393 - A Serious Look At Our Planetary Future

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck

“If you step back from it and really think about what the mass media does on a global scale, the most significant thing it does is coordinate behaviour.” -Daniel Pinchbeck

Today we feature Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2013 Palenque Norte Lecture. This talk/conversation took place late one night during the Burning Man Festival in the big tent at Camp Soft Landing, which hosted the annual lecture series. Prompted by questions from the audience, Daniel touches on a wide range of topics that included Rudolph Stiener, reincarnation, ecology, shamanism, mysticism, planetary crisis, morphagenic fields, and he even touches on Bitcoin.

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24 ►

And first the good news.

00:00:25 ►

Our annual pledge drive has been a complete success.

00:00:29 ►

Just this morning, we reached our goal of raising 12 months of operating expenses.

00:00:33 ►

So I am now committed to continuing these podcasts from the salon through February of 2015, at the very least.

00:00:42 ►

And on the last day of this month, I’ll post another podcast with a wrap-up of the fun drive

00:00:47 ►

and give you some more details.

00:00:49 ►

Also, just to let you know,

00:00:51 ►

I can already hear some of our fellow slaughters groaning here,

00:00:55 ►

but in case you missed it,

00:00:56 ►

the next phase of the Occupy movement

00:00:58 ►

begins on the 4th of April of this year,

00:01:01 ►

which is less than two weeks away.

00:01:04 ►

It’s called the Wave of Action,

00:01:05 ►

and I’ll do a dedicated podcast on April 3rd about this three-month event. But don’t worry,

00:01:12 ►

the Wave of Action podcast will be interspersed with podcasts from the 2013 Palenque Norte

00:01:18 ►

lectures and some new Terrence McKenna material as well. And again, I’ll have more to say about that in my next podcast.

00:01:26 ►

For today, we get once again to hear from my old friend, Daniel Pinchbeck. And for what it’s worth,

00:01:33 ►

Daniel and I first met at one of the Entheobotany conferences that were held near the Palenque,

00:01:38 ►

Mexico ruins. At the time, Daniel was still writing Breaking Open the Head, and I was writing The Spirit of the Internet.

00:01:47 ►

Now, Daniel and I next met at center camp at Burning Man in 2002,

00:01:51 ►

and it was at that burn that I changed my name from Larry to Lorenzo, for what it’s worth.

00:01:57 ►

The following year, Daniel was a speaker at the very first Palenque Norte lectures,

00:02:01 ►

and you can hear that talk, which is titled A Change in How

00:02:05 ►

We Experience Time, in podcast number four here in the salon.

00:02:10 ►

And now, almost 400 podcasts later, including half a dozen or so with Daniel, we are about

00:02:16 ►

to listen to his 2013 Palenque Norte Lecture, which covers quite a wide range of topics.

00:02:22 ►

I’ve not been able to locate a copy of the schedule from last year,

00:02:26 ►

but as I recall, the talk that we’re about to listen to was actually given by Daniel very late at night.

00:02:32 ►

But I could be wrong about that.

00:02:34 ►

In any event, I guess that it really doesn’t matter right now,

00:02:37 ►

so let’s join Pez as he introduces our speaker for today.

00:02:42 ►

All right, everybody, get nice and comfortable.

00:02:44 ►

We’re going to get started here with our next talk.

00:02:47 ►

It’s my great pleasure to introduce Daniel Pinchbeck.

00:02:50 ►

All the speakers that we have here this week,

00:02:52 ►

Daniel’s actually the only one who’s been at Palenque Norte

00:02:55 ►

every single year since 2003.

00:02:59 ►

So it’s really wonderful to have him back.

00:03:01 ►

And so I’m sure many of you know Daniel.

00:03:02 ►

He is the author of the best-selling novel, Breaking Open the Head, excuse me, best selling book Breaking Open the Head,

00:03:09 ►

and also 2012 Return of Quetzalcoatl. He is also the editorial director at Reality Sandwich and

00:03:16 ►

the founder of the Evolver.net network. And he’s currently working on a new project called Mind

00:03:21 ►

Shift that I’m sure I’ll tell you more about. So without further ado,

00:03:25 ►

here’s Daniel. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for coming tonight. I think I’ve started a new

00:03:32 ►

talking tradition, which is eating something that I’ve never eaten before, right before I talk.

00:03:37 ►

Because my friend Gino over there from Hong Kong has brought duck tongue in soy sauce. So I just

00:03:43 ►

had my first duck tongue. If anybody wants to try

00:03:45 ►

a duck tongue, but be forewarned, there’s a lot

00:03:48 ►

of weird cartilage

00:03:49 ►

stuff inside of it.

00:03:51 ►

He’s got them over there if you want them.

00:03:54 ►

They’re not going like hotcakes,

00:03:56 ►

you know.

00:03:59 ►

Okay, so I don’t know

00:04:01 ►

how many people here are familiar with my work.

00:04:04 ►

Who isn’t really that familiar? Who is not familiar with my work? Okay, so I don’t know how many people here are familiar with my work. Who isn’t really that familiar?

00:04:06 ►

Who is not familiar with my work?

00:04:09 ►

Okay, cool.

00:04:09 ►

So that gives me the, you know, it’s always easy for me to talk and sort of locate myself in my own kind of personal history.

00:04:18 ►

So I’m the author of a few books.

00:04:21 ►

My first book was Breaking Open the Head that was on psychedelic shamanism.

00:04:24 ►

And I started

00:04:26 ►

that book. I was a journalist. I was

00:04:28 ►

writing for the New York Times Magazine and Esquire

00:04:30 ►

and so on. I had a kind of

00:04:32 ►

existential crisis

00:04:33 ►

or a spiritual emergency as I was in my late

00:04:36 ►

20s.

00:04:38 ►

Although I’d come from a cultural background

00:04:39 ►

where my parents were artists. My father was an abstract

00:04:41 ►

painter and my mother was a writer.

00:04:44 ►

I hadn’t been, they’d rejected, you know, the religion, the spiritual, you know, practices of their ancestors.

00:04:50 ►

And so I grew up, you know, in the context of scientific materialism, accepting that or, you know, believing that consciousness could only be brain based.

00:04:58 ►

And that, you know, death was kind of the cessation of anything at all.

00:05:02 ►

kind of the cessation of anything at all.

00:05:06 ►

And when I was in my late 20s,

00:05:10 ►

I just began to realize in New York, in the media world, that underlying the frenzy of activity

00:05:13 ►

that you found in the cultural and the media world,

00:05:17 ►

there was a deep kind of despair and a kind of nihilism.

00:05:21 ►

And I began to realize that the basis of that

00:05:23 ►

was this scientific materialistic worldview. And so at, and I began to realize that the basis of that was this scientific materialistic worldview.

00:05:26 ►

And so at that point I began to, just as I went through this questioning phase,

00:05:31 ►

really ask myself, did I actually know for a fact that there could be no other existence of any part of our soul or spirit?

00:05:42 ►

And I realized that I didn’t necessarily know it for a fact,

00:05:44 ►

and I realized that I didn’t necessarily know it for a fact and I remembered that my psychedelic experiences in college

00:05:47 ►

had been the most significant kind of

00:05:50 ►

windows or doors into other possibilities of the psyche

00:05:53 ►

so yeah

00:05:56 ►

I also was kind of lucky because

00:05:59 ►

part of my heritage was through the Beat Generation

00:06:02 ►

my mother had been involved with the writer Jack Kerouac

00:06:05 ►

when she was very, very young.

00:06:07 ►

She wrote a memoir about her time with him.

00:06:10 ►

And through her, I was friends with Allen Ginsberg and so on.

00:06:14 ►

And they had definitely explored mysticism,

00:06:17 ►

Eastern mysticism, shamanism,

00:06:20 ►

been very early in exploring ayahuasca.

00:06:23 ►

And actually a friend of mine who was a poet who had a more direct connection to the beat lineage was the one who introduced me to ayahuasca.

00:06:33 ►

So breaking open the head, I ended up undergoing a series of shamanic initiations and was lucky enough to be able to use my journalistic abilities to visit different tribal people and write about them.

00:06:48 ►

So I got an assignment to go to West Africa, to Gabon,

00:06:51 ►

where I went through an initiation taking iboga.

00:06:56 ►

How many people here know what iboga is?

00:07:01 ►

Okay, so iboga is…

00:07:03 ►

If more of you wanted to… I know know it must be so nice to lie down

00:07:06 ►

but if you can sit up a little bit

00:07:08 ►

it would be kind of helpful for me

00:07:10 ►

it gives me a sense of a little more of like a vitality

00:07:12 ►

or something like that

00:07:13 ►

anyway so yeah

00:07:16 ►

iboga is the

00:07:18 ►

sort of main psychedelic

00:07:20 ►

of Africa, West Africa

00:07:23 ►

a tryptamine

00:07:24 ►

that is the longest lasting psychedelic that we know of. The trips

00:07:28 ►

are about 20 to 25 hours. The tribe

00:07:32 ►

called the Bwiti in Gabon and Cameroon use it as their main

00:07:35 ►

initiation tool. So I was lucky enough to be able to go to Gabon

00:07:40 ►

and go through a tribal initiation taking Iboga.

00:07:44 ►

Which I’ve written about extensively

00:07:46 ►

but among the amazing

00:07:48 ►

things about it for me

00:07:49 ►

was I was writing about it

00:07:52 ►

for a magazine called Vibe, a hip hop magazine

00:07:54 ►

and then they never published the article

00:07:55 ►

because I think they became kind of freaked

00:07:58 ►

out that they’d sent like this white Jewish guy

00:08:00 ►

to go through this African ritual

00:08:01 ►

I think it didn’t make sense in the context of

00:08:04 ►

their commercial hip-hop culture.

00:08:06 ►

Anyway, so a number of things about that experience

00:08:11 ►

were extraordinary, and as I said,

00:08:13 ►

I’ve written about it a lot,

00:08:14 ►

but among them was the sense of really there being

00:08:17 ►

a guiding spirit in the plant intelligence,

00:08:21 ►

and that almost as if the spirit took me by the hand

00:08:24 ►

and showed me my whole life.

00:08:30 ►

There was a long period.

00:08:31 ►

There was also different phases of the experience

00:08:33 ►

that they knew very, very clearly.

00:08:36 ►

One being an open-eyed phase

00:08:38 ►

where they put you in front of a mirror

00:08:39 ►

and you see different visions and windows opening up on a mirror

00:08:42 ►

that are like portals into other worlds or potentially like future possibilities they told me later and then a long phase where

00:08:49 ►

you lie down for about 10 hours and they play music the whole time and during that part of the

00:08:55 ►

trip i went through my whole life up to that point and it was almost like a holographic sense memory

00:09:02 ►

recapitulation of being able to go back into very early childhood

00:09:06 ►

spaces and traumas and experiences

00:09:09 ►

and really fully having that emotional sense

00:09:12 ►

of what that was like.

00:09:13 ►

And it felt as if I was being guided

00:09:16 ►

through this whole process.

00:09:19 ►

And then it would do things like, for instance,

00:09:22 ►

it showed me little films of myself.

00:09:24 ►

At that point I was a journalist.

00:09:26 ►

I was in this media culture, and I would drink a lot at cocktail parties.

00:09:28 ►

So I saw little films of myself drinking alcohol, getting drunk, acting poorly,

00:09:34 ►

feeling unable to work the next day, and so on.

00:09:37 ►

And it was like these little repetitive loops,

00:09:39 ►

which were basically just to make you disgusted with your own behavior.

00:09:43 ►

And I didn’t stop drinking alcohol after that.

00:09:48 ►

I definitely cut it down.

00:09:51 ►

So that, for me, was an example of how iboga seems to work with addictive patterns and addictive behavior.

00:09:57 ►

It seems to both have…

00:09:59 ►

Because iboga, known in the West now as ibogaine, is being used as a treatment for addictions,

00:10:05 ►

especially heroin addiction.

00:10:08 ►

And I have a number of friends who couldn’t get cured of heroin

00:10:10 ►

by any other method who managed to break it through ibogaine.

00:10:15 ►

But it seems to have a number of different ways

00:10:17 ►

that it has that effect.

