Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Psychedelics, by metling assumptions, by destroying the expectations of rigid educations creates a fluidity of possibility that may allow answers to emerge. And it’s the only thing that I’ve seen that operates on a time scale sufficiently short to have an impact.”
“Language is a strategy for binding time.”
“The other thing is that biology works. It’s very successful. It’s been around more than a billion years. Civilization doesn’t work. It’s been around 10,000 years, and it’s on the brink of meltdown.”
“We fabricate ideas out of matter. No other creature does that.”
“One of the unique things that is happening on the planet is that the fate of all life is becoming hinged to the decisions made by a single species.”
“If there’s not free will, then thinking is meaningless.”
“But all we have to do is hit one speed bump, and democratic values are down the drain.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And our fellow salonners who have made recent donations to help offset some of our monthly expenses here in the salon,
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well, those people are Floris M., Shane N., Alex B., Michael W., Sean V., and Benjamin P.
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So I thank you one and all for your continued support of these podcasts. I really couldn’t do it without your help.
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Now, today we’re going to get to compare last week’s podcast,
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which was from the final session of a weekend workshop that Terrence McKenna led in May of 1990.
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Well, we’re going to compare that with today’s talk,
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which features the opening session of a weekend workshop that took place four years later, well, about four years later, February of
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- Now, while I’m going to play the entire opening session, where Terrence would go around
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the room and let everyone introduce themselves and perhaps ask a question or make a statement,
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however, I feel that in the interest of the privacy of the participants,
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many of whom gave their full names, that, well, I shouldn’t include many of their comments, which
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were difficult to hear in any event. But Terrence’s comments to some of the statements that were made,
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well, I think they’re worth hearing. So I’ve edited out the participants for the most part and left in Mr. T.
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One more thing now before I play this talk, and that is in just a few minutes,
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you’re going to hear Terrence talk about what he calls the defining dose.
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Now I may be losing my memory earlier than I planned on,
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but I can’t remember him ever saying that phrase before, a defining dose.
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It’s an interesting concept that I hadn’t thought of in that way before.
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Maybe since this talk came closer to the end of Terrence’s life, it’s a little more mature in the way how he is framing some of his thoughts.
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And so in a moment, we’ll join Terrence McKenna and a few friends on a February weekend in 1994,
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which means that the Northridge earthquake
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that hit L.A. was still very fresh in everyone’s minds, for what that’s worth.
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Also, as we will hear shortly, this was just one week before Terence McKenna got his very
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first internet connection.
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So let’s join him now for the introduction to the last weekend workshop that Terrence McKenna led before getting his first personal connection to cyberdelic space.
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Tonight to basically get people recognizing each other and to help me understand the priorities of the group, we’ll do what we always do,
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we’ll do what we always do which is basically just go around
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quickly
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and you can
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say who you are
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or some identifier
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and say what your
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particular slant or hope
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or interest is
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or profession or anything
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just so I can tell you how many
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art historians, how many shrinks
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how many this, how many that
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and what the focus of interest is
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whether it’s all psychedelic or it’s about time
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or you know prehistory
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or whatever
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so why don’t we just start and by a sort of random process
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make our way around
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well that’s worth talking about.
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I mean, one thing that needs to be made clear
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if we’re going to talk about psychedelic experiences
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is there are all kinds of altered states.
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I mean, who knows how many there are.
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Nitrous states, ketamine states,
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meditative states, post-orgasmic states, all these states. I’m
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particularly interested in what’s called the psychedelic experience. It’s something which
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is pretty chemically confined. It’s confined to these indoles, psilocybin, ibogaine, LSD, DMT, beta-carbolines, indole hallucinogens.
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And one thing that is a problem when you talk about this is a lot of people think that they have psychedelic experience
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when in fact they’ve only just shaved the under tummy of the beast.
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And all drug states, all stimulatory drug states in their initial presentation present themselves the same way.
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As speed, as rushing thoughts
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as a kind of euphoria
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and giddiness
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but
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that’s why I stress
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the defining dose
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meaning a sufficient
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dose of a psychedelic that you
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see what they do that no
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other thing does
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and what they do is a fairly profound deconstruction
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of uh of all constructions one of the thing one of the categories of effect
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is what’s called boundary dissolution they profoundly dissolve boundaries I mean between yourself and the stone you’re
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sitting on or yourself
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and somebody else or yourself and
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traumatic material in your own
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past and this boundary
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dissolution thing
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is a very sensitive issue
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with human beings
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because
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identity is
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maintenance of boundary
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and yet
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yes we are our clothes
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we are who we say we are
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and yet because of our sexual drive
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which is a drive toward boundary dissolution
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we have this weird ambivalence
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about boundary dissolution
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we also understand that death
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is boundary dissolution
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so is sleep.
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So we’re surrounded by this possibility.
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That happens in a waking state,
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in psychedelics, in a fairly profound way.
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The other thing that happens that I stress,
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that some people say I overstress,
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but it’s just my personal epistemological bias,
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is vision.
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That it’s not enough to have rushing thoughts.
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It’s not enough to have strange feelings.
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It’s not enough to recover childhood memories.
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It’s not enough to conceive of wild schemes. There has
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to be a point where
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the upwelling
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of creativity actually
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pushes over into
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the visual cortex.
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And that, to my
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mind, is the distinguishing
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characteristic, is when you see it.
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And this is the first thing, if
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somebody wants to tell me an experience, the first thing I ask is did you hallucinate and
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even making sure that the person understands the question is not easy
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because even in the realm of hallucination there’s a gradient you
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know there’s phosphenes we all know what those are I mean that’s what you see when you press on your eyelids
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or you stand up suddenly
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and you see rushing green and yellow
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lights, phosphenes
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there’s also what’s called hypnagogia
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dancing mice
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little candies
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small wheels
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string beans, pebbles
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all these things in marching
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endless array emotionally
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neutral but visually discernible and then there is content which becomes
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progressively less and less Englishable until finally you know you’re you are in
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the presence of something that is somehow fully itself
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and yet beyond rational apprehension
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and yet present.
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And that, to my mind, is the payoff.
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And then the name of the game
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is to watch your mind
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as over and over again you drop it
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like a depth gauge or something
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into this deeper and deeper medium
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where it always deconstructs in the same way
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or in generally the same way
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and then in the core of all this deconstructing
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hopefully and in the substances I prefer
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there is a core observer
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that is never wiped out, never destroyed, never compromised, and that’s the recorder who is taking the film that is going to later be developed and whatever good comes out of this is then going to be brought back. And someone over here mentioned art and creativity, psychedelics as catalysts for creativity.
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This is precisely what they are, both culturally and individually.
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What they do is they cause a catalysis of the imagination.
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Well, the imagination is the thumbprint of deity,
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not to put too fine a point on it,
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on our species.
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In other words, it is the part of ourselves
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that is most mysterious,
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most potentially interpretable as transcendent.
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And yet, you know, the paradox of materialism
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is that chemicals, substances, drugs impinge on this most evanescent, spiritual, transcendent, and somehow highly valued portion of the self.
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Well, then what does that mean about the nature of mind
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and the nature of cognition and where being
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stands in the order of things?
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You know, what is the mind and what is its place
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in nature? And I don’t pretend
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to have answers, I just pretend to have the method.
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And the method is to perturb
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the mind in the method is to perturb the mind
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in the same way that physics
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perturbs the atom
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in order to understand
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its constituent parts
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you have to pump energy into the system
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and then cause its boundaries
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to rupture and then
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study the phenomena
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that result from that
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the mind is similar, it’s like a mirrored
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surface. It’s perfectly still. As long as you don’t perturb it, it will give back a
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perfect reflection of your expectation. But if you know, this psychedelic thing
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operates on two levels in my mind.
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First of all, it’s this old, old, old
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touchstone of mystery
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that is linked to our humanness,
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to our sexuality, to our creativity,
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to our language, all of these things.
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And in the course of the weekend, this will all be teased out. But these parts of ourselves are somehow in that, out of that.
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And then the other side is that there is a kind of urgency,
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a kind of pregnancy about this issue
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because our crisis as a global culture is in fact a crisis of insufficient consciousness,
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insufficient awareness, insufficient love, insufficient feeling.
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So we only have two methods supposed to impact
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on this problem. One is called religion. The other is called ecstatic drugs, plants. And
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religion has failed. Religion has had the game to itself for 5,000 years in the West.
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And this is no joke. You know, the culture is in crisis
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and it’s a planetary culture
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there is very little doubt
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but that the neck, the choke point
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of the next 5,000 years of history
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lies in the next 50 years
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what I mean by that is
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that we are going to get the correct managerial techniques, social policies and attitudes in place or we’re going to go extinct in the next little while.
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by destroying the expectations of rigid educations creates a fluidity of possibility
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that may allow answers to emerge.
