ►
previously called the unconscious, and previously unaccessible except through psychotherapy, dreams, or drug use,
01:02:05 ►
but suddenly put online as a 24-hour-a-day utility
01:02:10 ►
for those who need to use it.
01:02:15 ►
Bizarre, yes, but what isn’t?
01:02:19 ►
You know, I just wanted to mention
01:02:20 ►
that if anyone wants to get further into these ideas,
01:02:23 ►
there’s William Gibson’s novels
01:02:24 ►
are a good place to begin.
01:02:25 ►
Neuromancer, for example.
01:02:28 ►
Yeah, and I noticed there’s a new
01:02:30 ►
virtual reality novel out
01:02:31 ►
called Rim that I haven’t read
01:02:34 ►
but it’s published by my publisher
01:02:36 ►
Harper, so I’ll plug it
01:02:38 ►
anyway.
01:02:40 ►
But, yeah, and so what I
01:02:42 ►
see really is that there was a
01:02:43 ►
bifurcation, almost a there was a bifurcation,
01:02:46 ►
almost a gender-based bifurcation,
01:02:49 ►
and this male-dominant thing,
01:02:53 ►
which is all about controlling matter and energy
01:02:56 ►
and mathematically formal descriptions of nature and so forth,
01:03:01 ►
what it’s going to do is it’s going to deliver us back to the high Paleolithic.
01:03:06 ►
But it will be
01:03:07 ►
a totally
01:03:09 ►
established and hardwired
01:03:11 ►
technology. And so then you see
01:03:13 ►
history will be revealed to have
01:03:15 ►
been
01:03:16 ►
of all things a Viconian
01:03:19 ►
recirculation. A return
01:03:22 ►
back to our origins.
01:03:23 ►
That’s why I say Western man, the parable for Western
01:03:28 ►
civilization is the parable of the prodigal son. That’s who we are. We left the family fold,
01:03:36 ►
the flocks and the filial obligations, and we descended into matter and made a long,
01:03:47 ►
we descended into matter and made a long, long journey of understanding, which is meaningless unless we return to our origins. And then, you know, it can be used to enrich and broaden
01:03:57 ►
the human experience. Something so extraordinary is happening on this planet. I mean, you know, for hundreds of millions of years,
01:04:09 ►
biology flowed across the surface and species advanced and retreated
01:04:14 ►
and sensory organs were refined and redefined and so forth and so on.
01:04:19 ►
But about 35,000, 50,000 years ago, language broke loose.
01:04:27 ►
And language is the sheer will of information itself to transform itself.
01:04:34 ►
I mean, our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
01:04:43 ►
And that information could be fed into a computer,
01:04:46 ►
crystallized into a virus.
01:04:48 ►
What we are is a long message
01:04:51 ►
that is being typed out in proteins
01:04:54 ►
by thousands of ribosomes,
01:04:57 ►
coordinated over time.
01:04:59 ►
We are sort of like a phonograph record.
01:05:02 ►
And when you’re young, you know,
01:05:04 ►
certain enzyme
01:05:05 ►
systems certain genes are turned on and then you pass into midlife other genes
01:05:10 ►
are turned on certain genes are turned off it’s like a melody theme and
01:05:15 ►
variation being brought back the theme being enriched and worked and then
01:05:20 ►
finally the whole thing builds to a crescendo and then one by one the jeans are
01:05:25 ►
turned off and the audience tugs on its overcoats and cabs are hailed and people go home for the
01:05:34 ►
evening but that that’s what you are you’re a story a piece of code being run in the great computer of the world.
01:05:48 ►
And like the self-transforming machine elves in the DMT trance
01:05:49 ►
who can make things with language,
01:05:53 ►
so too we can make things with language.
01:05:56 ►
We can coax ideas into matter
01:05:58 ►
and make engines and dynamos
01:06:01 ►
and transmitters and oscillators
01:06:04 ►
and all these things, yeah.
01:06:06 ►
But you would like, you haven’t mentioned at all about
01:06:10 ►
relating all this in terms of health, of medicine.
01:06:17 ►
I mean, because there’s so much of that going on now with Chopra’s work
01:06:21 ►
and so much, and I don’t know if that’s considered that Hitchikuchi.
01:06:25 ►
No, no, that’s different.
01:06:27 ►
You know what I’m saying?
01:06:28 ►
There’s so much now going into the holistic,
01:06:32 ►
I’m not talking about systems,
01:06:35 ►
I’m talking about the cell,
01:06:37 ►
like Chopra talks about the cell
01:06:40 ►
and its ability to hear.