00:10:21 ►

One is something that’s like neurochemical

00:10:23 ►

in that people who are addicts who take Iboga

00:10:26 ►

will have no withdrawal symptoms from heroin and no desire for heroin after the experience.

00:10:34 ►

And so it has sort of some kind of a neurochemical reset. And then at the same time,

00:10:39 ►

it has this kind of integrative quality where you’re able to integrate your past experience

00:10:44 ►

and really see these patterns that you’ve been caught in as if from outside,

00:10:48 ►

as if they’re being shown to you as like a movie or something.

00:10:52 ►

So I had that experience, and I think as soon as I had that experience,

00:10:54 ►

I knew that I wanted to write a book at some point.

00:10:59 ►

And also things came up in that experience that, for me,

00:11:03 ►

seemed to indicate that these shamans were able to access

00:11:06 ►

kind of

00:11:08 ►

knowledge

00:11:08 ►

that

00:11:10 ►

didn’t really make sense in a rational

00:11:13 ►

empirical sense like one of the

00:11:15 ►

tribal shamans

00:11:17 ►

at one point was able to, he said that he

00:11:19 ►

could see the spirit of my grandmother, my mother’s

00:11:21 ►

mother he specified hovering

00:11:23 ►

over me and that he said that she had died recently and that she loved me very much and she was still kind of

00:11:29 ►

protecting me. And it was just fascinating because he was right. My mother’s mother had died within

00:11:34 ►

a year and I hadn’t told anybody that, you know, and it was just the way he said it was so

00:11:38 ►

commonplace, you know. So that was probably my first indication or kind of, yeah, kind of opening to the realization that that type of psychic connectivity or sensitivity or awareness was something common in shamanic cultures and had a validity.

00:11:55 ►

So breaking open the head, I ended up having a number of experiences along those lines.

00:12:00 ►

I also wrote about Burning Man in there.

00:12:02 ►

But I went down to Ecuador.

00:12:04 ►

I worked with a tribe called the Sequoia, who live in the Amazon in Ecuador.

00:12:09 ►

And, yeah, I had really magnificent experiences with them.

00:12:13 ►

And I actually continue to work with them.

00:12:14 ►

Now we do retreats through Evolver, where we bring people to Costa Rica.

00:12:19 ►

We bring their elders up from Ecuador, because they’re – we don’t do it in Ecuador,

00:12:24 ►

because the oil companies

00:12:25 ►

have pretty much despoiled a lot of their

00:12:27 ►

land so it’s a more pristine environment

00:12:30 ►

in Costa Rica to do ceremony

00:12:31 ►

I also

00:12:34 ►

visited the Mazatec Indians in Mexico

00:12:35 ►

and went through traditional mushroom ceremony

00:12:38 ►

and that was where

00:12:39 ►

in Huatla de Jimenez where Gordon Wasson

00:12:41 ►

had rediscovered the magic mushrooms

00:12:43 ►

back in the 1950s.

00:12:47 ►

This is so exciting as people gather slowly.

00:12:51 ►

It’s nice.

00:12:52 ►

Anyway, so breaking open the head ended up charting my shift in worldview

00:12:57 ►

from starting out as a kind of skeptic, secular materialist,

00:13:03 ►

to realizing that there were these other psychic

00:13:06 ►

dimensions to reality, which I assume most people here probably, we can do it as a show

00:13:11 ►

of hands.

00:13:11 ►

How many people here are still scientific materialists and locked into that old paradigm?

00:13:16 ►

Okay, cool.

00:13:18 ►

One guy.

00:13:20 ►

Gino, can you hit him?

00:13:21 ►

Two guys, two guys.

00:13:22 ►

Hit them both.

00:13:25 ►

All right, we’ll talk later.

00:13:28 ►

So anyway, so as I shifted paradigm,

00:13:32 ►

I began to realize that,

00:13:34 ►

well, I was reading obviously a lot of Terence McKenna,

00:13:36 ►

and I got introduced to the work of Jose Arguelles,

00:13:38 ►

and I began to think more about indigenous knowledge,

00:13:41 ►

and if it was true,

00:13:43 ►

if these shamanic people could have

00:13:45 ►

foreknowings

00:13:47 ►

kind of understandings if they had

00:13:50 ►

the capacity to

00:13:52 ►

access these other dimensions of the psyche

00:13:53 ►

that our modern western society

00:13:55 ►

had forfeited and lost

00:13:57 ►

then we had to take their knowledge

00:13:59 ►

systems much more seriously than

00:14:01 ►

we did and in a sense it seemed

00:14:03 ►

as if our modern Western culture

00:14:05 ►

was kind of operating with only half a cylinder,

00:14:10 ►

half a deck.

00:14:11 ►

We’d totally prioritized one way of thinking and being,

00:14:15 ►

kind of rational, dualistic, technical knowledge,

00:14:19 ►

and we had totally divorced ourselves

00:14:21 ►

from these other kind of intuitive,

00:14:24 ►

let’s say,

00:14:30 ►

irrational rather than irrational ways of connecting with spirit and with the universe.

00:14:36 ►

So that sort of led me into my second book, which was 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which came out in 2006.

00:14:39 ►

And for that book, it was about a four-year effort to really think about the prophetic knowledge of cultures like the classical Maya in particular, the Hopi Indians, and then even how this kind of archetype of transformation, one world shifting into another world, the New Jerusalem, the Kali Yuga to the Satya Yuga, how you found all of these archetypes in different cultures,

00:15:08 ►

esoteric traditions and so on around the world.

00:15:12 ►

And I particularly was fascinated by the Maya because,

00:15:15 ►

and here we are in Planké Norte, which is aptly named for this talk, I guess,

00:15:20 ►

because it seemed like they had reached the most sophisticated level

00:15:24 ►

of taking a kind of shamanic understanding of the world

00:15:28 ►

and creating a sophisticated civilization out of it.

00:15:31 ►

And certainly, how many people here have gone to Palenque?

00:15:34 ►

Wow, very, very few.

00:15:36 ►

Well, if you get the opportunity, it’s extraordinary.

00:15:38 ►

And what’s really so amazing about it is,

00:15:41 ►

especially if you go and you make friends with the local Mayan kids

00:15:45 ►

and buy mushrooms from them and take them in the pyramids

00:15:48 ►

you have a tremendous

00:15:50 ►

sense of a

00:15:51 ►

deep, you know, that something

00:15:53 ►

extremely profound was going on

00:15:55 ►

in that culture

00:15:56 ►

and

00:15:57 ►

it doesn’t really seem like something antiquated at all

00:16:02 ►

it seems something futuristic

00:16:03 ►

maybe something that aspects of the Burning Man

00:16:05 ►

culture is still pointing towards

00:16:08 ►

in a way. In terms

00:16:10 ►

of whatever they were doing with their esoteric

00:16:12 ►

or spiritual technologies to

00:16:13 ►

connect with other dimensions or

00:16:15 ►

other levels of being.

00:16:18 ►

I think that Hosea Aguelas

00:16:19 ►

actually, I mean Terence McKenna, how many people here

00:16:22 ►

read or listen to Terence McKenna?

00:16:24 ►

Alright, here we go. Even the materialists. You know, Terence McKenna proposed, you know,

00:16:33 ►

2012 as this potentially the eschaton or the singularity. And, you know, both Jose Arguelles and McKenna maybe were too quick

00:16:47 ►

to literalize or reify

00:16:49 ►

a date in a sense

00:16:51 ►

but

00:16:53 ►

of their work I think if you go

00:16:55 ►

to Jose Arguelles’ work in Earth Ascending

00:16:56 ►

it really gives you a profound sense

00:16:59 ►

of there being kind of like

00:17:01 ►

an underlying mathematical

00:17:03 ►

structure to the Mayan calendar

00:17:05 ►

that it’s almost like a cosmic imprint or something.

00:17:13 ►

And what Jose found in that book was a mathematical relationship

00:17:17 ►

between the 13 by 20 matrix of the Zulcan, which is a 260-day count,

00:17:21 ►

and the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching.

00:17:24 ►

And I think very, very elegantly and beautifully showed that there was some intrinsic understanding that they had reached.

00:17:33 ►

And even though in some ways they didn’t have all sorts of knowledge that we possess,

00:17:38 ►

for instance, it seems that they didn’t know that the world was, you know, that we were spinning around the sun,

00:17:42 ►

know that the world was, you know,

00:17:43 ►

that we were spinning around the sun, you know,

00:17:45 ►

but somehow they were based on this

00:17:47 ►

observation of their local cosmos

00:17:49 ►

and their accessing of

00:17:51 ►

these shamanic dimensions. They put

00:17:53 ►

together this knowledge system

00:17:55 ►

that’s

00:17:56 ►

fascinating, you know. And

00:17:59 ►

so what I ended up proposing in

00:18:01 ►

2012 was that

00:18:03 ►

the end of this mind calendar cycle, the long count, the 5,125-year count, was kind of the hinge point in a transformation.

00:18:14 ►

And I did a lot of work looking at Western philosophers, Western thinkers, and integrating their way of kind of articulating and expressing possibilities

00:18:27 ►

or what was happening to us with these indigenous knowledge systems.

00:18:33 ►

Looking at people like Heidegger and Nietzsche and Carl Jung and Gene Gebser, an Austrian

00:18:38 ►

philosopher who wrote about kind of the nature of time and the relationship between consciousness and time and how kind of

00:18:45 ►

there have been different evolutionary or kind of mutations in human consciousness

00:18:50 ►

that have been different ways of relating to time and space.

00:18:56 ►

Just to jump into that a little bit. Do you guys want to come in or are you happy on the

00:19:00 ►

outskirts? Because there’s plenty of room inside if you want to come in. You can stay there if you want. Come on in.

00:19:07 ►

Gebser in this book,

00:19:09 ►

The Ever-Present Origin, talked about

00:19:12 ►

what

00:19:13 ►

he saw was, it was very German and he’s a

00:19:15 ►

German thinker, that there were these kind of

00:19:18 ►

structures of consciousness

00:19:19 ►

as he called them.

00:19:21 ►

And he labeled four of them

00:19:23 ►

which was the aboriginal

00:19:26 ►

I guess he had the magical and the tribal

00:19:28 ►

then the mythological and then the

00:19:32 ►

mental rational. And he felt that

00:19:35 ►

we had gone through these kind of mutations of consciousness

00:19:37 ►

into these different ways of perceiving or realizing

00:19:41 ►

time and space. And in each of these types of consciousness

00:19:44 ►

different possibilities are inherent in them.

00:19:49 ►

And he felt that we were on the verge

00:19:51 ►

of transitioning to a next state of consciousness,

00:19:54 ►

undergoing a mutation of consciousness

00:19:56 ►

to what he called the integral

00:19:58 ►

or aperspectival level of consciousness.

00:20:02 ►

And so in terms of the relationship to time and space,

00:20:05 ►

if you think about the aboriginals,

00:20:07 ►

the word literally means of the origin.

00:20:09 ►

So for aboriginals in Australia or whatever,

00:20:12 ►

it’s not as if there’s a history.

00:20:14 ►

There’s not really a progress.

00:20:16 ►

They’re not looking towards any future crescendo.

00:20:20 ►

The purpose of their culture and their ritual

00:20:22 ►

is to maintain the world in its harmonic order

00:20:27 ►

and to maintain connection with the Dreamtime ancestors that they believe live under the land

00:20:33 ►

and that were actually the dreaming of those ancestors.

00:20:38 ►

So Gebser talks about how then with the tribal and next development,

00:20:44 ►

there’s the beginning of an understanding

00:20:46 ►

of time but then that really

00:20:47 ►

develops further in what he calls the

00:20:49 ►

mythological structure of consciousness

00:20:51 ►

which is all the cultures around

00:20:53 ►

2000, 3000 BC and up

00:20:56 ►

like the Egyptians, the

00:20:58 ►

Mesopotamians, the Greeks,

00:21:00 ►

the Maya, the Aztecs after them

00:21:02 ►

who

00:21:03 ►

saw time as cyclical,

00:21:06 ►

or maybe it’s more correct to say spiraling in a way,

00:21:09 ►

that there are cycles that repeat in a sense.