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And it’s the only thing that I’ve seen
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that operates on the time scale sufficiently
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short to have an impact
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in other words we are not
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getting a handle on our problems
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there’s very little sign
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of a deceleration
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of the lethal tendencies
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in our society
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I don’t know how it would be done
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one of the things worth talking
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about is
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are there practical understandable schemes I don’t know how it would be done. One of the things worth talking about is, you know,
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are there practical, understandable schemes
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for halting what is happening to our species and the Earth?
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Well, there’s no doubt that there will be a system.
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Well, so then, but then, you know, there’s a larger question,
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which is, is history a kind of gestation?
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Is it no more to be concerned that we’re using up all this stuff
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than that a fetal life in the womb eventually uses up all the stuff
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and it initiates a crisis?
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Then, you know, there’s strangulation, toxification, earthquakes, collapse,
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and it turns out this is how it’s done,
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and everything is carried into a new dimension,
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and unfolds at a different level.
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This is an interesting question,
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because I don’t think you can have it both ways.
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It’s either that the earth is our home,
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and we are to become its gardeners,
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and there is no salvation anywhere but here and we like that right or the earth is not our home we are strangers in this universe
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we belong in a higher and hidden realm made of light which we will achieve through a monolithic
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faustian technical something or other it’s the old Gnostic two-step
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where do you come down on that
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and in a sense the deck is stacked
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in favor of the Gnostic point of view
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because we’ve been playing a Gnostic game
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for a couple of thousand years
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I mean Christianity, don’t let them kid you
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all they did was exterminate
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the competition. But it’s
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a thoroughgoing dualism.
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I mean, it’s as thoroughgoing as all
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the dualisms it was
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so enthusiastic to stomp
00:15:56 ►
out.
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Well, because Western civilization
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is apocalyptically wired
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for self-destruction. It
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doesn’t have any open steady-state model of itself
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it always builds toward Ragnarok for well I think you glimpse it this whole psychedelic thing I
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think is the the raison d’etre is not the chaos of the experience, which is orgasmic, delightful, transcendental,
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but the honing of the mind that goes on
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so that when you come down,
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you see it all very differently
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and you see it rather more like an author.
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You understand that people are characters.
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You understand that people are characters. You understand that motivation matters.
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You understand that timing matters.
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And you understand that there are two kinds of people,
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those who understand what’s going on
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and those who are being manipulated
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by those who understand what’s going on.
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Yeah.
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Well, I’d like to believe they unconceal something
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that we’re not what they show you is that you’re not the victim of physics
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you’re not the victim that this is not a universe of laws that you are somehow a
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citizen of that it’s it well like the law of gravity the law of anything that
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it is that is all a fiction.
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That what it really is, is some kind of… This is what I was trying to get back to about the plot.
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It’s a story.
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It’s some kind of a story.
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And your job then is to awaken to this fact
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and then to, using that knowledge…
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I mean, I…
00:17:49 ►
To play the role that’s given to you mean I well and to transform it to see yourself as a character
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rather than a victim of laws
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you are not a victim of laws
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you are a character inside a work of art
00:17:59 ►
well there is a way basically to make your dreams come true
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I think and it’s
00:18:05 ►
nothing more than a slight forward lean into the energy field and then it works
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that’s all it is oh yes I am NOT Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be I’m an
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attendant Lord will do to swell a scene start a
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procession advise the prince careful meticulous at times a bit ridiculous I’m
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not sure that’s absolutely apropos but it’s yes that’s right he saw that he saw
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that it was a play but then he he said he was an attendant lord.
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And I think, you know, people say, well, then once you see that it’s a play,
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then you can transform your character.
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True to a point, but more importantly,
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I think the real wisdom in all of this is to become the author.
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You know, the author can reach back in
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and choreograph and lead the thing
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and redeem not only his character,
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but all the characters,
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and to make of life something plotted,
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because left to itself,
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you know, as it says in Finnegan’s Wake,
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we flop on the seamy side. Here in Moy’s Wake we flop on the seamy side here in
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Moy Kaine we flop on the seamy side but attention coax it into art and that’s
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why intelligence is indispensable to good art you know this idea of the
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enfant terrible I’m not buying buying this. Intelligence is the indispensable handmaiden of art
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because it’s somehow consciousness itself,
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consciousness of the how of the way things unfold.
00:19:58 ►
Well, anyway, we have our own value system.
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I mean, Marcello Ficino said, man, and he meant by that
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humanity, man is
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the measure of all things.
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Man is the measure of all things.
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It’s not what God wants, or the
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earth wants, or
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the only point of view which makes
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sense for us is a
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human point of view. Obviously,
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you know, the earth has achieved
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great things outside the human realm
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but within the human realm you know uh mozart and bach and milton and rumi and all of this stuff
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has been achieved and it represents an epigenetic accomplishment the It is not part of the gene swarm of the planet
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that stretches from viruses through to the mammals.
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It is something else,
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something some people, the materialists say,
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an iridescence on matter.
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But what an iridescence?
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I mean, I think the human enterprise is,
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and I will argue that it’s central to the cosmic drama that we are
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not witnesses to nature that’s not what it is that the what Christianity
00:21:14 ►
suppressed was a sense of invocative magic as the human relationship to the world history is a kind of alchemical sublimation
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it’s a rarefaction and a distillation of something and you know people say well you know what’s the
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argument for the transcendent for the eminence of the transcendent the argument for the eminence
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of the transcendent is the presence of human history
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on the planet if it were a planet of groundhogs butterflies and reindeer herds darwinian mechanics
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and so forth would nicely take care of the situation the fact that it is home to the striving
00:22:00 ►
of a civilized idea producing species species means that nature is trying to birth itself in a new way,
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almost to epigenetically explode itself
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out of the very deep and highly inertial creode
00:22:24 ►
of ordinary
00:22:25 ►
organic existence
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and yeah that
00:22:29 ►
biology the slow endless
00:22:31 ►
march of biology you know
00:22:33 ►
1.4 billion years of
00:22:35 ►
biology and suddenly
00:22:36 ►
self-reflection appears
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and in a million years
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produces more change
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than had been seen in the previous billion years.
00:22:47 ►
An order of several magnitudes of compression of time, of compression of novelty, takes place here.
00:22:54 ►
And the human world is the domain of that drama.
00:23:11 ►
no well I think human history is an incredibly brief unstable kind of metamorphosis it’s like you know you have caterpillars and then they form a chrysalis and then every enzyme system in this
00:23:18 ►
organic system goes berserk and essentially the thing melts and when when it is recast, it emerges as an entirely different kind of creature.
00:23:30 ►
History is not some meaningless or existentially empty process
00:23:36 ►
that has escaped from the bridle of nature.
00:23:41 ►
That’s preposterous.
00:23:42 ►
It is simply a natural process
00:23:45 ►
of a very unusual kind that occurs
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in a social species with a given
00:23:51 ►
density of neurons, a given sophistication
00:23:54 ►
of language and so forth and so on. And then the
00:23:57 ►
innate creativity that is locked
00:24:00 ►
in matter that causes
00:24:02 ►
electrons and protons to congregate into atoms, that causes you know electrons and protons
00:24:06 ►
to congregate into atoms
00:24:08 ►
that causes atoms to congregate into
00:24:10 ►
molecules that causes molecules to
00:24:12 ►
congregate into long chain polymers
00:24:14 ►
this endless
00:24:15 ►
self
00:24:18 ►
transcending through
00:24:19 ►
new forms of order that
00:24:22 ►
takes place at every level in nature
00:24:24 ►
is when it happens
00:24:25 ►
in animal nature
00:24:27 ►
it bubbles over
00:24:29 ►
into self-reflecting consciousness
00:24:31 ►
which is a strategy for time
00:24:34 ►
binding, that’s basically
00:24:36 ►
binding
00:24:37 ►
so language is a strategy
00:24:40 ►
for binding time
00:24:41 ►
it says remember last week
00:24:43 ►
when we saw the reindeer
00:24:44 ►
like that.
00:24:47 ►
And then writing is a further time binding and then electronic media is an effort to actually
00:24:53 ►
stop the fading of time at all and to create a kind of nunc stans, an endlessly expanding
00:25:01 ►
electronically stabilized now where all data is suspended in some kind of super space of accessibility.
00:25:09 ►
Time binding, now happening epigenetically through our species.
00:25:13 ►
The thing about history that I don’t believe,
00:25:16 ►
that I don’t see how the rationalists can believe,
00:25:20 ►
is that it can be extrapolated endlessly into the future.
00:25:24 ►
It can’t even be extrapolated hundreds of years into the future.