01:06:44 ►
Well, I think there’s a general spreading awareness
01:06:48 ►
of awareness in biology.
01:06:51 ►
And the old ideas of a system of integrated organs
01:06:55 ►
has given way to a holistic model.
01:07:00 ►
And so much can just
01:07:04 ►
be done with information in terms of like if you eat right, if you behave right, if you monitor yourself, if you exercise, we can know a great deal more about ourselves than we ever could before. The whole thrust of novelty
01:07:28 ►
is toward a kind of platonic perfection.
01:07:32 ►
And it means perfection of the body as well.
01:07:37 ►
How this will look, I’m not sure.
01:07:41 ►
Maybe the body can become superconducting.
01:07:49 ►
That’s a claim i would have to see before i believed i’m sure we’ll have people coming down the pike who claim they’re superconducting
01:07:54 ►
essentially breatharians claim that but then they were cornered down at baskin robbins and
01:08:01 ►
well that’s also how long the human body can live i mean they’re they’re
01:08:07 ►
talking about the in chopra’s view that their age is limitless there should be no
01:08:12 ►
well i think the i think that that’s quite within reach but i’m puzzled by the ethics of it
01:08:19 ►
i mean i i think that if you don’t die, you miss the point.
01:08:26 ►
So…
01:08:26 ►
He says we have a larger…
01:08:29 ►
Oh, we can live for a long time.
01:08:31 ►
Yeah, I mean…
01:08:31 ►
Oh, that’s true.
01:08:33 ►
He says that tongue-in-cheek when you hear him talk.
01:08:35 ►
He says that, but…
01:08:36 ►
Well, but there certainly are immortalists running around,
01:08:39 ►
people who have wild hopes.
01:08:41 ►
To me, that’s an incredibly egomaniacal wish because death is nature’s
01:08:48 ►
way of getting rid of worn out. I mean, you know, part of what’s wrong with our society
01:08:56 ►
is that people aren’t retiring and moving on. We’re becoming a society ruled by octogenarians and older
01:09:05 ►
because medicine has made that possible
01:09:08 ►
and it’s paradoxical that in an age
01:09:12 ►
when there is so much impetus for change
01:09:15 ►
people hang on so long
01:09:18 ►
at the top
01:09:20 ►
which frustrates more and more generations
01:09:24 ►
building up behind
01:09:26 ►
it’s called the Charles Windsor problem
01:09:29 ►
some of the immortalists that I’ve talked to
01:09:32 ►
plan on ascending the body in 2012
01:09:34 ►
or thereabouts as opposed to dying
01:09:37 ►
yes one thing that’s going to happen
01:09:40 ►
that my theory predicts but that doesn’t make my job
01:09:44 ►
any easier is that as we get
01:09:46 ►
closer and closer to 2012 the hysteria will build and claims will multiply and
01:09:55 ►
it’s just going to become a circus I’ve already in my life realized that apparently I’ve become involved with or set in motion something that
01:10:08 ►
will probably outlast me and I’m looking for high ground. I am very happy to be a cultural
01:10:21 ►
commentator from the side of my volcano in Hawaii,
01:10:25 ►
but I don’t want to move among the seething masses
01:10:30 ►
preaching the approaching apocalypse
01:10:33 ►
and, you know, anointing bishops and that sort of thing.
01:10:39 ►
I think that’s absolutely nuts.
01:10:41 ►
For me, I want to treat it as a kind of event in the world of physics.
01:10:48 ►
Sort of to say, well, the Earth is on a collision course.
01:10:52 ►
Not with an asteroid, not with a black hole, but with a very large question mark.
01:10:57 ►
And this will impact in December 2012.
01:11:01 ►
in December 2012.
01:11:09 ►
But I can tell that probably my ideas and these kinds of ideas
01:11:11 ►
are in fact going to get more than a fair hearing.
01:11:15 ►
They’re probably going to become the kernels of obsession
01:11:18 ►
for many lightly, delicately balanced people.