00:21:14 ►

So for instance, the Hopi talk about this

00:21:18 ►

being the transition from the fourth world to the fifth world,

00:21:21 ►

and the Maya talked about it as the age of the fifth son to the age of the sixth son

00:21:27 ►

similarly the the the the you know Indians talked about the yuga cycle you know in the Kali Yuga

00:21:35 ►

leading to the sort of the age of materialism culminating in in some kind of you know threshold

00:21:41 ►

event that would then bring back the statueya Yuga, the Golden Age.

00:21:46 ►

So that was the mythological way of understanding time.

00:21:50 ►

And then we transitioned into the modern understanding of time,

00:21:54 ►

which is the historical time,

00:21:56 ►

which was what Gebster called

00:21:58 ►

the mental rational way of thinking about time.

00:22:01 ►

And essentially we became,

00:22:03 ►

and you see the development into the Renaissance

00:22:05 ►

where we suddenly developed perspective

00:22:07 ►

and we kind of entered space.

00:22:09 ►

Like other, previously art had been very

00:22:11 ►

hieratic and flat, if you look at it,

00:22:13 ►

whether it’s medieval art or Egyptian art,

00:22:15 ►

suddenly we discovered space and matter

00:22:18 ►

as we were developing science

00:22:20 ►

and technology.

00:22:22 ►

And in a way,

00:22:23 ►

Gebser says that we became possessed by space.

00:22:26 ►

So we began to see everything

00:22:28 ►

in terms of space, including time.

00:22:30 ►

So just as we felt

00:22:32 ►

that we could parcel out space,

00:22:33 ►

we felt the same thing about time.

00:22:36 ►

So if we think about all of our metaphors

00:22:38 ►

when we talk about time,

00:22:39 ►

we talk about wasting time, spending time,

00:22:42 ►

time is money. We’re constantly

00:22:43 ►

conceiving of time as a quantity of which there’s a limited amount

00:22:46 ►

that we could run out of or that we’re always chasing after, in a sense.

00:22:53 ►

Does that make sense?

00:22:54 ►

Yeah, okay.

00:22:57 ►

So Gebser felt that with the 20th century, with quantum physics,

00:23:02 ►

with cubism, dataism, and so on,

00:23:04 ►

there was the beginning of a

00:23:06 ►

breakthrough into a new perception of time

00:23:08 ►

which he thought eventually would

00:23:10 ►

lead to a mutation of human consciousness

00:23:11 ►

into the integral or apex perspectival

00:23:14 ►

worldview which would

00:23:15 ►

actually be a kind of integration of

00:23:17 ►

all these different ways of being in time

00:23:19 ►

so from that perspective

00:23:21 ►

you would realize that these different ways

00:23:24 ►

of knowing time or realizing or perceiving time were like different veils that you could use as lenses in a way.

00:23:34 ►

So at this moment, according to this perspective, we’re simultaneously in the ever-present origin, like the aboriginal time.

00:23:42 ►

This is the only moment that ever is.

00:23:43 ►

origin, like the aboriginal time. This is the only moment that ever is.

00:23:44 ►

At the same time, we’re in these mythological cycles.

00:23:48 ►

The end of the Kali Yuga, potentially the Christian

00:23:51 ►

apocalypse to a certain extent.

00:23:55 ►

Apocalypse being a word that ultimately means revealing

00:23:57 ►

or uncovering a time when everything becomes revealed

00:24:01 ►

or everything becomes known.

00:24:03 ►

At the same time, we’re also in the mental rational time,

00:24:08 ►

historical time, and so on.

00:24:10 ►

So when you recognize that all these forms of time are available to you,

00:24:13 ►

then it would be entering this integral perspective.

00:24:17 ►

So that was one aspect of the 2012 book,

00:24:20 ►

was looking at different ways to articulate

00:24:23 ►

and really also synthesizing and seeing how ways that somebody like the

00:24:27 ►

visionary philosopher Rudolf Steiner, anybody read his work?

00:24:34 ►

Or Carl Jung or

00:24:36 ►

Gebser, how really they were all speaking of the same thing

00:24:39 ►

but it was hard to perceive that because the articulations were different.

00:24:45 ►

And the book also followed my own experiments and self-discoveries

00:24:50 ►

that included more work with psychedelics,

00:24:52 ►

visiting the Santo Daime religion.

00:24:55 ►

People know about Santo Daime?

00:24:57 ►

So Santo Daime is one of the ayahuasca-based religions of Brazil.

00:25:03 ►

In the 1920s,

00:25:06 ►

as the mestizo white culture

00:25:07 ►

penetrated deeper into the Amazon,

00:25:11 ►

some of the rubber tappers and border guards

00:25:13 ►

started to make friends with the local Indian tribes

00:25:16 ►

and began to participate in their ceremonies with ayahuasca.

00:25:20 ►

And what happened is that those

00:25:22 ►

mestizos who were Catholic received during their ceremonies

00:25:27 ►

kind of a new religion

00:25:31 ►

a new dispensation in a sense

00:25:32 ►

that was a melding, a syncretic melding

00:25:36 ►

of Christian and indigenous elements

00:25:37 ►

so for the Santo Daime they sing about Christ and the Virgin Mary

00:25:42 ►

but the Virgin Mary is also the mother of the forest.

00:25:47 ►

So in the 2012 book, I actually described

00:25:49 ►

a direct prophetic transmission that I had

00:25:53 ►

when I was doing work with the Santo Daime

00:25:55 ►

in the Amazon in Brazil back in, I think it was November 2003,

00:26:01 ►

where totally to my shock and dismay to a certain extent,

00:26:07 ►

a voice kind of announced itself in my head during a ceremony

00:26:10 ►

as the voice of Quetzalcoatl, which was a Mesoamerican deity,

00:26:17 ►

the feathered serpent of mine, an Aztec myth,

00:26:20 ►

spoke through me for a week during a series of ceremonies.

00:26:24 ►

And late at night I would have dreams with phrases that I would

00:26:28 ►

write down and so on. And I put that in the

00:26:32 ►

book also. And actually that part of the book ended up getting

00:26:36 ►

rejected by my first publisher, which was Random House, because it was too much

00:26:40 ►

for my editor to take in. And what I ultimately

00:26:43 ►

did in the book is I contextualized it

00:26:47 ►

in looking at the history of these prophecies

00:26:49 ►

and so on and transmissions

00:26:50 ►

that you see with people like Alistair Crowley.

00:26:53 ►

There’s a whole history of them.

00:26:55 ►

Diane Fortune.

00:26:57 ►

And saying that, hey man,

00:26:59 ►

people get these things,

00:27:00 ►

but often they turn out not to be true.

00:27:03 ►

But this is what happened in my circumstance.

00:27:06 ►

In that book 2012, I also looked at different phenomena like the crop circles in England.

00:27:12 ►

How many people here have spent some time looking at crop circles, websites and stuff

00:27:17 ►

like that?

00:27:18 ►

So yes, that was another phenomenon that I was very skeptical about. And I wrote a piece about them for Wired magazine.

00:27:27 ►

And that gave me an opportunity to speak to people who had been researching it for years.

00:27:34 ►

To, you know, scientists who had been doing studies on the molecular changes to the plants in the formations.

00:27:43 ►

molecular changes to the plants in the formations which had been

00:27:46 ►

they published papers in peer reviewed science journals

00:27:48 ►

arguing that there was no way those could be caused by

00:27:52 ►

people just knocking down the plants that it had to be some type of

00:27:55 ►

high heat or electromagnetic

00:27:58 ►

energy blast or something

00:28:01 ►

I also interviewed

00:28:04 ►

people who had been studying the geometry of the formations

00:28:06 ►

and also

00:28:08 ►

people who claimed to be the makers

00:28:10 ►

of the formations or to know who the artists were,

00:28:12 ►

the human artists behind them.

00:28:15 ►

But in the book I ended up spending

00:28:16 ►

about maybe 80 pages

00:28:18 ►

studying that phenomenon. And one

00:28:20 ►

thing that had made it part of the book is one of the first

00:28:22 ►

researchers who I spoke to about it,

00:28:24 ►

when I asked him what he thought the meaning was, he also said that a number of the formations seem to relate to the Mayan calendar and seem to indicate the end of 2012 or this period as kind of like the hinge point of a shift, dimensional shift or consciousness shift or so on.

00:28:42 ►

shift, dimensional shift or consciousness shift or so on.

00:28:45 ►

00:28:46 ►

yeah, so

00:28:47 ►

I also covered

00:28:49 ►

psychic phenomena,

00:28:53 ►

kind of

00:28:54 ►

tried to look at different ways we

00:28:56 ►

could begin to integrate

00:28:57 ►

the scientific

00:28:58 ►

worldview with

00:29:01 ►

esoteric and mystical ways

00:29:04 ►

of understanding.

00:29:05 ►

Looking at, for instance, the work of Amit Goswami,

00:29:08 ►

who was a physicist who wrote a book called The Self-Aware Universe,

00:29:12 ►

where he offered a whole thesis around how you could use quantum physics

00:29:17 ►

as a basis for beginning to think about how we could have bodies

00:29:21 ►

or subtle bodies that would exist after death in some form.

00:29:28 ►

And how even things like the chakra system

00:29:30 ►

and the subtle energy systems

00:29:31 ►

might actually be kind of quantum phenomena.

00:29:37 ►

So, yeah, so that was 2012.

00:29:41 ►

And as that book came out

00:29:45 ►

well I should also say that

00:29:48 ►

part of what has really spurred a lot of my work

00:29:53 ►

has been thinking very much about the ecological

00:29:57 ►

crisis and I guess also kind of like

00:30:01 ►

the endemic corruption in our current kind of military, financial, industrial media complex.

00:30:10 ►

And, you know, I guess if we were to step back and think about whether we really are in a kind of point of planetary metamorphosis or transformation,

00:30:20 ►

you know, there’s a number of things that, you know, forgetting the Maya, forgetting, you know, psychic phenomena that we could look at as representing the sense of an accelerating transformational process, right?

00:30:35 ►

And definitely one of them is the ecological crisis, which we could talk about in more depth if we want.

00:30:42 ►

You know, we’re obviously in the midst of a huge crisis

00:30:45 ►

of mass species extinction.

00:30:47 ►

The oceans are, you know, 30% more acidic

00:30:49 ►

than they were 40 years ago.

00:30:51 ►

Climate change is accelerating unpredictably

00:30:54 ►

with many feedback loops in the climate system

00:30:57 ►

having been kind of activated, you know.

00:31:01 ►

So, I mean, just flying into Reno, right,

00:31:03 ►

like there was huge forest fires.

00:31:05 ►

We’re seeing that more and more every summer.

00:31:09 ►

Those fires are releasing more and more carbon in the atmosphere, which contributes to the heating,

00:31:12 ►

which contributes to the fires, and so on. Honestly, there’s

00:31:16 ►

some potential for truly

00:31:21 ►

catastrophic effects, even in our lifetimes.

00:31:25 ►

For instance, they’ve discovered that in previous epochs,

00:31:31 ►

climate change has often happened extremely rapidly.

00:31:35 ►

It could be like an 8-degree shift in 10 years or something.

00:31:40 ►

And it seems to be because there’s so many delicate feedback loops

00:31:42 ►

that then get kind of activated.

00:31:44 ►

And it seems to be because there’s so many delicate feedback loops that then get kind of activated.

00:31:57 ►

So, for instance, one of the things that they’ve now discovered is that there’s huge deposits of methane beneath the Arctic and beneath the Siberian permafrost.

00:32:03 ►

And the methane is a much more potent heat-trapping gas than CO2.

00:32:06 ►

We release about a million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per hour,

00:32:08 ►

and the methane would potentially,

00:32:11 ►

if the release of it became uncontrolled,

00:32:13 ►

could turn the planet into a biological desert

00:32:16 ►

in about 40 or 50 years.

00:32:19 ►

So we’re facing that,

00:32:22 ►

and that’s something that I still feel essentially

00:32:27 ►

humans in general and human society

00:32:31 ►

and the corporations and the governments and everybody else is still not

00:32:36 ►

able to bring into focus or stare at directly.

00:32:42 ►

Which I think will happen

00:32:44 ►

within hopefully the next few years,

00:32:47 ►

we’re going to have to mobilize a tremendous force of creativity and innovation

00:32:52 ►

to confront this change that’s underway.