00:25:28 ►
It is obviously a rate-limiting process of some sort
00:25:32 ►
that is forcing everything into a situation
00:25:35 ►
where only more and more radical perturbation
00:25:38 ►
can break it out of this self-canceling cycle that it’s into.
00:25:44 ►
So like the birth process and like the death process
00:25:48 ►
it is now irreversible so wherever we’re going we are going and the question is
00:25:57 ►
you know where are we going and can we uh can we make some sense about it?
00:26:08 ►
Well, and the other thing is that biology works.
00:26:11 ►
Biology works. It’s very successful.
00:26:13 ►
It’s been around more than a billion years.
00:26:15 ►
Civilization doesn’t work.
00:26:19 ►
It’s been around 10,000 years, and it’s on the brink of meltdown. So this attention to nature is an effort to study something which works
00:26:25 ►
and then organize yourself like that.
00:26:30 ►
And if that could be done, if we could make that intellectual leap,
00:26:35 ►
there might be a certain measure of hope.
00:26:37 ►
At least that’s one of the pieces of the puzzle,
00:26:40 ►
to be able to produce things with low temperature catalytic chemistry
00:26:45 ►
that doesn’t require high temperature and high pressure
00:26:48 ►
which is how it’s now done in modern industrial fabrication processes
00:26:52 ►
in all of nature on this planet
00:26:55 ►
organic nature you don’t get temperatures much above 130 degrees
00:27:00 ►
and yet redwood trees are produced
00:27:03 ►
coral reefs are produced
00:27:04 ►
at low temperature, at low pressure degrees and yet redwood trees are produced coral reefs are produced you know things of amazing
00:27:06 ►
complexity produced at low temperature at low pressure yes everything yeah originally from
00:27:13 ►
this kind of but somehow something else put us here and that we belong into this other realm
00:27:17 ►
that we’re trying to get to well not so much that i mean you don’t have to evoke extraterrestrials. It’s just that, you know, is the Earth some kind of ultimate value to be preserved?
00:27:29 ►
Or is it no more to be preserved than, say, a placenta?
00:27:34 ►
This is the question.
00:27:36 ►
Is it the baby or is it the placenta?
00:27:39 ►
That goes off the question of what is humanity’s role on the Earth?
00:27:43 ►
Are we a fetus or are we a cancer?
00:27:44 ►
That’s right. That’s right.
00:27:46 ►
That’s right.
00:27:46 ►
But saying we’re a cancer is, you know, what we are is we’re different.
00:27:53 ►
We’re very, very different.
00:27:54 ►
We fabricate ideas out of matter.
00:27:58 ►
No other creature does that.
00:28:00 ►
Some creatures fabricate genetic programming into matter.
00:28:06 ►
They build termite nests and honeycombs and coral reefs. But each, those kinds of animals have incredibly limited
00:28:13 ►
repertoire. And it changes very, very slowly under, and it’s not under conscious control.
00:28:20 ►
We, on the other hand, you know, can trade in our entire cultural model every 6 to 18 months if we want.
00:28:30 ►
The world is incredibly conservative, and we are not.
00:28:37 ►
The world will test a single modification on itself for 10,000 years before ruling yay or nay. We will generate
00:28:47 ►
50 models of automobile in 40 years.
00:28:53 ►
So we have gone from Christian generational
00:28:56 ►
times in 2,000 years to where we are now in a technological
00:29:00 ►
conscious awareness sense with the same biological capacity.
00:29:04 ►
Yes. Our culture could have been played on the biology of 2,000 years ago.
00:29:08 ►
It definitely could have.
00:29:10 ►
The programming that we’re manifesting right now
00:29:12 ►
is a program that’s running on a biological machine
00:29:16 ►
that is much, much older.
00:29:19 ►
The hardware doesn’t change, but the software changes.
00:29:23 ►
I mean, in 1660, Newton invents the calculus.
00:29:28 ►
The software changes.
00:29:29 ►
In the 900s in the Umayyad Caliphate of Baghdad, they invent algebra.
00:29:35 ►
These are like system upgrades is what they are.
00:29:39 ►
And in the 20th century, incredibly powerful tools,
00:29:46 ►
century, you know, incredibly powerful tools. In fact, tools so powerful that no single monkey understands or applies them.
00:29:50 ►
We have massively powerful technology, but it is also flawed conceptually. And given
00:29:56 ►
a reasonable awareness and given that human consciousness is some channel for novelty,
00:30:01 ►
we can work on our technology if that’s the direction that we choose to go.
00:30:07 ►
Well, we are the flexible part of technology.
00:30:10 ►
Or Marshall McLuhan put it more graphically.
00:30:12 ►
He said, we are the genitals of our machines.
00:30:15 ►
We exist to make sure that next year’s model is better.
00:30:21 ►
It’s not very far off.
00:30:23 ►
Well, right now, for instance instance when they design very densely
00:30:27 ►
packed circuitry they tell the computer to optimize the packing but they don’t specify
00:30:33 ►
the final solution the computer itself decides the final optimized close packing of the circuitry
00:30:40 ►
it’s very interesting that as the organic realm becomes more and more uninhabitable
00:30:46 ►
we appear to be preparing
00:30:48 ►
a kind of an electronic
00:30:49 ►
trap door for ourselves
00:30:51 ►
that there is the possibility
00:30:54 ►
some people
00:30:56 ►
like Hans Moravik and Frank
00:30:57 ►
Tipler and people like that think
00:30:59 ►
you know that we are destined
00:31:01 ►
to essentially become our machines
00:31:04 ►
and to
00:31:04 ►
the projection of problems because of the fact that our material technology that we are destined to essentially become our machines.
00:31:07 ►
The projection of problems,
00:31:10 ►
because of the fact that our material technology is so great,
00:31:13 ►
we may in fact project the problems to the point where they manifest themselves and become unmistakable.
00:31:17 ►
And that may be what spurs us to solve them in some sense or another.
00:31:20 ►
Well, primates love a good fight.
00:31:23 ►
And the fight hasn’t begun yet. I mean, good fight and the fight
00:31:25 ►
hasn’t begun yet
00:31:26 ►
this is not the fight
00:31:27 ►
this is the long garden party
00:31:29 ►
before the fight
00:31:31 ►
this is the groaning buffet
00:31:34 ►
tables, the literary conversation
00:31:37 ►
the women in the
00:31:38 ►
tule dresses
00:31:39 ►
but the fight will come
00:31:43 ►
and
00:31:43 ►
I’m very interested
00:31:47 ►
in the human condition
00:31:48 ►
and what we represent
00:31:50 ►
as an experiment of nature
00:31:54 ►
and an investment of nature
00:31:55 ►
nature has put all life on this planet at risk
00:31:59 ►
for this experiment in self-reflection
00:32:04 ►
intelligence for this experiment in self-reflection, intelligence, material downloading of ideas into matter.
00:32:11 ►
If there is an appetition for completion,
00:32:14 ►
as Alfred North Whitehead thought,
00:32:16 ►
then we have turned a corner
00:32:19 ►
in the high-stakes game of nature’s unfoldment.
00:32:24 ►
Just to hear you talk about it. stakes game of nature’s unfoldment well I mean
00:32:27 ►
certainly they have a right to live on the planet
00:32:30 ►
I don’t know where
00:32:31 ►
all that lies
00:32:33 ►
95% of all
00:32:35 ►
species that have ever existed
00:32:37 ►
on the planet are extinct
00:32:39 ►
nature is really an
00:32:42 ►
engine for the production of
00:32:43 ►
extinct species, apparently.
00:32:46 ►
At any given moment, only 5-7% are alive.
00:32:50 ►
There have been enormous diebacks in the past.
00:32:56 ►
Ebb and flow of dieback is one way in which evolutionary advancement takes place,
00:33:03 ►
because it’s in competition for
00:33:06 ►
newly impoverished environments
00:33:09 ►
that speciation takes place
00:33:12 ►
like it’s thought by most evolutionary biologists
00:33:14 ►
that before the rise of industrial civilization
00:33:19 ►
the main force creating speciation
00:33:22 ►
among plants on this planet
00:33:24 ►
was the
00:33:25 ►
meandering of rivers
00:33:27 ►
because rivers
00:33:29 ►
produce in the course of meandering
00:33:32 ►
sandbar
00:33:34 ►
environments
00:33:35 ►
and desertified
00:33:38 ►
bank
00:33:40 ►
regions and it’s into
00:33:42 ►
those wastelands
00:33:43 ►
that invader species can come and that’s
00:33:47 ►
where the competition for new forms is most ferocious in a climaxed ecosystem
00:33:54 ►
most mutations are lethal but in a in an open up for grabs environment like that mutations are not so frequently detrimental
00:34:08 ►
that’s the notion behind the evolution of weeds
00:34:11 ►
what weeds are are annual
00:34:15 ►
plants which produce enormous amounts of seed
00:34:19 ►
in a very opportunistic effort to
00:34:23 ►
grab and hold as much unclaimed territory as possible.