01:11:25 ►
And that’s why I stress
01:11:28 ►
you know the scientific approach
01:11:29 ►
evidence what can
01:11:32 ►
you show me everybody stay
01:11:34 ►
calm no wild
01:11:36 ►
claims
01:11:38 ►
and then
01:11:40 ►
if it turns out to be all
01:11:41 ►
malarkey nevertheless
01:11:43 ►
we will have navigated one of the most narrow
01:11:46 ►
necks in the history of consciousness and perhaps these faiths are like crutches. Once
01:11:53 ►
you are able to hobble forward without their use, you can fling them away and think no
01:12:00 ►
more about it. But even the most rational among us can hardly fail to notice that
01:12:07 ►
we are, we have backed ourselves into one hell of a position. And how are we going to get through
01:12:14 ►
this and maintain our human dignity? I mean, are we going to allow millions, billions of people to
01:12:21 ►
slip into starvation and disease? Are we going to practice triage on entire sectors of the planet
01:12:27 ►
and withdraw resources so that the white industrial democracies
01:12:36 ►
can ride through the waves of chaos?
01:12:39 ►
I mean, it’s very important that we not only preserve the human genome,
01:12:45 ►
it’s important that we preserve human values through all of this.
01:12:51 ►
And I think realizing that we are caught in a process of metamorphosis and transformation,
01:12:58 ►
not of our responsibility,
01:13:01 ►
is the basis for the attitudes of confidence and anticipation that will be necessary
01:13:11 ►
and that will allow us to be exemplars for the society. And then at the core of all of this is,
01:13:18 ►
of course, the evidence, which lies, to my mind, in the psychedelic experience.
01:13:31 ►
I mean, you know, people can say we’re bananas or misguided or whatever,
01:13:33 ►
but if they haven’t been there,
01:13:37 ►
it’s hard to understand the basis of their criticism because to explore our mystery,
01:13:40 ►
you don’t have to sweep up around the ashram for 12 years
01:13:44 ►
or kiss the feet of some beady-eyed weasel in a dhoti
01:13:48 ►
none of that
01:13:49 ►
our thing is successable
01:13:52 ►
you know, you make the decision
01:13:55 ►
you take it, you shut your mouth and it happens
01:13:59 ►
and anybody who criticizes that
01:14:03 ►
without having the experience
01:14:05 ►
is in a curiously unbalanced position, I think.
01:14:11 ►
This is a dependable mystery.
01:14:13 ►
This is what I sought my entire life.
01:14:15 ►
I mean, this was not in the church.
01:14:18 ►
This was not in India.
01:14:21 ►
This was not to be found
01:14:24 ►
until I was willing to submit myself to the
01:14:27 ►
experience of eating something which grows in dung and then it was there
01:14:34 ►
that’s the humbling that has to take place and the huge emphasis in the New
01:14:39 ►
Age on doing it on the natch you know know, is a form of spiritual materialism.
01:14:47 ►
I mean, what is the central…
01:14:49 ►
Naturally.
01:14:51 ►
Say, I don’t need to take drugs.
01:14:54 ►
Well, this is a form of spiritual materialism
01:14:57 ►
because what is the central faith of the New Age?
01:15:00 ►
There is no inside and no outside.
01:15:03 ►
Well, until you mention drugs and then
01:15:06 ►
suddenly this distinction has the dovecoat all in a flutter I don’t think
01:15:15 ►
so if I were able to reach it by any other means than pharmacology I would
01:15:20 ►
check myself in somewhere we didn’t you do not want these states to be…
01:15:27 ►
We’re not talking about…
01:15:29 ►
I don’t think people understand
01:15:31 ►
how entirely radical the psychedelic flash is.
01:15:35 ►
It is not something you want spontaneously hanging around
01:15:38 ►
as a consequence of your good works and clean diet.
01:15:42 ►
I don’t think so.
01:15:44 ►
What about the age-old
01:15:46 ►
problem? You always come down.
01:15:48 ►
You get high,
01:15:49 ►
you have that great experience, and then we come back
01:15:52 ►
to reality.
01:15:53 ►
Well, sex is like that.
01:15:56 ►
Youth is like that.
01:15:58 ►
Going to Venice
01:15:59 ►
is like that.
01:16:01 ►
The law of
01:16:03 ►
unfolding seems to be good times, bad times, ebb and flow.
01:16:12 ►
Nothing lasts. I mean, if you want a piece of psychedelic truth that is somewhat sobering,
01:16:19 ►
I mean, this is what I have taken away, and I guess I should leave you with this thought.
01:16:25 ►
I think you apply it in your life, and I also think that you look back on it and you understand.
01:16:31 ►
You know, Proust said, nothing is understood until it is remembered.
01:16:35 ►
And that’s certainly true of psychedelic experiences.
01:16:41 ►
But nothing lasts, you know.