00:32:56 ►

And at the same time, we’ve seen the, obviously, the evolution of the internet,

00:32:59 ►

social technologies, so that we now have a, you know,

00:33:04 ►

we’ve constructed the fundamental

00:33:06 ►

structure of a global brain.

00:33:09 ►

You know, humanity is now meshed together as one.

00:33:12 ►

Ideas, new ideas, new possibilities can transmit across the global brain, across the whole

00:33:17 ►

field of the species mind instantaneously or extremely rapidly.

00:33:22 ►

So potentially, you know, if we are entering a time

00:33:25 ►

where these crises become more rapid and unavoidable,

00:33:30 ►

any solutions that we can find can also be implemented,

00:33:34 ►

shared and implemented extremely rapidly.

00:33:39 ►

Yeah, and then we’re also seeing,

00:33:41 ►

facilitated by the communications technologies,

00:33:46 ►

on the one hand hand we have corporations using

00:33:48 ►

it to basically

00:33:49 ►

eliminate privacy

00:33:51 ►

in governments

00:33:53 ►

and so on, but

00:33:54 ►

we also see the

00:33:57 ►

ability of

00:33:58 ►

activists and

00:34:01 ►

opponents of political structures

00:34:03 ►

able to create these alternatives,

00:34:05 ►

like the Arab Spring or the Occupy Movement,

00:34:08 ►

based on the social technologies that currently exist.

00:34:13 ►

So, yeah.

00:34:14 ►

So, I mean, this brings me to the threshold of the new book

00:34:16 ►

that I’ve been working on,

00:34:18 ►

or, you know, just the ideas that now compel me and fascinate me.

00:34:24 ►

Have people here ever looked at or heard of a book called Spontaneous Evolution?

00:34:28 ►

Yeah.

00:34:29 ►

So that’s a book, it’s a collaboration of a cell biologist and a political philosopher.

00:34:35 ►

And so they kind of look at the evolution of human civilization,

00:34:41 ►

and they see that in some level it could be compared to processes of biological evolution in the

00:34:47 ►

past. And they note that in the past there’s been

00:34:51 ►

a shift from

00:34:53 ►

immature ecosystems that are marked by competition,

00:35:00 ►

aggression, dominator type behavior

00:35:03 ►

to mature ecosystems that are marked by

00:35:07 ►

cooperation and symbiosis.

00:35:10 ►

A great example of this being our own bodies.

00:35:13 ►

Our own bodies are 100 trillion cells

00:35:16 ►

and vast colonies of microorganisms

00:35:18 ►

that were once competing in the environment

00:35:22 ►

for scarce resources.

00:35:24 ►

In the process of devouring each other,

00:35:27 ►

fighting each other,

00:35:29 ►

somehow started to figure out how to build with each other

00:35:32 ►

and to construct more complex structures,

00:35:37 ►

like organs, like tissues, like skin, like bone, and so on.

00:35:43 ►

So our bodies are kind of reflections

00:35:44 ►

of this extraordinary symbiosis

00:35:46 ►

that nature kind of organically moves towards.

00:35:52 ►

And, yeah, so they believe that humanity as a whole

00:35:58 ►

is on the cusp of self-realizing

00:36:01 ►

that we are a superorganism,

00:36:04 ►

a planetary superorganism that’s in a symbiotic relationship

00:36:08 ►

with the ecology of the Earth in its entirety.

00:36:11 ►

And from that realization, that reflection,

00:36:14 ►

we would then have the capacity to reorganize,

00:36:18 ►

reconstruct our social systems, our economic systems,

00:36:23 ►

our industrial systems, so that they meshed with this new

00:36:26 ►

understanding.

00:36:29 ►

So that’s the idea that’s been really fascinating me.

00:36:33 ►

Thinking about if that’s the case, does that make sense to people as an idea?

00:36:38 ►

Cool.

00:36:39 ►

Does anybody have any questions and stuff that we’ve talked about up to this point?

00:36:43 ►

I’m going to get to the, sooner, eventually I’m going to get to a point

00:36:45 ►

where I’ll open this to

00:36:46 ►

question and answer discussion.

00:36:50 ►

So if you

00:36:50 ►

have, if you’re formulating questions

00:36:53 ►

or things you really want to ask, because I know I cover

00:36:55 ►

a lot of topics,

00:36:58 ►

get them ready, prepare them.

00:36:59 ►

I guess that’s been part of my

00:37:01 ►

task or my

00:37:03 ►

philosophical effort has been to synthesize and integrate and bring together

00:37:07 ►

a lot of developments in different fields and different ways of thinking.

00:37:13 ►

So another model that they talk about in this book,

00:37:17 ►

spontaneous evolution, and other writers in the same vein have talked about,

00:37:21 ►

like Barbara Marks Hubbard, who wrote a book called Conscious Evolution,

00:37:26 ►

where she argues that humanity is also

00:37:27 ►

another way of looking at it or talking about it, is that we’re

00:37:30 ►

on the cusp of going from

00:37:31 ►

kind of

00:37:32 ►

unconscious to conscious

00:37:35 ►

evolution, which means that we

00:37:37 ►

recognize that we’re at the forefront

00:37:39 ►

of evolution, and we can become

00:37:42 ►

consciously, we’re now

00:37:43 ►

consciously co-creative with the evolutionary

00:37:45 ►

process.

00:37:47 ►

We’re the species that can

00:37:49 ►

design and determine its own

00:37:51 ►

evolution.

00:37:53 ►

And that’s especially becoming the case as we learn

00:37:56 ►

that everything on so many

00:37:57 ►

levels is code that we

00:37:59 ►

can understand or break down.

00:38:02 ►

For instance, I think it’s

00:38:03 ►

entirely possible for many people that I’ve

00:38:06 ►

spoken to and stuff that I’ve looked into that we could potentially in the near future be able to

00:38:13 ►

halt or even reverse aging. Biotechnology is beginning to figure out how to make…

00:38:23 ►

At the end of our DNA there’s a code

00:38:25 ►

called telomerase, which is what tells

00:38:28 ►

our cells to stop

00:38:29 ►

dividing as effectively or as

00:38:32 ►

frequently as we get older. And there are

00:38:33 ►

some species on the planet that don’t have those

00:38:35 ►

telomerase, for instance certain types

00:38:37 ►

of jellyfish. They’ve

00:38:39 ►

begun to do experiments where they’re able

00:38:42 ►

00:38:43 ►

knock out the telomerase

00:38:45 ►

or change them. They’ve done

00:38:47 ►

studies with mice where

00:38:49 ►

I guess the original study was

00:38:51 ►

they

00:38:52 ►

messed with the telomerase

00:38:55 ►

so the mice aged rapidly.

00:38:57 ►

Then they introduced

00:38:59 ►

a change to the telomerase

00:39:01 ►

and the mice actually de-aged.

00:39:03 ►

They went from grey-haired and

00:39:06 ►

kind of somber to brown-haired and frisky again.

00:39:11 ►

So I mean

00:39:12 ►

this is the level at which we’re

00:39:15 ►

quickly moving towards these types of capacities.

00:39:18 ►

That’s only one aspect of slowing down the

00:39:21 ►

aging process or stopping it or even reversing it.

00:39:24 ►

But it actually does look

00:39:26 ►

like that’s significantly plausible

00:39:28 ►

if not inevitable

00:39:30 ►

you know in the next

00:39:32 ►

you know who knows

00:39:33 ►

10 to 30 years

00:39:34 ►

00:39:37 ►

yeah anyway so this idea that we’re

00:39:40 ►

the species that now has the capacity to

00:39:41 ►

consciously direct or determine our own

00:39:43 ►

evolutionary destiny but the problem is that we’re inflicted to consciously direct or determine our own evolutionary destiny. But the problem

00:39:45 ►

is that we’re inflicted by the subconscious

00:39:47 ►

programming of our past.

00:39:49 ►

We’ve inherited this legacy

00:39:51 ►

of violence, of these

00:39:53 ►

distorted and destructive belief

00:39:55 ►

systems, these religious ideologies,

00:39:58 ►

these cultural ideologies

00:40:00 ►

and

00:40:00 ►

they’re embedded in our social

00:40:03 ►

financial structures and so on, our governments and they’re rep in our social financial structures

00:40:05 ►

and so on, our governments,

00:40:07 ►

and they’re repressing and retarding human evolution

00:40:10 ►

to a tremendous degree, right?

00:40:12 ►

Can we all agree on that? Does that make sense?

00:40:16 ►

I mean, so for instance, what’s that?

00:40:19 ►

How is, in the face of prolonged living,

00:40:22 ►

how is the economy of ecology feasible?

00:40:26 ►

I mean, you spoke of this…

00:40:28 ►

I’m going to get there.

00:40:29 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:40:30 ►

Booyah.

00:40:30 ►

Okay.

00:40:32 ►

Absolutely.

00:40:35 ►

Yes, yes, yes.

00:40:36 ►

I was talking about the subconscious programming

00:40:38 ►

that’s now inflicting us and leading us to our destruction

00:40:40 ►

unless we make a quick upgrade

00:40:44 ►

in what the fuck we’re doing on this planet and why the fuck we’re doing it. destruction unless we make a quick upgrade in

00:40:45 ►

what the fuck we’re doing on this planet

00:40:47 ►

and why the fuck we’re doing it.

00:40:51 ►

So yeah,

00:40:52 ►

at the moment, for instance,

00:40:55 ►

media, we have this

00:40:56 ►

mass media that’s essentially

00:40:57 ►

a weapon that’s used by the

00:41:00 ►

hands of an elite to dominate

00:41:02 ►

and control the mass mind,

00:41:03 ►

to keep everybody at a low frequency.

00:41:06 ►

And if you really want to think about, I mean,

00:41:07 ►

what I’m seeking to do in the new book is take a number

00:41:09 ►

of these different areas and kind of

00:41:11 ►

look at them, you know,

00:41:13 ►

where they’re at now, you know, how they’re holding us

00:41:15 ►

back, and what would be the potential to

00:41:17 ►

the way, the tactical and strategic

00:41:19 ►

method to bring about their transformation.

00:41:23 ►

You know,

00:41:24 ►

as practically and pragmatically as possible.

00:41:29 ►

So the media

00:41:31 ►

is constricting the mass mind. And if you want to think about what

00:41:35 ►

media ultimately does, we think that it’s

00:41:40 ►

conveying information or entertaining.

00:41:44 ►

But if you step back from it and really

00:41:46 ►

think about what the mass media does on a global scale, the most significant thing it does is

00:41:51 ►

coordinate behavior, okay, the media coordinates global behavior, you know, so through the mass

00:41:56 ►

media on a planetary scale, you know, we’re telling people, you know, what the model is of how to live,

00:42:02 ►

you know, what they should be consuming,

00:42:06 ►

what their relationships should be like,

00:42:09 ►

what their relationships to authority should be like.

00:42:14 ►

So we’re imprinting this way of being and living that no longer makes sense with our planetary situation.

00:42:20 ►

One of the major thinkers who’s had a huge impact on me is Buckminster Fuller.

00:42:28 ►

Have people explored his work here at all?

00:42:31 ►

He wrote a little book called Utopia or Oblivion, where he essentially argued back in the 60s that humanity really was faced with that as our choice.

00:42:38 ►

That either we could maintain these old programs and keep running them until we destroyed ourselves,

00:42:44 ►

maintain these old programs and keep running them until we destroyed ourselves or we could make this upgrade, begin to use

00:42:49 ►

resources efficiently, change our whole model of what economy and wealth mean

00:42:53 ►

and prosper entirely.

00:42:58 ►

And he felt that the only way we could really be doing that would be

00:43:00 ►

the model would be to elevate and evolve humanity as a whole.

00:43:07 ►

Which I think, I mean, I feel like, you know, even many of the,

00:43:13 ►

there’s so many incredibly brilliant people at Burning Man,

00:43:17 ►

many of them who work in major corporations or investment funds and so on.

00:43:23 ►

But I think many of them are still operating

00:43:25 ►

with these subconscious programs.

00:43:27 ►

And one of those subconscious programs

00:43:29 ►

is that all of humanity can’t make it,

00:43:31 ►

that it’s survival of the fittest.

00:43:34 ►

Nature is actually not survival of the fittest,

00:43:36 ►

it’s survival of the fit.

00:43:38 ►

You don’t have to be the dominator king to survive.