00:34:29 ►
In a climaxed rainforest, seeds are often huge, often produced intermittently,
00:34:38 ►
and it’s a whole different psychology of dispersal.
00:34:43 ►
Once human beings enter into the scene with burning and land clearing and this sort of psychology, of dispersal. Once human beings enter into the scene
00:34:46 ►
with burning and land clearing and this sort of thing,
00:34:49 ►
then we become the major force affecting plant speciation.
00:34:54 ►
Unfortunately, this effect,
00:34:56 ►
both by meandering rivers and human beings,
00:34:58 ►
is to create a more, a lesser,
00:35:03 ►
a lesser,
00:35:05 ►
more annual,
00:35:08 ►
more ephemeral kind of biotome.
00:35:11 ►
Carl Sauer, the geographer, said
00:35:15 ►
we found the planet a climaxed forest
00:35:18 ►
and we will leave it a weedy lot.
00:35:22 ►
That’s what he meant
00:35:24 ►
about our impact on plant life
00:35:26 ►
so this question
00:35:28 ►
you know about our place
00:35:29 ►
in the scheme of things
00:35:31 ►
versus all the rest of life
00:35:33 ►
it’s very clear that
00:35:35 ►
one of the unique
00:35:36 ►
things that is happening on the planet
00:35:39 ►
is that the fate of all
00:35:41 ►
life is becoming
00:35:44 ►
hinged to the decisions made by a single species.
00:35:49 ►
It’s though the concept of cultivation has at this point been extended to the entire planet,
00:35:57 ►
and there’s even a fairly radical form of political philosophy
00:36:01 ►
which would have you believe that we should take upon ourselves the role of
00:36:05 ►
caretaker of the planet and what that means is extending the umbrella of human responsibility
00:36:11 ►
over the entire biota what it means then if you’re an extraterrestrial standing off looking at all
00:36:19 ►
this is that what is really going on on the planet is a gene swarm.
00:36:31 ►
And, you know, the concept of species is extremely slippery at its boundaries when you start trying to talk about it with a population geneticist
00:36:36 ►
or a molecular geneticist.
00:36:38 ►
And really what’s happening is what the old biology called species
00:36:46 ►
are really temporary nexus,
00:36:49 ►
nexi of genetic associations
00:36:52 ►
that on the scale of a million years
00:36:54 ►
are extremely plastic, flowing, changing,
00:36:59 ►
and at the viral level,
00:37:00 ►
even mammalian genes are moving around.
00:37:03 ►
Everything is in flux
00:37:05 ►
so then
00:37:06 ►
suspended at some position
00:37:10 ►
in this matrix
00:37:11 ►
to be determined by self-reflection
00:37:14 ►
maybe, is our
00:37:16 ►
species, which has
00:37:18 ►
this peculiar
00:37:19 ►
role of extending
00:37:22 ►
control through the extension
00:37:24 ►
of metaphor and technology. And we are somehow
00:37:33 ►
now defining the process. And to this point, historical development has been unconscious.
00:37:41 ►
I mean, the notion of a global civilization is probably less
00:37:45 ►
than 30 years old as a fact it’s less than 10 years old the asymptotic rate at
00:37:53 ►
which boundaries are being dissolved and databases are being fused is driving the
00:38:00 ►
historical process now with a momentum that no institution or person can control
00:38:09 ►
the amount of information, the amount of sheer data that’s being connected up.
00:38:17 ►
I mean, I was thinking last night, for some reason, God knows why. I was thinking about a pioneer in the Ohio Valley in 1810 and how
00:38:31 ►
this guy could talk to his wife or his three children and how now at home I can talk to
00:38:39 ►
probably 500 million people in the world fairly easily by simply placing an international
00:38:45 ►
telephone call. I can talk to that many people.
00:38:49 ►
500 million, between 5 and 500 million
00:38:52 ►
is I believe 6 orders of magnitude
00:38:54 ►
of connection that has gone on.
00:38:58 ►
Well, it’s astonishing
00:39:00 ►
and it means that
00:39:02 ►
we are running around basically with the reflexes best suited for bashing out the brains of reindeer.
00:39:11 ►
This is what nature taught us to do. genie which we have summoned out of the dimensions of information
00:39:26 ►
and chaos and complexity
00:39:28 ►
that we have summoned
00:39:30 ►
through the magic of civilization
00:39:32 ►
has some kind
00:39:34 ►
of autonomous
00:39:35 ►
existence, some kind
00:39:38 ►
of destiny
00:39:39 ►
and it’s not clear whether
00:39:42 ►
you know that organization is on some kind of quest for self-reflection and that it moves through the atomic, the molecular, the subcellular, the cellular, the organic, the cultural, the personal, if it’s that kind of thing, or if it’s actually something that we have, as it were, summoned from above.
00:40:09 ►
I mean, this is back to these questions we talked about last night
00:40:12 ►
of Gnostic versus whatever else is out there,
00:40:16 ►
in terms of defining how we think about our relationship to the other
00:40:21 ►
and how other we are.
00:40:23 ►
I mean, if nature is the standard, then we are clearly the minions of the other and how other we are I mean if nature is the standard then we are
00:40:25 ►
clearly you know the minions of the other you know no well summoned in this
00:40:31 ►
in a sense of not so much dragged out but have triggered a descent of gnosis
00:40:39 ►
into our species I mean we have like summoned a genie, the genie of symbolic activity,
00:40:47 ►
cognitive understanding,
00:40:50 ►
mathematical representation.
00:40:52 ►
I mean, incredible tools
00:40:54 ►
whose epistemic foundations
00:40:58 ►
are not clearly understood,
00:41:00 ►
even by modern people.
00:41:02 ►
I mean, we do not know what numbers are
00:41:05 ►
actually
00:41:06 ►
and yet we have these relationships
00:41:09 ►
to these things unquestioningly
00:41:12 ►
that give us the ability to for instance
00:41:16 ►
summon the light which burns
00:41:19 ►
at the heart of stars
00:41:20 ►
we can summon that down to our deserts
00:41:23 ►
it’s a form of natural magic
00:41:27 ►
I mean it’s eerie how
00:41:29 ►
as natural magic abandoned
00:41:31 ►
its pretense of a moral
00:41:33 ►
universe
00:41:34 ►
at the close of the 30 years war
00:41:38 ►
it turned into
00:41:39 ►
modern science
00:41:41 ►
which you know with cold
00:41:44 ►
gaze and a complete absence of any belief in spiritual hierarchy,
00:41:49 ►
began to work one by one the miracles, you know, to summon the light which burns in the stars,
00:41:57 ►
to change lead into gold, to plumb the mysteries of life itself.
00:42:03 ►
But the price was a desouling
00:42:06 ►
I mean you don’t have to be a Jungian
00:42:09 ►
to understand what the message here is
00:42:12 ►
I mean it’s the story of the golem
00:42:14 ►
yes it’s Faustian
00:42:16 ►
it’s somehow that the price of this understanding
00:42:19 ►
is dis-ensouling
00:42:21 ►
the understanding comes
00:42:23 ►
but the soul and the understanding cannot exist autonomously,
00:42:28 ►
which by a vicus mode of recirculation
00:42:31 ►
is sort of what I wanted to mention today.
00:42:35 ►
Well, yeah, I mean, one way that I’ve always thought about biology
00:42:41 ►
is that, I mean, if you stand way off and look at biology
00:42:46 ►
it’s a kind of
00:42:48 ►
chemical system
00:42:50 ►
for
00:42:51 ►
amplifying quantum mechanical
00:42:54 ►
indeterminacy
00:42:55 ►
it’s a way of lifting
00:42:58 ►
the indeterminacy at the
00:42:59 ►
atomic level and transferring
00:43:02 ►
it to the molecular level in the form
00:43:04 ►
of charge transfer, resonance
00:43:06 ►
rings, electron storage, and this sort of thing, and then raising it still further into
00:43:15 ►
the macro-physical realm so that concepts like free choice, indeterminacy so forth and so on become real because apparently i mean obviously
00:43:27 ►
thoughts which are the place where free will begins i will or will not do x thoughts are very
00:43:36 ►
subtly uh channeled i don’t know if channeled is the word well, cascades of electrons
00:43:45 ►
that what we’re talking about when we say
00:43:48 ►
I will make my hand into a fist
00:43:51 ►
and then it happens
00:43:53 ►
is we’re talking about thought
00:43:55 ►
becoming the initiator of physicality
00:44:00 ►
of acts in the physical world
00:44:02 ►
how this happens is completely unknown.