01:16:44 ►
Not your friends know not your friends
01:16:46 ►
not your enemies
01:16:47 ►
nothing lasts
01:16:49 ►
and we deny this
01:16:51 ►
and yet that’s the great psychedelic truth
01:16:54 ►
and if you can face it in every moment
01:16:57 ►
and live it
01:16:58 ►
you will have a very very complete experience of existence
01:17:03 ►
you will ride the Tao
01:17:05 ►
towards the concrescence
01:17:07 ►
and be able to live
01:17:08 ►
in the light of its anticipation.
01:17:11 ►
And this, I believe,
01:17:13 ►
makes for a healthy life
01:17:15 ►
full of lots of laughs.
01:17:17 ►
And that’s basically
01:17:19 ►
what we’re striving for here.
01:17:22 ►
The best idea,
01:17:24 ►
the truest idea,
01:17:25 ►
will feel right.
01:17:30 ►
So thank you all very, very much for coming today.
01:17:34 ►
I appreciate it.
01:17:38 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:17:41 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:17:45 ►
Nothing lasts. Nothing lasts.
01:17:49 ►
Well, I guess that isn’t just psychedelic people who understand that.
01:17:53 ►
Us dusty old farts understand it even better.
01:17:56 ►
And if you’re an old psychedelic person, well, you’ve most likely learned that
01:18:00 ►
life is mainly about letting go of things.
01:18:03 ►
Material things, relationships,
01:18:05 ►
friends, places you live, jobs, and most importantly, I think, letting go of old ideas, beliefs
01:18:12 ►
that no longer serve you very well.
01:18:14 ►
It’s really amazing how much more interesting and enjoyable life becomes the more things
01:18:19 ►
you’re willing to let go of.
01:18:21 ►
But you already know all of this, so let’s move on.
01:18:28 ►
willing to let go of. But you already know all of this, so let’s move on. I’ll bet that back there a little bit when Terrence was describing his idea of a black contact lens inside your eyelid,
01:18:35 ►
one that would provide drop-down menus when you closed your eyes, well, I’ll bet that you were
01:18:40 ►
thinking the same thing I was thinking. Google Glasses. One of our fellow salonners who has been testing Google Glasses lately
01:18:48 ►
tells me that they provide a really wonderful experience.
01:18:52 ►
So, I’d like to think that the inspiration for Google Glasses
01:18:56 ►
may have come from one of Terrence McKenna’s workshops,
01:18:58 ►
where one day some young geek who was in attendance
01:19:01 ►
became inspired with Terrence’s fantasy.
01:19:05 ►
Actually, if the truth be known, I suspect that there is a whole legion of geeks out
01:19:10 ►
on the West Coast and in Silicon Valley who at one time or another heard Terrence speak.
01:19:15 ►
And when you go back and listen to his rap about the global network with everyone connected,
01:19:20 ►
and then you recall that he was saying this back in December of 1994, and then look at
01:19:26 ►
the state of our tech back then compared with where we are today, well, my guess is that the
01:19:32 ►
lilting words of the Bard McKenna were catalysts for many of the wonderful toys that you and I are
01:19:37 ►
playing with right at this very moment. So, if you happen to be one of those good people, why don’t
01:19:43 ►
you leave a comment with the program notes for this podcast and tell us about it. And, if you happen to be one of those good people, why don’t you leave a comment with the program notes for this podcast and tell us about it.
01:19:48 ►
And, as you know, you can get to our program notes via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:19:53 ►
All one word, psychedelicsalon.us.
01:19:55 ►
Or.com,.net, or.org.
01:19:58 ►
I think they’ll all get you to the same place.
01:20:05 ►
you to the same place. But getting back to one of the comments that we just heard Terrence make about populations where mutants lived within them for a long time before events gave them an
01:20:11 ►
advantage, well, howdy fellow mutant, because if you’re listening to this podcast, you most likely
01:20:18 ►
fit into that category, one in which I’m proud to belong myself, I should add. So, here’s to a world led by us psychedelic mutants.
01:20:27 ►
But now that I think about it, I for one have no desire to lead anybody anywhere.
01:20:33 ►
Maybe what we are really searching for is a world in which each and every one of us will be left alone to pursue whatever it is that interests us,
01:20:42 ►
as long as we don’t impinge on anyone else’s right to do
01:20:45 ►
the same thing. In other words, anarchy. Non-violent, small-a anarchy. Or, for a step even beyond that,
01:20:54 ►
I’ll leave you with one of my little brother’s witticisms. Down with anarchy!
01:21:01 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:21:05 ►
Be well, my friends.