00:43:43 ►

In fact, that ultimately wouldn’t work in our situation.

00:43:48 ►

So Buckminster Fuller really thought that if we began to

00:43:51 ►

really utilize our resources efficiently and effectively,

00:43:55 ►

we could sustain the human population as a whole

00:43:58 ►

with abundance and

00:44:02 ►

continue our existence on this planet

00:44:06 ►

into the long-term future.

00:44:13 ►

Yeah, so I think that’s

00:44:16 ►

a very powerful and helpful way to think about it.

00:44:20 ►

That it really is hard for us to even see how deep

00:44:24 ►

our subconscious programming

00:44:25 ►

operates. And it’s been inbred in us that there’s winners and losers, that it has to

00:44:33 ►

end in tragedy, in a sense. And all that stuff is what we need to deprogram ourselves from.

00:44:40 ►

And I think Burning Man helps us to see how tremendously powerful the human imagination is and how the unleashed imagination can do things that are beyond what we now think is even conceivable.

00:45:03 ►

That’s what we’re offered with the ecological crisis is this tremendous opportunity to engage

00:45:07 ►

our deepest resources of creativity

00:45:10 ►

to construct something incredibly beautiful for the future.

00:45:17 ►

And I think that, yeah, I mean,

00:45:20 ►

one metaphor, so both Barbara Marks Hubbard

00:45:23 ►

and the authors of Simplenius Evolution talk about the, as a metaphor analogy, the caterpillar to butterfly transition.

00:45:32 ►

So when the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis, it’s not as if it simply sprouts wings.

00:45:39 ►

It’s more like the whole being consumes what’s in the chrysalis and then kind of melts

00:45:46 ►

down into kind of a biotic soup.

00:45:48 ►

And just as it’s on the verge

00:45:50 ►

of total dissolution,

00:45:52 ►

there are small imaginal

00:45:54 ►

cells in the caterpillar.

00:45:56 ►

There’s like six of them. And they contain

00:45:58 ►

this reprogramming code for

00:46:00 ►

the entire organism. So they begin

00:46:02 ►

to propagate themselves. And at first, those imaginal

00:46:04 ►

cells are seen as a virus by the dying caterpillar’s immune system. So they’re attacked. But as the imaginal

00:46:11 ►

cells are attacked, they actually become stronger and they figure out how to propagate themselves

00:46:16 ►

further until they’ve taken over the whole mechanism and the whole organism, and are able to reconstruct it into the form of the butterfly.

00:46:33 ►

So if we take that metaphor, we could think about, I mean, there’s individual imaginal cells,

00:46:37 ►

people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King or even John Lennon, let’s say,

00:46:47 ►

who were beginning to kind of offer the counter-meme to the dominator parasitic culture.

00:46:50 ►

And now we’re seeing that happen on this level of new kind of social organisms.

00:46:54 ►

Burning Man being one example,

00:46:57 ►

and I would say the Occupy movement

00:46:58 ►

being a very significant example also.

00:47:01 ►

I feel that the Occupy movement

00:47:03 ►

has been deeply misunderstood

00:47:06 ►

and once again it’s the media

00:47:07 ►

bashing people over the head

00:47:10 ►

with a certain perspective on it.

00:47:12 ►

I think that it was only

00:47:14 ►

most

00:47:15 ►

kind of superficially

00:47:18 ►

a protest movement.

00:47:19 ►

The protest was kind of like the outer boundary

00:47:22 ►

around the cell

00:47:24 ►

and within the

00:47:26 ►

boundary what it was was a process

00:47:28 ►

movement and the process was

00:47:29 ►

really how do you construct a healthy

00:47:32 ►

new social organism

00:47:33 ►

so if you went into Occupy Wall Street for

00:47:36 ►

instance it was like a mini

00:47:37 ►

cell and like a new social organism

00:47:39 ►

and that you had like

00:47:41 ►

places for people to sleep

00:47:43 ►

you had a direct people to sleep, you had direct democracy,

00:47:47 ►

public forum, you had media,

00:47:49 ►

you had a library, an education area,

00:47:52 ►

you had a kitchen, you had greywater, sustainability.

00:47:56 ►

So the whole thing was like a model

00:47:57 ►

of a new social system or social organism.

00:48:02 ►

And very much like this imaginal cell model, I mean, that thing

00:48:05 ►

propagated around the world relatively

00:48:07 ►

quickly, and

00:48:09 ►

yes, there were a lot of chaos around

00:48:11 ►

it, and ultimately, I think

00:48:14 ►

the whole, you know,

00:48:16 ►

it was a necessary phase in an evolutionary

00:48:18 ►

process that had emerged

00:48:19 ►

in that way, with that kind of oppositional

00:48:22 ►

mentality, and

00:48:23 ►

that oppositional mentality invited

00:48:25 ►

kind of crackdown.

00:48:29 ►

So it was smushed in that original form,

00:48:32 ►

but that program

00:48:36 ►

is going to re-access,

00:48:38 ►

reappear in a new form that probably won’t be

00:48:41 ►

oppositional, that’ll be more symbiotic

00:48:44 ►

in the next phase of its evolutionary growth. Does that make sense?

00:48:49 ►

Yeah? Okay.

00:48:53 ►

Yeah, so those are some of the ways that I’ve been

00:48:56 ►

thinking about this process. Now,

00:49:00 ►

because I also take seriously things like extraterrestrials, which we can talk

00:49:04 ►

about, or let’s say galactic civilizations, galactic levels of intelligence, and psychic phenomena, my perspective also goes into other areas and dimensions.

00:49:28 ►

So, for instance, the way that I see, in a sense, what’s happening is you could look at the ecological.

00:49:31 ►

So if you look at the whole history of human societies up till today,

00:49:37 ►

every other civilized society that we knew about, culture that we knew about, had initiatory practices.

00:49:44 ►

Now, initiation was especially meant for young men, for women also.

00:49:49 ►

But in every culture around the world, it was thought that men particularly needed to be initiated in some way.

00:50:02 ►

Joseph Chilton Pierce wrote a book called The Biology of Transcendence, and he wrote about how the neocortex is what makes us particularly human. It’s the most recent part of the brain to develop.

00:50:05 ►

It’s what allows for abstract symbol processing,

00:50:08 ►

for long-range planning, and so on.

00:50:12 ►

But although it obviously develops when we’re children

00:50:16 ►

and is part of the maturing brain,

00:50:18 ►

he argues that initiation actually has a biological

00:50:21 ►

or neurological function

00:50:23 ►

in that to actually reach kind of adult maturity

00:50:28 ►

in terms of your consciousness, your awareness,

00:50:32 ►

you actually need to go through some type of initiatory process

00:50:34 ►

to enter into kind of…

00:50:39 ►

to go through a kind of ordeal

00:50:41 ►

that forces you to access visionary states

00:50:44 ►

or break through to a transpersonal or trans-egoic connection to the universe.

00:50:50 ►

So if you look at our culture where we’ve done away with initiation, ritual,

00:50:57 ►

and initiation has a number of different aspects or phases to it that we can discuss.

00:51:01 ►

But then you have young people, you know, when you’re 15, and I know that I

00:51:06 ►

felt this, I’m sure most people here did too,

00:51:08 ►

you feel like

00:51:09 ►

something is just missing.

00:51:12 ►

You were meant to have some experience

00:51:14 ►

when you’re 17,

00:51:16 ►

and this culture

00:51:18 ►

doesn’t provide it, so instead

00:51:20 ►

you get cynical, you get nasty,

00:51:22 ►

you look for any kind of substitute.

00:51:24 ►

How many people feel that that’s

00:51:25 ►

common to their experience?

00:51:29 ►

So anyways,

00:51:29 ►

00:51:30 ►

since modern society

00:51:33 ►

for various reasons did away with initiation,

00:51:37 ►

it created

00:51:38 ►

a strong subconscious or unconscious

00:51:39 ►

urge for some type of initiation.

00:51:43 ►

And the way

00:51:44 ►

to do that could be something destructive

00:51:46 ►

like a war or an ecological

00:51:49 ►

catastrophe. So in a way, our

00:51:52 ►

incapacity to deal with the ecological crisis up to this point

00:51:55 ►

could just reflect our subconscious

00:51:58 ►

impulse to bring about a crisis

00:52:01 ►

that forces us through an initiation process

00:52:04 ►

to reach another level or threshold of consciousness.

00:52:08 ►

Now, from my personal experience and from my work with indigenous cultures,

00:52:14 ►

I am completely personally convinced that they did possess psychic capacities and ways of working together to even affect the physical world in different respects.

00:52:32 ►

In particular, in my 2012 book,

00:52:33 ►

I talked about the Hopi Indians in Arizona

00:52:35 ►

as an example of a culture who…

00:52:39 ►

And some of these indigenous cultures

00:52:41 ►

may have chosen to live on the edge

00:52:44 ►

of what was sustainable for them

00:52:48 ►

in order to be forced to access initiatory states of consciousness

00:52:53 ►

and to be able to hone their psychic capacities.

00:52:59 ►

You know, so much of the Hopi culture, their spiritual culture, is about bringing rain

00:53:03 ►

because without a certain amount of rain there, they can’t grow their crops and they can’t survive.

00:53:08 ►

In my book, I talked about the works of an anthropologist who spent many years with the Hopi.

00:53:12 ►

And ultimately, he had to admit that their rain dances, not always, but more than he could explain according to any way of understanding that he

00:53:26 ►

had coming from Cambridge

00:53:27 ►

as an empiricist

00:53:29 ►

that they were somehow able to affect the weather

00:53:32 ►

through these rituals. He said that sometimes

00:53:34 ►

they would dance and there would be a blazing

00:53:36 ►

hot sun. In 20

00:53:38 ►

minutes clouds would gather and rain would fall.

00:53:40 ►

This didn’t happen all the time but it happened

00:53:42 ►

often enough that he

00:53:44 ►

became convinced they had some type often enough that he became convinced

00:53:45 ►

they had some type of capacity

00:53:47 ►

that he couldn’t understand

00:53:48 ►

now so

00:53:49 ►

this is even statistically

00:53:53 ►

demonstrated in terms

00:53:55 ►

of like

00:53:55 ►

they’ve done studies on

00:53:57 ►

graduation days and incidents of rainfall

00:54:01 ►

and apparently the incidents of rainfall

00:54:03 ►

becomes less likely significantly

00:54:04 ►

on graduation days.

00:54:06 ►

So it’s that collective energy is keeping the rain at bay.

00:54:11 ►

Does that make sense to people in a way?

00:54:13 ►

Okay, cool.

00:54:14 ►

Yeah, you want to give a question?

00:54:15 ►

Hold on, hold on, he’s going to bring you a mic.

00:54:19 ►

That sounds a lot like Greg Brayden.

00:54:22 ►

In his writing he describes the same thing,

00:54:24 ►

that they would go out and pray

00:54:26 ►

for rain, but their praying would be basically

00:54:28 ►

assuming that it’s already

00:54:30 ►

raining. By doing that,

00:54:32 ►

they would get it. So instead

00:54:34 ►

of asking for it, they

00:54:35 ►

envision it like it’s already happening.

00:54:38 ►

Well, yeah, I don’t know about that, but

00:54:39 ►

in the case of the Hopi,

00:54:42 ►

I guess they take on the persona of the spirits

00:54:44 ►

and then they dance as the spirits and that’s meant to bring in the case of the Hopi I guess they take on the persona of the spirits and then they dance as the spirits

00:54:45 ►

and that’s meant to bring in the rain

00:54:49 ►

but anyway so just to think about that idea

00:54:52 ►

so let’s say that we actually have these capacities that are dormant within us

00:54:56 ►

that our culture has actively suppressed

00:54:59 ►

is it possible that

00:55:02 ►

this ecological crisis is a means for us to compel us to access these dormant faculties of the psyche,

00:55:12 ►

you know, paranormal capacities, psychic abilities?

00:55:15 ►

And is it possible that we could eventually be doing maybe global psychic workings to affect the climate and other aspects of our world?

00:55:24 ►

psychic workings to affect the climate and other aspects of our world.

00:55:34 ►

So yeah, and from my perspective also, if we look at all of our, like one of the most popular films of all time, right?