00:44:08 ►
But I think indeterminacy, free choice,
00:44:10 ►
the sense of controllable destiny,
00:44:14 ►
all these things probably have to do with the fact
00:44:16 ►
that the nature of living chemistry
00:44:21 ►
is quantum mechanical,
00:44:23 ►
and so it has these indeterminacies
00:44:26 ►
built into it. It’s quite miraculous
00:44:29 ►
and yet very neat.
00:44:32 ►
Yes, right.
00:44:34 ►
And exploding indeterminacy, I mean that seems to be
00:44:37 ►
what is the magic of our existence
00:44:41 ►
is that somehow we have pushed out
00:44:44 ►
a bubble of indeterminacy in a macro-physical
00:44:48 ►
space. I mean, people can say there is no free will, but there is the persistent experience
00:44:55 ►
of the illusion of free will, which is, you know, I’ll take it so how this happens
00:45:06 ►
and it apparently
00:45:07 ►
is not really, well we don’t know
00:45:10 ►
obviously but
00:45:11 ►
it is not obviously happening
00:45:14 ►
at the animal level
00:45:15 ►
in the same way it’s happening for us
00:45:18 ►
animals experience
00:45:19 ►
a kind of eternal moment
00:45:22 ►
of choice making
00:45:23 ►
which also rides on this quantum indeterminacy.
00:45:27 ►
But they don’t have a horizon of recall
00:45:30 ►
or a set of forward-leading vectors based on the past,
00:45:36 ►
or at least it’s assumed not.
00:45:38 ►
The fact that we can symbolically communicate these things
00:45:42 ►
is taken as proof of their presence in our organization
00:45:47 ►
and absence in other, yeah.
00:45:51 ►
What you’re saying is that on the atomic level is manifested just into this, and that the
00:45:58 ►
expression of the, everything of the expression of the atomic level is kind of a mechanism
00:46:02 ►
that’s expressed through it?
00:46:01 ►
the expression of the atomic level as kind of a mechanism that’s expressed
00:46:03 ►
through it? Well, the way
00:46:05 ►
nature seems to work in most
00:46:07 ►
systems is that it
00:46:09 ►
a strategy which
00:46:12 ►
works will be
00:46:13 ►
repeated on different levels
00:46:16 ►
at different scales.
00:46:18 ►
This is the fractal thing that we were
00:46:20 ►
talking about over here.
00:46:22 ►
So
00:46:23 ►
it’s a great question.
00:46:27 ►
See, if there is not free will,
00:46:31 ►
then thinking is meaningless.
00:46:35 ►
Because if there is not free will,
00:46:37 ►
you think what you think
00:46:38 ►
because you couldn’t possibly think anything else.
00:46:42 ►
So thinking is not an enterprise of any consequence
00:46:45 ►
in a universe without free will.
00:46:48 ►
Yet we have the persistent intuition
00:46:51 ►
that thinking is of consequence.
00:46:54 ►
Well, so then the question is,
00:46:56 ►
our science tells us
00:46:58 ►
that at the scale we’re living at,
00:47:00 ►
everything is very highly determined
00:47:02 ►
by like thermodynamics,
00:47:04 ►
Newtonian physics, the
00:47:07 ►
laws of mechanics, so forth and so on. And that we are, I mean, this is where Descartes
00:47:12 ►
pushed it in this 18th century, that we are machines of some sort. Yet, you know, persistently
00:47:20 ►
modernity insists that there is this existential residuum.
00:47:28 ►
Well, then, if you’re going to try and explain it,
00:47:31 ►
whatever that means in scientific terms,
00:47:36 ►
then what you have to do is find a source of this kind of indeterminacy somewhere in the universe,
00:47:38 ►
and then build a pipeline, an ideological pipeline,
00:47:41 ►
where you can pipe it from there to where you need it.
00:47:44 ►
Okay, so where you need it.
00:47:49 ►
Okay, so where we need it is in modern sociology and psychology,
00:47:52 ►
and where we have it is in quantum physics.
00:47:56 ►
So a lot of people are trying to build a pipeline to bring it over here and dump it here, and then it will do wonderful things
00:47:58 ►
for our modeling of the living state.
00:48:02 ►
But I, you know, this is all fine to talk about this,
00:48:05 ►
but I warn you, this is not my forte
00:48:09 ►
nor my favorite thing,
00:48:10 ►
because I think it’s very cut off
00:48:12 ►
from the felt presence of immediate experience.
00:48:19 ►
That’s what’s missing from all that we’ve been
00:48:22 ►
kind of tap-in-thing around this
00:48:24 ►
since we started this discussion about what is our relationship with nature and the earth.
00:48:30 ►
I mean, in a way, maybe it’s just such an obvious thing.
00:48:33 ►
Everybody here just already thinks this and nobody wants to say it.
00:48:37 ►
But, I mean, I think it’s obvious that human beings are in some kind of unique situation on the earth,
00:48:45 ►
either by design or their own will or something.
00:48:49 ►
But we still have this sticky problem of what to do about.
00:48:53 ►
We’re here on the Earth now with the animals and the plants,
00:48:56 ►
and in a way, isn’t the de-soul condition that we’re in,
00:49:03 ►
isn’t that what really a lot of what you’re
00:49:06 ►
interested in is supposed to address?
00:49:08 ►
I mean, isn’t that what psychedelics are supposed to address?
00:49:10 ►
What is our relationship with nature?
00:49:12 ►
It’s sort of something that you just need to
00:49:14 ►
we need to
00:49:16 ►
re-get, we have to
00:49:17 ►
get back in touch with that
00:49:19 ►
in some real immediate way that we
00:49:21 ►
don’t have to think about almost
00:49:23 ►
or philosophize about but we just are a part of this matrix.
00:49:28 ►
And then we can really figure out where we go
00:49:30 ►
in this Faustian pact that we’ve made and so forth.
00:49:34 ►
Do we go to the stars?
00:49:36 ►
But I don’t think we’re going anywhere until we get this relationship
00:49:38 ►
figured out with what to do with the earth and nature,
00:49:42 ►
our relationship with it.
00:49:44 ►
Well, on one level, it’s an act of attention.
00:49:48 ►
It’s not like an ideology.
00:49:50 ►
It’s simply a shift of attention so that we watch it.
00:49:55 ►
I mean, your question is broad.
00:49:57 ►
It ranges from the most practical questions of population politics,
00:50:03 ►
demography, insurance and tax
00:50:06 ►
policies, this kind of thing
00:50:08 ►
to
00:50:09 ►
you know
00:50:12 ►
basically how shall
00:50:14 ►
we design the destiny of the race
00:50:16 ►
kind of questions
00:50:17 ►
probably every civilization
00:50:20 ►
that has gone through a twilight
00:50:22 ►
has had groups
00:50:24 ►
of concerned comfortable people who have met in rooms to decry the approaching catastrophe.
00:50:33 ►
You know, I’m sure that when Rome fell, there were people who said, you know, we see what it is.
00:50:40 ►
The bad tax policies, the barbarians at the border, these religious cults.
00:50:45 ►
It’s just not safe to walk the streets anymore.
00:50:49 ►
And yet fell she did.
00:50:52 ►
And this always happens.
00:50:54 ►
So I don’t know.
00:50:56 ►
It bothers me to think that we could perhaps trigger.
00:51:00 ►
See, what’s most fragile is democratic values.
00:51:04 ►
See, what’s most fragile is democratic values.
00:51:11 ►
And I’m pretty confident that the human race is going to survive in some form or another.
00:51:20 ►
But all we have to do is hit one speed bump and democratic values, which are already under tremendous assault, will just go down the drain. You must have all seen a few weeks ago in the New York Times the article about how
00:51:27 ►
FAO or somebody issued this report that the world food supply has now fallen behind the world food
00:51:34 ►
demand. And, you know, this long demographic article littered with equations and statistics,
00:51:41 ►
but what it’s saying is, you know, build into your model of the world
00:51:46 ►
millions of people starving every year
00:51:48 ►
in various places
00:51:50 ►
as politicians manipulate
00:51:52 ►
and move food supplies around
00:51:55 ►
because forced agriculture
00:51:57 ►
is failing around the world
00:51:58 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:52:00 ►
When does it become moral, for example,
00:52:02 ►
for governments to, say,
00:52:04 ►
pay women not to have children?
00:52:06 ►
I mean, this is the…
00:52:07 ►
It’s a moot point because you have…
00:52:10 ►
You mean they’ve already tried.
00:52:12 ►
In Singapore they have, yes.
00:52:14 ►
They had tax advantage.
00:52:15 ►
Yes, well, mostly what they try in Singapore they succeed with.
00:52:19 ►
But Singapore is a perfect example.
00:52:21 ►
Singapore is a beige fascism.
00:52:23 ►
You know, they don’t burn books and wear
00:52:26 ►
funny uniforms, but
00:52:27 ►
the result is the same.