00:55:46 ►

Like Avatar, Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Matrix, you know, they’re telling the same story over and over again, which is essentially that there needs to be kind of a training,

00:55:52 ►

a school or some kind of process where you can access the force or whatever name it’s given,

00:55:54 ►

where you can learn to develop your psychic faculties.

00:55:57 ►

So rather than just thinking that’s like an imaginary fantasy,

00:56:02 ►

I kind of tend to think that that’s like a foreshadowing of how human culture will develop in the future

00:56:08 ►

where we’ll actually have institutes where we hone

00:56:12 ►

these types of faculties.

00:56:16 ►

So for me, what I’ve tried to do is

00:56:20 ►

kind of look at it as a full

00:56:23 ►

paradigm model for what this transformation looks like,

00:56:28 ►

what it would entail. That includes kind of understanding that it requires kind of a new

00:56:34 ►

mythology that embraces these dimensions of the psyche, that recognizes the need to shift from a competitive to a cooperative or collaborative framework.

00:56:47 ►

And then provides the infrastructure for doing that.

00:56:52 ►

And potentially, yeah, I mean, at that point, you know, what’s interesting is we’ve already built, you know, the roads, the cities, and the industrial infrastructure.

00:57:02 ►

You know, and now the communications infrastructure.

00:57:05 ►

So all of that exists

00:57:06 ►

and in a sense we can imagine that being

00:57:11 ►

turned in a different direction and used to create

00:57:15 ►

sustainable technologies.

00:57:18 ►

Part of what I’ve been doing in my recent thinking

00:57:21 ►

and working is studying kind of different views

00:57:24 ►

on the future,

00:57:28 ►

different perspectives and different visionaries and engineers and activists.

00:57:31 ►

So, for instance, somebody mentioned Ray Kurzweil recently and the idea of the technological singularity.

00:57:38 ►

You know, Kurzweil wrote a book called The Singularity is Near,

00:57:41 ►

arguing that sort of the human destiny was to merge with machines to a certain extent.

00:57:47 ►

Another

00:57:48 ►

book by, I mean it’s just so

00:57:50 ►

funny because the range of thinkers

00:57:51 ►

who all seem quite

00:57:53 ►

convincing and sensible but say

00:57:55 ►

totally the opposite things about the future.

00:57:57 ►

It’s pretty dizzying in a way.

00:58:01 ►

There are people who

00:58:01 ►

believe that due to peak oil and climate

00:58:03 ►

change we’re going to collapse back into a much more rudimentary way of life

00:58:08 ►

and then there’s authors like the people who wrote Abundance

00:58:13 ►

who believe that in 30 or 40 years technology will have evolved so fast

00:58:18 ►

that it will be able to solve all of our problems on the planet

00:58:21 ►

and I totally think that technology is crucial

00:58:26 ►

to our evolution.

00:58:27 ►

I’m in no way a Luddite.

00:58:30 ►

However,

00:58:31 ►

I think as we were to shift

00:58:33 ►

into kind of

00:58:34 ►

this other state

00:58:37 ►

of kind of recognizing

00:58:38 ►

that we’re a planetary superorganism

00:58:41 ►

in a symbiotic relationship with our ecology,

00:58:44 ►

we would also begin to want to refocus our development of technology.

00:58:52 ►

There’s so many aspects of it that we can discuss,

00:58:54 ►

whether it’s genetically modified food or kind of geoengineering plans to reverse climate change.

00:59:02 ►

geoengineering plans to reverse climate change.

00:59:04 ►

They’re all kind of treating these massive problems that human engineering

00:59:10 ►

and industry have unleashed

00:59:14 ►

as things that can be solved with the same type of mentality,

00:59:18 ►

which is kind of single-point solutions

00:59:20 ►

that are not holistic or integrated.

00:59:24 ►

So from my perspective,

00:59:26 ►

the type of

00:59:27 ►

kind of

00:59:28 ►

technological approach or technical

00:59:32 ►

approach that somebody like Buckminster Fuller advocates

00:59:34 ►

makes a lot more sense.

00:59:41 ►

There’s a book called

00:59:43 ►

Biomimicry, that essentially instead of

00:59:44 ►

creating technologies

00:59:45 ►

that are seeking to dominate or control natural systems

00:59:49 ►

as we’ve done until now,

00:59:51 ►

we should be learning from natural systems

00:59:53 ►

and applying those lessons in our technologies.

00:59:57 ►

What’s that?

00:59:59 ►

Yeah.

01:00:01 ►

One very important thinker in this regard

01:00:04 ►

is William McDonoghue, who wrote a book called Cradle to Cradle, who basically argues that we could theoretically, you know, I mean, first of all, we think about in the past, like, you know, there was no way we could fly a plane until we think is possible. But he argues that we could potentially redesign

01:00:25 ►

our industries so that all of the industrial products feed back seamlessly into the natural

01:00:33 ►

world non-destructively and could even be positive and productive. So for instance,

01:00:39 ►

he gives an example of having wrappers and containers not only biodegradable but having

01:00:46 ►

kind of seeds and fungi

01:00:47 ►

embedded in them

01:00:48 ►

so that when you bought a product you can

01:00:51 ►

just bury the bag or whatever

01:00:53 ►

and a flower garden would

01:00:56 ►

spring up or a vegetable garden or something like that.

01:00:59 ►

And some

01:01:00 ►

companies have now begun to do that

01:01:02 ►

actually.

01:01:04 ►

So we look at nature, obviously, as a model.

01:01:08 ►

Nature is a perfect, in a sense, you could look at nature as a perfected technology.

01:01:12 ►

You know, it doesn’t create any waste.

01:01:13 ►

Everything that it creates is used, you know, kind of sublimely.

01:01:18 ►

You know, there’s no waste.

01:01:19 ►

It’s only food.

01:01:20 ►

And in a way, like, you could see that the next step in human existence or whatever would be to kind of reintegrate with nature, but at a higher order of technological development and conscious self-reflection.

01:01:42 ►

So, yeah, that’s an idea I find to be really palatable

01:01:47 ►

and you know once again I think it’s

01:01:50 ►

a question of you know our focus

01:01:53 ►

is shifting in this direction and then we’ll see things

01:01:56 ►

that are unimaginable becoming imaginable

01:01:59 ►

that’s only going to happen I think within a new

01:02:02 ►

paradigm or new kind of

01:02:04 ►

way of thinking of what the future looks like.

01:02:08 ►

And, you know, in a sense, I think that human beings always need to be oriented towards some type of transcendence,

01:02:16 ►

something that takes us beyond where we’ve been.

01:02:20 ►

And, you know, from where we are now, I would say that that next stage of transcendent would be potentially space migration, you know, settling other worlds, terraforming them and so on.

01:02:33 ►

I mean, why not?

01:02:34 ►

You know, that was in the 60s and the 70s.

01:02:36 ►

That was something that we really expected to be doing.

01:02:40 ►

That was something that Leary talked about a lot.

01:02:42 ►

And somehow with the kind of disappointments in the space program, that idea

01:02:45 ►

got kind of set back.

01:02:48 ►

But why not

01:02:49 ►

imagine ourselves

01:02:51 ►

reaching into other worlds? And then

01:02:53 ►

at the same time

01:02:55 ►

exploring the

01:02:57 ►

inner cosmos, the psychokosmos

01:02:59 ►

through shamanic practices,

01:03:02 ►

mystical practices,

01:03:04 ►

psychedelics and so on.

01:03:06 ►

So I think we could see that the future of human development

01:03:09 ►

could be in both directions at once.

01:03:11 ►

Does that make some sense?

01:03:13 ►

Cool.

01:03:15 ►

Yeah, let’s take some questions. That would be awesome.

01:03:17 ►

Do you think it’s necessary for us to have a crisis to help us evolve?

01:03:24 ►

I think something I was thinking of as you were speaking

01:03:27 ►

was that at least in the U.S., I think we feel like we need a crisis.

01:03:31 ►

I think as a country, we feel like we came into our own

01:03:37 ►

at a moment of enormous crisis in World War II.

01:03:42 ►

That’s where we became this giant force in the world

01:03:46 ►

and that’s sort of that

01:03:47 ►

piece of the 20th century is where

01:03:50 ►

we derive a lot of what we think of

01:03:52 ►

as standard American culture from

01:03:54 ►

and I think we don’t know

01:03:56 ►

what to do with ourselves without a crisis

01:03:57 ►

but that’s

01:03:59 ►

my theory

01:04:02 ►

about one country in the world

01:04:04 ►

and I was wondering if you think we need to have a crisis

01:04:07 ►

so that we can get to this next place,

01:04:08 ►

or if we can do it without some kind of massive destruction.

01:04:13 ►

Yeah, I mean, I honestly don’t think that there has to be

01:04:16 ►

massive destruction, but I think the crisis is already underway.

01:04:21 ►

And really the question is how we’re going to adapt to it.

01:04:24 ►

You know, I mean,

01:04:29 ►

we, for instance, we saw a hurricane Sandy in New York last year, you know, I mean, who knows what’s going to happen with the climate, but it seems likely we’re going to start to see two or three

01:04:33 ►

hurricane Sandys a year. And at that point, we’re not going to be thinking about like, how do we

01:04:37 ►

rebuild Far Rockaway? We’re going to start thinking about how do we resettle populations, right?

01:04:43 ►

And then the choice is, are we going to create you know more

01:04:45 ►

shitty you know cities that

01:04:47 ►

you know don’t have good infrastructure

01:04:49 ►

where food needs to be imported vast

01:04:51 ►

distances or are we going to

01:04:54 ►

you know creatively innovate and build

01:04:55 ►

eco cities that are able to

01:04:58 ►

you know feed

01:04:59 ►

everybody from within

01:05:01 ►

you know

01:05:02 ►

I think we need the crisis

01:05:05 ►

because without it we’re not going to overcome the inertia

01:05:08 ►

of our current social

01:05:10 ►

structure, but I don’t think it has to be

01:05:11 ►

massively destructive at all. I think that we

01:05:13 ►

actually could, even with reduced

01:05:16 ►

circumstances, completely sustain

01:05:18 ►

the current global population

01:05:20 ►

and even see it moderately increase

01:05:23 ►

and then taper off.

01:05:26 ►

Anyway, you said you were going to get into some of this

01:05:29 ►

more mystical Rudolf Steiner stuff, so I’m curious to hear you rap

01:05:33 ►

more about the worldview that you imagined

01:05:37 ►

on the other side of this transition and

01:05:40 ►

where it’s going to go deep on that stuff.

01:05:50 ►

Yeah, well, I mean, I think that,

01:05:52 ►

I mean, how many people here have done

01:05:54 ►

like shamanic work with ayahuasca in particular?

01:05:58 ►

I mean, I think that we’ve now inherited

01:06:03 ►

the knowledge of these indigenous cultures

01:06:05 ►

and the probing and innovative Western mind is now exploring,

01:06:11 ►

beginning to explore, scratch the surface of these dimensions.

01:06:15 ►

And for me, it was my psychedelic experiences, especially ayahuasca,

01:06:19 ►

that opened me very deeply to the works of Rudolf Steiner

01:06:22 ►

and other occult thinkers and visionaries.

01:06:29 ►

But Steiner for me was most significant.

01:06:34 ►

Yeah, that to me suggests that these shamanic dimensions,

01:06:37 ►

these other dimensions of the psyche,

01:06:38 ►

are a vast realm that’s ahead of us for human exploration.

01:06:46 ►

And the fact that it’s still largely mysterious

01:06:49 ►

is something that I find to be tremendously wonderful.

01:06:53 ►

Because that mystery is a goad to us to probe forward

01:06:59 ►

and to experiment and explore and learn more.

01:07:03 ►

So for me, Steiner provided the most powerful mapping

01:07:09 ►

of these other-dimensional possibilities.

01:07:14 ►

And any articulation in this sense is just a map.

01:07:19 ►

It’s an effort. It’s an attempt.

01:07:21 ►

Actually, if you read Steiner’s first book…

01:07:23 ►

So Steiner was a Austrian visionary

01:07:25 ►

I think he was born around 1860

01:07:27 ►

even as a child he had the innate capacity

01:07:31 ►

to enter into visionary realms

01:07:33 ►

and kind of read what’s often called

01:07:38 ►

the Akashic record and so on or at least this is what he claims

01:07:41 ►

he began to realize that nobody around him

01:07:44 ►

possessed these faculties

01:07:45 ►

except for one old gardener he found

01:07:48 ►

who became his friend.

01:07:50 ►

So he began to realize that if he talked about it,

01:07:52 ►

people were just going to think he was crazy.

01:07:54 ►

So he waited until he was, I think, in his 40s

01:07:58 ►

until he’d gotten a doctorate in philosophy

01:08:00 ►

and done work with Goethe’s science papers

01:08:03 ►

and published his first book of philosophy,

01:08:06 ►

The Philosophy of Freedom,

01:08:08 ►

which was really a refutation of dualistic thinking,

01:08:12 ►

in a sense, where he also noted that ultimately

01:08:15 ►

philosophers were artists in the realm of concepts

01:08:18 ►

and that what they did was opened up

01:08:20 ►

between the percept and its articulation.

01:08:25 ►

There’s infinite room for

01:08:27 ►

development, for

01:08:29 ►

extension. So Steiner

01:08:32 ►

said that the mission of his particular

01:08:33 ►

life on earth was to bring the

01:08:35 ►

knowledge of reincarnation back to the West,

01:08:38 ►

which had been lost

01:08:39 ►

with the breaking

01:08:41 ►

of the mystery school traditions

01:08:43 ►

and the rise of Christianity.

01:08:48 ►

He said that

01:08:49 ►

he wrote a number of volumes

01:08:51 ►

on reincarnation

01:08:53 ►

and he looked at how

01:08:55 ►

even in our Western culture

01:08:58 ►

there were souls that evolved

01:09:00 ►

through different incarnations

01:09:02 ►

and he traced a number of them back

01:09:04 ►

into the past

01:09:06 ►

but Steiner said that not only did individual humans

01:09:11 ►

reincarnate again and again

01:09:13 ►

but the earth itself also reincarnated

01:09:16 ►

and that we were currently in the fourth

01:09:19 ►

incarnation of the earth

01:09:21 ►

on the cusp of shifting to the fifth incarnation

01:09:24 ►

so I found that a very numinous correspondence incarnation of the earth on the cusp of shifting to the fifth incarnation.

01:09:30 ►

So I found that a very numinous correspondence with the ideas of people like the Hopi and the Maya who talked about the fourth world to the fifth world or the fifth son and the sixth son.

01:09:35 ►

So for Steiner, these worlds were also kind of different levels of consciousness.

01:09:43 ►

were also kind of different levels of consciousness.

01:09:46 ►

His esoteric philosophy,

01:09:50 ►

which was also related to Blavatsky and theosophy and so on,

01:09:52 ►

he said that as we’re currently constructed,

01:09:56 ►

humans actually possess four bodies.

01:09:58 ►

The physical body, the astral body,

01:10:01 ►

the etheric body, and the eye or the ego.

01:10:04 ►

These bodies were formed

01:10:06 ►

in these previous worlds

01:10:07 ►

and have been developing since

01:10:09 ►

so kind of world one for him

01:10:11 ►

would have been just the

01:10:13 ►

rudimentary physical body developing

01:10:15 ►

then the etheric body

01:10:18 ►

developed in the next world and the physical body

01:10:20 ►

reached a higher stage of development

01:10:21 ►

then the astral body joined the etheric body

01:10:24 ►

and the physical body and reached a higher stage all of them reached a higher stage of development. Then the astral body joined the etheric body and the physical body and reached a higher stage.

01:10:26 ►

All of them reached a higher stage of development

01:10:27 ►

in the current world, the fourth world,

01:10:30 ►

where for the first time humans developed

01:10:32 ►

the I or the ego,

01:10:34 ►

which was their sense of self-identity.

01:10:37 ►

So he felt that this world was the…

01:10:40 ►

It’s complex because it doesn’t map perfectly

01:10:43 ►

onto a scientific and rational technical understanding

01:10:46 ►

that we’re so kind of familiar with.

01:10:50 ►

So for instance, my reading of Steiner

01:10:52 ►

is he talks about things like Atlantis and Lemuria,

01:10:55 ►

these lost civilizations,

01:10:57 ►

but it’s not really as if they’re literal physical structures

01:11:01 ►

that we’re going to find on the planet,

01:11:02 ►

although we might find some residue of them.

01:11:04 ►

It’s more like they are other forms of consciousness

01:11:06 ►

that are dimensionally proximate to our own.

01:11:12 ►

So Steiner felt that

01:11:14 ►

in this present world,

01:11:17 ►

humans had for the first time developed the I or the ego

01:11:20 ►

and had evolved that to a certain

01:11:24 ►

level where we had self-identity, consciousness,

01:11:29 ►

and we had separated out, obviously, in the modern world from the tribal cultures, which

01:11:33 ►

still largely have a group self-identity to now having individual identity, that that

01:11:39 ►

was a major evolutionary jump for humanity.

01:11:43 ►

If you look at tribal cultures like the Australian Aboriginals,

01:11:46 ►

one story I think illustrates how differently

01:11:49 ►

they think is

01:11:51 ►

documentary filmmakers wanted to make a documentary on them

01:11:55 ►

and instead of just shooting it, they decided to

01:11:58 ►

actually get them involved with the process. So they showed

01:12:00 ►

all these other anthropological documentaries to the Aboriginals

01:12:04 ►

and they asked them

01:12:05 ►

how would you like to be represented in this film

01:12:08 ►

and the main thing that they said is they wanted

01:12:11 ►

the whole tribe to be in every frame

01:12:13 ►

they didn’t want there to be any close ups on one person

01:12:16 ►

so for them that idea of having an individual focus

01:12:21 ►

or close up was something that

01:12:23 ►

seemed degenerative,

01:12:25 ►

something they couldn’t even really understand or fathom.

01:12:28 ►

So they ended up shooting the film with a wide-angle lens

01:12:30 ►

and having the whole tribe in every shot.

01:12:34 ►

So anyway, but as part of our modern evolution,

01:12:36 ►

we had to shift from that tribal, as you said,

01:12:39 ►

we had to separate from nature entirely.

01:12:41 ►

We had to separate from the group, from the collective,

01:12:43 ►

into this ego and individuality.

01:12:47 ►

So for Steiner, the transition to the next

01:12:49 ►

world involved the construction of what he called

01:12:52 ►

the fifth body, which he described as the spirit

01:12:55 ►

self. So for Steiner, basically

01:12:58 ►

there’s an astral world. When we go to

01:13:01 ►

sleep at night, our ego

01:13:03 ►

and our eye connect with the astral body, and they leave behind the etheric body, which is like the energy body and the physical body sleeping, and the astral body and the eye go off and journey into the astral realms.

01:13:24 ►

these realms of dream and imagination and spirits and so on.

01:13:26 ►

And through those astral realms,

01:13:28 ►

all of these desires and cravings pour into us.

01:13:31 ►

And they kind of overwhelm us,

01:13:33 ►

which is why we end up with addictions,

01:13:35 ►

with all these destructive patterns.

01:13:39 ►

So for Steiner, the fifth world that we were moving into was defined by the ability of the ego or the I

01:13:45 ►

to become strong enough so that it transformed the astral body

01:13:48 ►

and was no longer subject to those cravings and addictions and so on.

01:13:52 ►

And as we transform the astral body, we form the spirit self.

01:13:57 ►

Just as the fourth world was about the construction of the I

01:14:01 ►

and the individual ego,

01:14:03 ►

the fifth world would be about the construction of the eye and the individual ego. The fifth world would be about the construction of the spirit self.

01:14:07 ►

So for Steiner,

01:14:08 ►

in each of these evolutionary leaps,

01:14:11 ►

it’s like everything evolved in consciousness.

01:14:13 ►

Like minerals, stones possess a certain level of consciousness.

01:14:17 ►

Plants possess another one.

01:14:19 ►

Animals another one.

01:14:22 ►

So he said that, for instance,

01:14:23 ►

that plants were currently at a…

01:14:27 ►

Gosh, I can’t remember exactly.

01:14:29 ►

Kind of like a dreamless, a deep sleep consciousness.

01:14:32 ►

And in the next incarnation of the Earth,

01:14:34 ►

they were going to move into a dream sleep consciousness.

01:14:37 ►

Everything kind of takes an upshift through this process.

01:14:40 ►

So I think it’s a very beautiful and poetic way

01:14:44 ►

of one

01:14:46 ►

map articulation of how we could understand what’s happening.

01:14:49 ►

Another way would be to say, you know,

01:14:52 ►

to look at more like Terence McKenna talked about or William Blake

01:14:54 ►

talked about, which is really that

01:14:56 ►

potentially

01:15:00 ►

the imagination, as Blake said, is not just

01:15:03 ►

a state,

01:15:06 ►

it’s the human existence in itself.

01:15:10 ►

So as we’re evolving our technical capacities,

01:15:16 ►

our ability to parse and change and impact code at all these different levels,

01:15:20 ►

the imagination becomes like an emergent property

01:15:22 ►

that could become more and more powerful.

01:15:27 ►

Which I think, once again, we get a sense of at Burning Man,

01:15:30 ►

of what that begins to look like or feel like in the future.

01:15:34 ►

Was that helpful?

01:15:35 ►

That was helpful.

01:15:38 ►

…thing and the rational thought,

01:15:42 ►

that’s what I think has gotten everyone…

01:15:44 ►

It’s so helpful if you can wind up in a question.

01:15:48 ►

Let’s see.

01:15:49 ►

Do you think that there’s a way that we can just – I mean, is education the answer?

01:15:58 ►

Yeah, so I mean, I think that, you know, potentially we have the capacity now

01:16:06 ►

with the internet

01:16:07 ►

and the internet once again I think is

01:16:09 ►

obviously something that’s

01:16:11 ►

kind of a fundamental

01:16:13 ►

aspect of this evolutionary process

01:16:15 ►

and once again in terms of crisis

01:16:17 ►

it’s very interesting that

01:16:19 ►

the internet, the development of it

01:16:21 ►

in its current form was a response

01:16:23 ►

to the threat of nuclear war disrupting communications.

01:16:28 ►

So they needed to construct a system that was fully distributed and kind of holographic in the way that information was distributed.

01:16:36 ►

And by doing this, they almost inadvertently tapped into kind of a successful evolutionary paradigm.

01:16:44 ►

kind of a successful evolutionary paradigm.

01:16:48 ►

Paul Stamets talks about how mycelium store information holographically.

01:16:51 ►

So if you have a vast mycelial network underground,

01:16:55 ►

if at one end the mycelia encounter a pathogen or a toxin

01:16:59 ►

and they figure out how to convert it into a food,

01:17:02 ►

then that information is shared across the whole network.

01:17:05 ►

It could be many, many miles.

01:17:09 ►

And similarly, our brains also store information holographically.

01:17:12 ►

If you lose a chunk of your brain, you don’t lose a set of your memories.

01:17:16 ►

The memories are all stored throughout the whole system.

01:17:20 ►

So this appears to be something that we’ve beamed into,

01:17:23 ►

and what it potentially, as I mentioned before, could potentially allow for is very fast best practices being transmitted during a type of crisis.

01:17:50 ►

Yeah, so I think that the Internet allows us to overcome, maybe supersede the current corporate structures in a way.

01:17:53 ►

We don’t quite see how that could happen quite yet.

01:17:57 ►

I mean, Bitcoin, I think, is a very fascinating example.

01:17:59 ►

People tracking Bitcoin or have a limited number of options.

01:18:17 ►

There’s 23 million of them.

01:18:20 ►

And he launched it.

01:18:22 ►

It was very cheap.

01:18:23 ►

It blew up.

01:18:24 ►

Suddenly it was $230 to Bitcoin.

01:18:26 ►

Then it went back to like $80 or$ 100 per Bitcoin now.

01:18:29 ►

But what Bitcoin is revealing is, in a sense, the same thing that Napster did for the music industry.

01:18:37 ►

It’s possible for the financial industry that you could have a type of currency that requires no banking system as an intermediary,

01:18:47 ►

because Bitcoin can be stored by individuals and just doesn’t require that type of structure.

01:18:56 ►

So that’s an example of how we can see our capacities through networks and information technologies

01:19:02 ►

to leapfrog over the inertia of the corporate structures.