00:52:30 ►
Right now we’re quite literally
00:52:32 ►
paying people to have children
00:52:33 ►
in a tax-incentive government structure,
00:52:36 ►
church-sponsored.
00:52:38 ►
That is the posture of our civilization
00:52:40 ►
at the moment.
00:52:41 ►
But see, you would have to refight the wars
00:52:44 ►
of the 17th century because what you would have to refight the wars of the 17th
00:52:45 ►
century because what you would have to do
00:52:47 ►
is say no social institution
00:52:49 ►
period can
00:52:51 ►
promulgate policies
00:52:53 ►
which are genocidal
00:52:55 ►
or racially suicidal
00:52:57 ►
and then you would have to arrest
00:52:59 ►
the Pope and
00:53:00 ►
proceed along those lines
00:53:03 ►
and
00:53:03 ►
what? that’s coming up on the time wave and proceed along those lines. What?
00:53:09 ►
That’s coming up on the time wave in the Enlightenment.
00:53:11 ►
Arresting the Pope.
00:53:15 ►
Well, you heard it here first, folks.
00:53:19 ►
The cultural thing that’s happening there is interesting.
00:53:22 ►
The Internet is becoming the network.
00:53:26 ►
I mean, there is a globalization of a single computer network.
00:53:30 ►
And so what do you say to people who ask the simple question,
00:53:32 ►
what if it’s evil?
00:53:35 ►
We don’t have a choice.
00:53:37 ►
We don’t have a choice. What a great answer to that question.
00:53:44 ►
The only possible answer to that question. The only possible
00:53:46 ►
answer to that question.
00:53:49 ►
The answer to the will
00:53:51 ►
is so much baggage.
00:53:53 ►
But the concept of psychedelic awareness is not.
00:53:56 ►
We can be quite conscious of the process.
00:53:58 ►
But the idea that we can,
00:54:00 ►
that we, I, me,
00:54:01 ►
can individually manifest a significant
00:54:04 ►
difference to it by choice?
00:54:08 ►
Well, but that’s an interesting question.
00:54:11 ►
The fact that you can’t do it, the fact that you can’t affect that dimension
00:54:17 ►
may mean that that’s not the dimension you should be trying to affect.
00:54:22 ►
In other words, part of what’s
00:54:26 ►
going on, I think, is a retreat
00:54:27 ►
to immediacy.
00:54:30 ►
I will next week
00:54:32 ►
get on
00:54:34 ►
the internet,
00:54:35 ►
but I found your question
00:54:37 ►
amusing because I loathe people
00:54:40 ►
who ask if you’re on the internet.
00:54:42 ►
I went through this with fax
00:54:44 ►
machines six years ago,
00:54:45 ►
and finally the whining just reached such a level.
00:54:50 ►
They said, all right, we will get the dedicated fax line.
00:54:55 ►
And yes, next week we will be on the internet,
00:54:59 ►
but with no sense of joy.
00:55:02 ►
And since we have no choice as you inform
00:55:06 ►
me, what difference does it matter
00:55:08 ►
whether I like it or
00:55:09 ►
don’t like it, it just has to
00:55:12 ►
be done
00:55:12 ►
I would say
00:55:16 ►
you know, I have an observation
00:55:18 ►
the thing is it seems like
00:55:19 ►
as more complex the communication
00:55:21 ►
as more trivial is most of
00:55:24 ►
the communication
00:55:24 ►
well, but that doesn’t mean As more complex the communication network, as more trivial is most of the communication.
00:55:27 ►
Well, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t also a rising percentage
00:55:30 ►
of profound communication.
00:55:32 ►
I mean, yes, when everything is being communicated,
00:55:34 ►
99% of it will be garbage.
00:55:36 ►
Nevertheless, when everything is communicated,
00:55:39 ►
100% of the good stuff will be being communicated.
00:55:43 ►
We just need more good stuff.
00:55:46 ►
Huh? We just need more good stuff. Well, what we need are filters
00:55:48 ►
and navigational devices
00:55:50 ►
and…
00:55:51 ►
Who’s going to sort out the 1%?
00:55:54 ►
Well, you’re going to buy software
00:55:56 ►
that is tailored to your needs
00:55:58 ►
or not tailored to your needs, depending
00:56:00 ►
on whether you’re a chump or not.
00:56:02 ►
That’s the thing.
00:56:03 ►
I mean, I don’t have the capacity to solve it out.
00:56:07 ►
Well, then you’re dead on arrival.
00:56:10 ►
This is the new order.
00:56:13 ►
You have no choice.
00:56:17 ►
Whatever it was.
00:56:22 ►
Okay, all right.
00:56:25 ►
Go for it.
00:56:26 ►
We didn’t grow our own brains as human beings,
00:56:31 ►
so maybe we’re not growing our own global brain.
00:56:36 ►
Yeah, the point about all this is,
00:56:39 ►
and the only reason there is any hope,
00:56:41 ►
is because the macro process that’s going on
00:56:47 ►
is not under the control of human planners or institutions, thank God.
00:56:52 ►
If it were, it would be as big a botch as everything else.
00:56:56 ►
But it is not under the control of human planners and institutions.
00:57:01 ►
It is biological, not cultural.
00:57:05 ►
This is what has not been understood about history,
00:57:08 ►
is that the past million years,
00:57:11 ►
the big headlines have been biological
00:57:15 ►
and behavioral slash organizational.
00:57:20 ►
The software, which is languages, religions, cultures,
00:57:23 ►
systems of magic, mathematics, engineering schemas, heresies, magic, so forth, well, all that is ephemeral.
00:57:35 ►
And there hasn’t been a major shift in behavior slash organization since the rise of perspective.
00:57:44 ►
But that’s only 500 to 600 years in the past.
00:57:49 ►
Now something else is happening.
00:57:52 ►
And the sensory biases and technological biases
00:57:56 ►
that permitted the evolution
00:57:59 ►
of the post-medieval democratic individual,
00:58:03 ►
the citizen, the worker,
00:58:07 ►
taxpayer,
00:58:09 ►
all that is now the field of focus is moving beyond it.
00:58:16 ►
Something else is happening.
00:58:18 ►
Everything is being recast.
00:58:20 ►
And we, each of us, as we imbibe the medium of the culture
00:58:25 ►
keep trying on
00:58:27 ►
the latest adumbration
00:58:30 ►
of modernity that is
00:58:32 ►
consistent with what we can put up with
00:58:34 ►
you know, so so and so
00:58:36 ►
decides to have reconstructive
00:58:38 ►
cosmetic surgery, somebody else
00:58:40 ►
decides not to, somebody else
00:58:42 ►
decides they’ll go with the tattoo
00:58:44 ►
but not the nipple piercing somebody else decides not to. Somebody else decides they’ll go with the tattoo, but not the nipple piercing.
00:58:46 ►
Somebody else decides, you know,
00:58:48 ►
Armani is okay, Gucci is out.
00:58:51 ►
What this is, is, you know,
00:58:53 ►
shedding and scaling of cultural self-image
00:58:58 ►
controlled by the individual
00:59:00 ►
in a relationship of capital expenditure
00:59:03 ►
to monolithic images
00:59:05 ►
that are being projected down
00:59:07 ►
through the sociological control mechanism.
00:59:10 ►
All the means are there
00:59:12 ►
in the matrix of information between human beings
00:59:14 ►
or they’re being put in place anyway.
00:59:17 ►
That’s fine and good,
00:59:18 ►
but what hasn’t happened yet
00:59:21 ►
is we haven’t been resold.
00:59:23 ►
That’s right.
00:59:24 ►
Since we’ve been desold, that’s where we’ve been.
00:59:26 ►
Well, see, there is no percentage now in educating us
00:59:30 ►
because as Marx, which is what we all are,
00:59:34 ►
we are easier to manipulate, easier to fleece.
00:59:38 ►
It’s easier to get an idiot to join a book club
00:59:41 ►
than it is to get an intelligent person to join a book club than it is to get an intelligent person to join a book club
00:59:45 ►
this is an interesting equation
00:59:48 ►
then for the American publishing
00:59:50 ►
industry you see
00:59:51 ►
and all other of these
00:59:54 ►
voluntary participations
00:59:56 ►
in the market economy
00:59:58 ►
so it’s about
01:00:00 ►
reclaiming
01:00:03 ►
immediate
01:00:04 ►
experience and retracting fetishism,
01:00:09 ►
which relates to addiction and all this other stuff.
01:00:11 ►
Because what’s happened is a social system, a virus, has gotten loose
01:00:17 ►
that is actually not symbiotic, but ultimately will kill off the the host and we are the host i mean you know lenin
01:00:28 ►
said when it comes time to hang the capitalists they’ll sell us new rope and this is true
01:00:36 ►
they’re lenin’s gone but we are still you know digging the ground from beneath our feet
01:00:42 ►
because of this object fetishism,
01:00:47 ►
which is a form of addiction,
01:00:48 ►
which comes out of, you know,
01:00:50 ►
our dysfunctional relationship to our prehistory.
01:00:55 ►
I think so.
01:00:56 ►
And then there are two ways to approach doing something about it.
01:01:00 ►
One, to go cold turkey,
01:01:02 ►
to try and just cure it by, I suppose, psychedelic drugs and massive applications of a different point of view, or to try and mediate it by analyzing, this would be the methadone approach, to try and figure out, you know, what is it about this fetishism and how
01:01:25 ►
much of it can be satisfied without killing ourselves? And this is where you get the virtual
01:01:31 ►
reality enthusiasts, because they’re saying, you know, object fetishism is not detrimental to the
01:01:39 ►
earth if the objects are made of light. In other words, the problem is the physicality of the fetish itself.
01:01:47 ►
If you can make the fetish out of light,
01:01:51 ►
well, in a sense, we have this, though.
01:01:53 ►
We have hundreds of millions of people being warehoused by television
01:01:58 ►
where they live, you know, toxic, low-awareness lives,
01:02:02 ►
semi-preserved by food preservatives
01:02:05 ►
and low levels of ionizing radiation,
01:02:09 ►
and they live in great arcologies
01:02:14 ►
where everybody is turned to a different…
01:02:17 ►
Yes?
01:02:17 ►
What a waste of intelligence.
01:02:19 ►
Well, on the other hand,
01:02:20 ►
do you want these people driving around
01:02:22 ►
and crowding the malls
01:02:24 ►
and waiting in lines in front of you in restaurants?
01:02:27 ►
If all these people ever…
01:02:29 ►
Walking down virtual shopping malls.
01:02:31 ►
Exactly.
01:02:32 ►
So, I don’t know.
01:02:34 ►
It’s a great age for intelligence because there’s so little of it.
01:02:53 ►
The nature of the game is to deprogram from all of these systems of images that are being handed down. And then, you know, to make your way like a pilgrim with eyes open across a new landscape, which is not a very pretty landscape because you know western civilization is in the
01:03:05 ►
act of a slow motion train wreck that’s what’s going on at the end of uh of the millennium
01:03:11 ►
because you know what are you going to do what’s the alternative well the main the only alternative
01:03:17 ►
i’ve found is to yak about it and to you know a kind of hasidic complaining is good.
01:03:29 ►
And just never shut up.
01:03:36 ►
What’s happening now is there is so much understanding running around at the service of capitalism, but it’s all micromanaged.
01:03:39 ►
Somebody has a technology for making a better chip.
01:03:42 ►
Somebody has a better, faster switch.
01:03:47 ►
a technology for making a better chip somebody has a better faster switch but nobody can extrapolate what is the consequence of all of this stuff at once and it has there are emergent properties
01:03:54 ►
so that no one can actually predict the direction that the culture is moving in and the cone of
01:04:01 ►
projection is actually shortening not lengthening as uncertainty
01:04:06 ►
is crowding into the system as more and more factors begin to arrive i mean we don’t know
01:04:12 ►
where it could come from it could come from superconductivity or cold fusion or charge transfer
01:04:18 ►
or you know and at any moment some technique, or piece of information could arrive,
01:04:26 ►
which will just confound the entire situation.
01:04:30 ►
I think that psychedelics are this.
01:04:33 ►
That, you know, what physics was for the 20th century,
01:04:39 ►
pharmacology and psychedelic travel, or whatever,
01:04:42 ►
and psychedelic travel or whatever
01:04:43 ►
will be for however much
01:04:45 ►
of the 21st century exists
01:04:47 ►
before we’re sucked
01:04:48 ►
into the infundibulum
01:04:50 ►
because it is,
01:04:54 ►
at last,
01:04:55 ►
we have understood.
01:04:56 ►
See, I mean,
01:04:57 ►
the way science proceeds,
01:04:58 ►
which is somewhat reasonable,
01:05:00 ►
is by dealing with
01:05:01 ►
the simple questions first.
01:05:04 ►
You know,
01:05:04 ►
what is a falling ball?
01:05:07 ►
What is an inclined plane?
01:05:08 ►
Simple questions first.
01:05:10 ►
Now, reductionism has essentially come to the end of its road with matter.
01:05:17 ►
The canceling of the superconducting supercollider.
01:05:21 ►
Did you read the descriptions of how to go to the level where they could test the theory
01:05:28 ►
they would need a superconducting supercollider a thousand
01:05:31 ►
kilometers around and then to go to the next
01:05:36 ►
order of magnitude to test the final level of the theory
01:05:39 ►
a superconducting supercollider the size of the solar system
01:05:44 ►
well these things are not going to be built.
01:05:47 ►
So what it means is that this path
01:05:51 ►
proceeding from the Greeks for 2,500 years
01:05:54 ►
has now come to an end
01:05:57 ►
with a handful of quarks.
01:06:00 ►
You know, that’s what you’ve got.
01:06:02 ►
And, you know, mountains of equation
01:06:04 ►
and many careers
01:06:05 ►
and all those conferences in Zurich and in Italy
01:06:08 ►
and chasing women around in Stockholm
01:06:11 ►
and all that business, that happened.
01:06:15 ►
What’s now, it’s understood that the really interesting energies
01:06:20 ►
go on at probably less than that of an ordinary triple-A flashlight battery,
01:06:27 ►
and that everything goes on in the near domain, specifically the biology of this planet,
01:06:36 ►
even more pointedly, the neocortex of the higher primate man. This is where the action is. And
01:06:43 ►
primate man. This is where the action is.
01:06:47 ►
And science is possible in the neocortex,
01:06:52 ►
but it’s much more like shamanism because it’s a phenomenological science, meaning it bases itself on observation
01:06:56 ►
like 19th century botany or something,
01:07:00 ►
and what you send is simply the intelligent
01:07:03 ►
mind. It’s not about long base interferometry
01:07:08 ►
radio telescopes and all these instrumentalities
01:07:12 ►
the instrumentality of psychopharmacology
01:07:16 ►
lies in the laboratory
01:07:17 ►
but the field work of psychopharmacology
01:07:22 ►
lies right here
01:07:24 ►
and I made it my business of psychopharmacology lies, you know, right here. And I, you know,
01:07:27 ►
I made it my business
01:07:29 ►
to attend to what has been accomplished
01:07:32 ►
by the Western mind.
01:07:34 ►
And then I made it my business
01:07:36 ►
to explore some of the wilder frontiers
01:07:42 ►
of pharmacology.
01:07:43 ►
And the news I bring back to the
01:07:46 ►
best of my ability is
01:07:48 ►
that great confoundment
01:07:50 ►
lies ahead I mean you can run
01:07:52 ►
those wild horses over that
01:07:54 ►
cliff anytime
01:07:55 ►
it’s
01:07:56 ►
it’s a
01:08:00 ►
moot point as to whether western
01:08:02 ►
science can survive
01:08:04 ►
the encounter with these things.
01:08:07 ►
And, you know, it’s only been about a hundred years.
01:08:11 ►
Lewis Lewin went to Cincinnati and brought peyote back to Berlin in 1888 and began his extraction processes.
01:08:35 ►
It’s been a hundred years that this peculiar ethnological complex of the aboriginal people at the fringes of great civilizations has been deposited on our plate.
01:08:41 ►
And for most of that time, it’s either been ignored or illegal or both.
01:08:45 ►
And so we don’t, we have not finished with this.
01:08:48 ►
And people like ourselves,
01:08:52 ►
what we represent is an intuitionally driven underground of people who have found this
01:08:55 ►
to have some positive or fascinating impact
01:09:00 ►
on our own lives,
01:09:02 ►
but we are not an ideology or a field of study. I mean, some of us are
01:09:10 ►
simply thrill seekers, some of us are pharmacologists, some of us ethnologists,
01:09:16 ►
some botanists, psychologists, artists, everybody has a different angle, but the thing has not annealed into a coherent understanding
01:09:26 ►
the self
01:09:28 ►
the ego
01:09:30 ►
is the crowning
01:09:32 ►
achievement of western civilization
01:09:34 ►
it also is sinking
01:09:36 ►
the rowboat
01:09:37 ►
and what this stuff
01:09:40 ►
represents is an antidote
01:09:42 ►
but this is a
01:09:44 ►
cultural war of such
01:09:46 ►
fierceness and fury
01:09:47 ►
because people are going
01:09:49 ►
to be mighty agitated
01:09:51 ►
when they realize
01:09:53 ►
what cultural transformation really means
01:09:56 ►
it means you can’t take it with you
01:09:58 ►
it means you can’t take you
01:09:59 ►
with you
01:10:00 ►
and the issue
01:10:04 ►
of surrender in a dominator
01:10:06 ►
society is very
01:10:07 ►
major, that’s why these psychedelics
01:10:10 ►
are so
01:10:10 ►
politically hot
01:10:13 ►
because the ego
01:10:15 ►
for all of its bluster
01:10:17 ►
is a very fragilly established
01:10:19 ►
thing
01:10:20 ►
and every wind that blows
01:10:23 ►
carries a certain threat to it
01:10:25 ►
well
01:10:27 ►
if you fully
01:10:30 ►
assimilate the time wave
01:10:32 ►
theory I think the part that
01:10:34 ►
colors immediate experience
01:10:35 ►
is the resonances
01:10:37 ►
because
01:10:39 ►
it’s sort of
01:10:42 ►
hard to explain but
01:10:43 ►
for instance
01:10:45 ►
in James Joyce’s Ulysses
01:10:47 ►
the way he organizes it
01:10:49 ►
is on one level this is a book about a guy
01:10:51 ►
trying to buy some kidneys
01:10:52 ►
to fry for breakfast
01:10:54 ►
and wandering around his neighborhood
01:10:56 ►
waiting for the meat store to open
01:10:59 ►
and having all these things go on
01:11:00 ►
on one level it’s that
01:11:02 ►
on another level it’s the Trojan War and the
01:11:05 ►
peregrinations of Odysseus
01:11:07 ►
in the eastern Mediterranean.
01:11:09 ►
And then there are several other levels.
01:11:11 ►
Well, everything gives
01:11:14 ►
off
01:11:14 ►
vibrations
01:11:17 ►
of its metaphorical or
01:11:19 ►
analogical relationship to
01:11:21 ►
similar situations in the past.
01:11:24 ►
This is a kind of literalizing of the shell
01:11:26 ►
drake Ian morphogenetic field so let’s take an obvious and easy example a person any person
01:11:35 ►
their face their gesture is an obviously a resonance of their grandfather their great
01:11:42 ►
grandmother they’re saying all of these genetic concatenations are coming together we understand that because it’s a material metaphor
01:11:51 ►
and relational but everybody i don’t really believe in reincarnation in the ordinary sense
01:11:59 ►
but i do believe that we are interference patterns of effects created by people who existed in the
01:12:08 ►
past and the future and you can see it you know i see a lot of people and i at least i think i do
01:12:17 ►
sometimes i think it’s just the same 250 being moved ahead of me on trucks at night.
01:12:27 ►
But I’m not sure.
01:12:33 ►
But people give off these resonances of past time,
01:12:36 ►
and situations give them off.
01:12:38 ►
You know, cities.
01:12:42 ►
I mean, it’s not so true in America where everything is young,
01:12:46 ►
but in Europe, if you know where you are, then you usually know several things scattered along a time chain about where you are, you know, what was
01:12:53 ►
going on in the 4th century, the 9th century, the 16th, and the 19th. And this is a way of seeing,
01:13:01 ►
I mean, this is really there, this is is in everything this is just an extension of intuition
01:13:07 ►
where you actually
01:13:09 ►
see a wider
01:13:11 ►
spectrum of time
01:13:13 ►
in people, in their faces
01:13:16 ►
one thing that the time wave
01:13:19 ►
says is that there are
01:13:22 ►
clots of novelty
01:13:27 ►
in a medium of otherwise less novel stuff
01:13:33 ►
of some sort, a probabilistic medium.
01:13:36 ►
And a person, a galaxy, a person, a book
01:13:43 ►
are nexies of novelty
01:13:46 ►
floating along in this less novel medium
01:13:50 ►
and these things come together and go apart
01:13:52 ►
but specifically people
01:13:54 ►
are persistent nexii of novelty
01:13:58 ►
and obviously there is a boundary of complexity
01:14:01 ►
at my skin surface
01:14:03 ►
I mean an inch in it’s a very different place than an inch out,
01:14:08 ►
as far as I’m concerned.
01:14:11 ►
I had read an article recently that talked about how the vocabulary of,
01:14:18 ►
say, like a 14-year-old today has decreased significantly in the last 30 years
01:14:25 ►
to the point of like they were saying today, I think it was about,
01:14:30 ►
the average 14-year-old has a vocabulary of about 10,000 words
01:14:33 ►
as opposed to about 26,000 words about 30 years ago.
01:14:38 ►
And I was wondering what your thoughts were about that.
01:14:44 ►
If you thought it was a manifestation of we’re moving into this realm
01:14:47 ►
of being able to communicate better without actually having to verbalize these things,
01:14:53 ►
or are we moving toward the 1984 version of hell where we’re cutting back on our ways?
01:15:01 ►
The problem is that we’re moving in both directions at once.
01:15:05 ►
I mean, what’s happening is that the society is beginning to stretch its upper and lower boundaries.
01:15:14 ►
You can now fall farther and climb higher than you ever could before.
01:15:20 ►
I mean, if you screw up in this society, you could find yourself living under a bridge
01:15:25 ►
quickly. If, on the other hand, you know, the dice rolled a different way for you,
01:15:32 ►
you know, you could be sleeping with Madonna tomorrow.
01:15:40 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:15:48 ►
Well, I really hate to have Terrence’s last thought for today to be about sleeping with Madonna, but that’s where the tape ended.
01:15:57 ►
But if you’re one of our younger salonners, I don’t want you to let that gross you out just because, well, McDonough was a lot younger back then, as we all were.
01:16:07 ►
Anyway, we just heard Terence McKenna and a few friends back in February of 1994
01:16:12 ►
talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly potential of this new technology called the Internet.
01:16:19 ►
At the time he was making these comments, I was the project lead for a group
01:16:23 ►
that ultimately became the first Internet and Java development group for a company that’s now called Verizon.
01:16:31 ►
So I know that I was already well into what at the time was not much more than a curiosity to everybody above the middle management in the world’s telecommunications companies.
01:16:42 ►
It was really an uphill battle to get the budgets we
01:16:45 ►
needed to build out the net to where it is today. And so I have to admit that I was quite pleasantly
01:16:51 ►
surprised to hear how up to speed Terrence and his group were about what was going on with the
01:16:57 ►
internet, even though Terrence didn’t seem to be all that happy about it. Remember this?
01:17:02 ►
all that happy about it. Remember this?
01:17:04 ►
I will next week
01:17:05 ►
get on the internet
01:17:08 ►
but with no sense of
01:17:10 ►
joy. Now if you
01:17:12 ►
go back and re-listen to the
01:17:13 ►
full soundbite, you’ll also hear
01:17:16 ►
the part that I cut out where he said
01:17:17 ►
I loathe people who ask if I’m
01:17:20 ►
on the internet.
01:17:22 ►
But of course just before that he
01:17:23 ►
also said that the following week he was going to get on the net himself.
01:17:27 ►
So I think that we can perhaps come to the conclusion that it was sometime
01:17:32 ►
around March of 1994 that Terence McKenna first
01:17:36 ►
jacked into the net. Somehow that little factoid has to work
01:17:40 ►
its way into fiction someday. I might even do that myself.
01:17:47 ►
Now can you quickly tell me how many different topics were touched on in this little get-together session? As I keep pointing out,
01:17:53 ►
this was all ad lib. Terrence had no idea of what questions would be coming his way.
01:17:59 ►
And yet, if you go back and listen again, keeping in mind that this is all coming off the top of
01:18:04 ►
his head,
01:18:09 ►
I think you’ll have to agree with me that Terrence McKenna had a truly unique mind.
01:18:15 ►
And I just can’t pass up the opportunity to again say something positive about the game Minecraft. Terrence was just now talking about object fetishism and how it wouldn’t be so bad
01:18:22 ►
if the objects were made of light.
01:18:29 ►
Well, yesterday afternoon, after I brought my granddaughter home from school at noon,
01:18:34 ►
I told her that I finally broke down and put Minecraft on our new Kindle tablet.
01:18:40 ►
And the first thing that she said was, I want to build the first world on it, which she then proceeded to do.
01:18:41 ►
And within an hour, you would be blown away by the world that she built.
01:18:46 ►
Not only a couple of houses, but pens with various livestock milling around in them,
01:18:51 ►
and a railroad that you could ride for what seemed like miles around this part of the
01:18:55 ►
nearly infinite world of Minecraft. You know, I’ve spent some time myself trying to do a few
01:19:02 ►
simple things in Minecraft, but the things I do are childishly primitive
01:19:07 ►
compared to what my little five-year-old granddaughter created just yesterday afternoon.
01:19:12 ►
And she did it all with light.
01:19:15 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:19:20 ►
Be well, my friends.