01:19:07 ►

You know, similarly, we could imagine, you know,

01:19:09 ►

using the global communications infrastructure to do, you know,

01:19:15 ►

retraining for the human population on the planetary scale

01:19:18 ►

so that, you know, we could suddenly be teaching permaculture,

01:19:22 ►

you knowulture practices,

01:19:26 ►

homeopathy,

01:19:28 ►

acupuncture,

01:19:30 ►

Chinese medicine principles.

01:19:31 ►

Those could become collective property of humanity

01:19:34 ►

in a very short time frame.

01:19:38 ►

So, yeah,

01:19:39 ►

I think that

01:19:39 ►

we’ve constructed,

01:19:41 ►

once again, it’s like this organic process.

01:19:44 ►

We built the roads, we built the cities, we built the industry,

01:19:47 ►

we built the communications infrastructure.

01:19:49 ►

It’s all there, but it’s still caught in the kind of inertia

01:19:54 ►

of the old social systems and ideologies

01:19:57 ►

that are not allowing us to just perceive what this thing is tending towards,

01:20:03 ►

which would be us, the emergence of humanity

01:20:05 ►

as a planetary superorganism,

01:20:07 ►

able to take care of its own environment properly.

01:20:14 ►

Talking about the planetary superorganism,

01:20:16 ►

I was wondering what your thoughts were on,

01:20:18 ►

say, Rupert Sheldrake’s work with morphogenic fields

01:20:22 ►

and kind of talking about that we’re all really

01:20:26 ►

kind of connected through this field

01:20:27 ►

and how that relates.

01:20:29 ►

I love Rupert Sheldrake’s work a lot. How many people here

01:20:32 ►

know his work?

01:20:34 ►

One of his ideas that I think

01:20:36 ►

is so brilliant and kind of obvious

01:20:38 ►

once you think about it

01:20:39 ►

is he talks about how

01:20:40 ►

we have this idea that there are laws of nature

01:20:44 ►

that these laws are fixed and immutable.

01:20:47 ►

But actually, when you think about it, that’s only an idea

01:20:49 ►

that developed in a historical context of the 16th, 17th century,

01:20:55 ►

when the scientists of that time were Christians,

01:20:58 ►

who had this idea that there was a divine, immutable, heaven, angelic, set up with God at the top

01:21:08 ►

much like a Supreme Court judge in a legal structure.

01:21:12 ►

So they imposed that idea onto these laws of nature and saw them as fixed

01:21:16 ►

and immutable, like they were divinely inscribed.

01:21:20 ►

And Sheldrake points out that

01:21:22 ►

it’s more likely that the laws of nature

01:21:26 ►

are more like patterns or habits that form over time

01:21:29 ►

so for instance

01:21:31 ►

something like a crystal molecule forms

01:21:34 ►

and it reveals that potential

01:21:36 ►

in that type of circumstance for such a thing to happen

01:21:40 ►

so Sheldrake argues that that creates

01:21:42 ►

what he talked about as a formal morphinogenic field that makes it more likely that that will happen again until finally that pattern becomes more and more coherent and what was originally just serendipity then becomes something like a principle or a law. And he believes that this could extend to all sorts of things that

01:22:05 ►

through our beliefs

01:22:08 ►

and our consciousness, we’re also

01:22:09 ►

creating new morphinogenic fields of possibility.

01:22:12 ►

And just in the same

01:22:14 ►

way that these

01:22:15 ►

things might have been possible in these different

01:22:17 ►

structures of consciousness that are not possible

01:22:20 ►

in other structures.

01:22:21 ►

To give you an example, the tradition

01:22:24 ►

of ayahuasca that I work with,

01:22:25 ►

the sequoia from Ecuador,

01:22:28 ►

they claim that when they would do their ceremonies together,

01:22:32 ►

there are these accountings of all these magical things that happen.

01:22:36 ►

And among them, for instance,

01:22:37 ►

they say that sometimes they would need a new healing plant,

01:22:41 ►

a new medicinal plant for some condition in the tribe,

01:22:45 ►

and they would pray and they would sing and they would drink ayahuasca all night

01:22:48 ►

at the end of the night, the shaman would look down

01:22:50 ►

at his hand and he would have like a seed in his

01:22:52 ►

hand, and that would be the new plant

01:22:54 ►

that had healing properties

01:22:55 ►

you know, I personally believe

01:22:58 ►

that such a thing is possible

01:22:59 ►

it’s not possible in the mental rational structure of

01:23:01 ►

consciousness, but when you’re in the magical structure

01:23:04 ►

it was possible, you know it might become some, but when you’re in the magical structure, it was possible.

01:23:06 ►

It might become some things like that and more things like that,

01:23:09 ►

an infinite number of more things like that

01:23:11 ►

may become possible to us when we fully shift

01:23:14 ►

into this next level of consciousness.

01:23:18 ►

So yeah, I think Sheldrake is providing

01:23:20 ►

a crucial conceptual tools or building blocks

01:23:24 ►

for seeing how this potentiality can be realized.

01:23:30 ►

If that makes sense.

01:23:34 ►

Any other questions?

01:23:36 ►

Yeah, back there.

01:23:40 ►

Continuing to expand on what you’re talking about

01:23:43 ►

in developing psychic abilities or tapping into a super organism,

01:23:50 ►

how much of that do you think is going to be technological versus shamanic technologies?

01:23:58 ►

And whether that’s possible in our current mind state, this mental rational,

01:24:04 ►

or do we need to move past that to accomplish that type of thing?

01:24:09 ►

Well, I think it’s an integration.

01:24:11 ►

That for me is very much what 2012 represents.

01:24:14 ►

This next dispensation or level of consciousness that humanity can realize is very much based on the full integration

01:24:26 ►

of the Western scientific, technical, and rational mindset

01:24:30 ►

with the shamanic, eastern metaphysic,

01:24:35 ►

kind of esoteric worldview.

01:24:39 ►

Those things are going to come together,

01:24:41 ►

and they are coming together now.

01:24:44 ►

We see it in many levels.

01:24:46 ►

For instance, the Dalai Lama’s work with MIT brain scientists

01:24:51 ►

on looking at what happens in deep meditation states

01:24:55 ►

in terms of what types of waves are produced and so on.

01:25:00 ►

I think that we’re ultimately going to learn a lot about

01:25:03 ►

subtle aspects of electromagnetism

01:25:08 ►

and consciousness.

01:25:09 ►

And we may develop beneficial tools and technologies to enhance our capacities to learn and develop

01:25:18 ►

even at very fast rates.

01:25:20 ►

There’s a really fun new book called The Psychedelic Future of the Mind by Tom Roberts.

01:25:24 ►

And he notes, for instance, like there are demonstrated kind of incidents of people getting struck by lightning

01:25:30 ►

and suddenly developing or having new skills they never had before,

01:25:35 ►

like the ability to play the piano or read music or whatever.

01:25:39 ►

And so this suggests that there are forms of learning that become available

01:25:44 ►

through some type of electrical stimulation

01:25:46 ►

of the brain in some sense.

01:25:48 ►

What if that’s something we can actually learn how to do?

01:25:51 ►

And that just allows for rapid learning or re-imprinting.

01:25:57 ►

Really, the question is,

01:26:00 ►

a lot of the edgier technologies in terms of understanding the brain-mind system can either be used as tools of domination and control or tools of liberation and realization.

01:26:18 ►

That’s why this time is so fascinating, I think, because we’re really riding that knife edge of which way it’s going to go.

01:26:22 ►

I think because we’re really riding that knife edge on which way it’s going to go

01:26:23 ►

You’re listening to

01:26:26 ►

The Psychedelic Salon

01:26:27 ►

where people are changing their lives

01:26:29 ►

one thought at a time

01:26:30 ►

I realize that we’ve

01:26:34 ►

gone a bit long here today

01:26:35 ►

but there’s one more short story about

01:26:38 ►

Daniel that I’d like to tell you

01:26:39 ►

You see, most people only get to experience

01:26:42 ►

Daniel as a public speaker

01:26:43 ►

or in a crowd that has gathered around him after one of his talks.

01:26:48 ►

And by the way, Daniel is one of the most accommodating speakers that I know.

01:26:52 ►

He seems always ready to spend time with anyone who asks to talk with him.

01:26:57 ►

But since Daniel is a very serious scholar at his core, it may be difficult to see his lighter side in these more intense discussions.

01:27:06 ►

However, the Daniel that I know is also a really fun guy once he gets the chance to lighten up,

01:27:11 ►

which means that once all of the heavy-duty questioners have let him alone for a while,

01:27:16 ►

he can have a lot of fun with you. My favorite moment with Daniel came around four or five one

01:27:21 ►

morning after an oracle gathering in Seattle. Earlier in the event, somewhere around 10 o’clock the night before,

01:27:28 ►

Daniel and I gave back-to-back presentations to a packed room of people

01:27:32 ►

who were taking a break from the all-night dancing that was actually the main feature of the gathering.

01:27:37 ►

My talk was titled, The Other Side of 2012,

01:27:41 ►

and Daniel gave a talk titled, Aliens, Elementals, and the Demonic Realm, and those

01:27:47 ►

are still available as podcasts number 56 and 57 here in the salon.

01:27:53 ►

Anyway, we gave our talks, and then we spent several hours in deep discussions with some

01:27:58 ►

of the people there.

01:27:59 ►

But finally we’d all had enough talk, and went upstairs and danced until, well, close

01:28:04 ►

to dawn.

01:28:05 ►

I’d kind of lost track of Daniel during much of that time, but as we were getting ready to leave,

01:28:10 ►

he came walking into the little room where we were sitting,

01:28:13 ►

and he had absolutely the biggest smile on his face that I’ve ever seen.

01:28:18 ►

And as we talked then, it was quite obvious that we were both still in one of the best places we’d been in for

01:28:25 ►

a while, and I got to see a very relaxed and fun-to-be-around person. So for me, that is Daniel

01:28:31 ►

at his best. So the next time you see him, hey, lighten up a bit and have some fun talking about

01:28:37 ►

some non-serious things. You know, life’s too short to be serious all the time, don’t you think?

01:28:43 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:28:48 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

393 - A Serious Look At Our Planetary Future

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:20 ► §

00:00:24 ► §

00:00:25 ► §

00:00:29 ► §

00:00:33 ► §

00:00:42 ► §

00:00:47 ► §

00:00:49 ► §

00:00:51 ► §

00:00:55 ► §

00:00:56 ► §

00:00:58 ► §

00:01:01 ► §

00:01:04 ► §

00:01:05 ► §

00:01:12 ► §

00:01:18 ► §

00:01:26 ► §

00:01:33 ► §

00:01:38 ► §

00:01:47 ► §

00:01:51 ► §

00:01:57 ► §

00:02:01 ► §

00:02:05 ► §

00:02:10 ► §

00:02:16 ► §

00:02:22 ► §

00:02:26 ► §

00:02:32 ► §

00:02:34 ► §

00:02:37 ► §

00:02:42 ► §

00:02:44 ► §

00:02:47 ► §

00:02:50 ► §

00:02:52 ► §

00:02:55 ► §

00:02:59 ► §

00:03:01 ► §

00:03:02 ► §

00:03:09 ► §

00:03:16 ► §

00:03:21 ► §

00:03:25 ► §

00:03:32 ► §

00:03:37 ► §

00:03:43 ► §

00:03:45 ► §

00:03:48 ► §

00:03:49 ► §

00:03:51 ► §

00:03:54 ► §

00:03:56 ► §

00:03:59 ► §

00:04:01 ► §

00:04:04 ► §

00:04:06 ► §

00:04:09 ► §

00:04:09 ► §

00:04:18 ► §

00:04:21 ► §

00:04:24 ► §

00:04:26 ► §

00:04:28 ► §

00:04:30 ► §

00:04:32 ► §

00:04:33 ► §

00:04:36 ► §

00:04:38 ► §

00:04:39 ► §

Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

00:00:20 ►

00:00:24 ►

00:00:25 ►

00:00:29 ►

00:00:33 ►

00:00:42 ►

00:00:47 ►

00:00:49 ►

00:00:51 ►

00:00:55 ►

00:00:56 ►

00:00:58 ►

00:01:01 ►

00:01:04 ►

00:01:05 ►

00:01:12 ►

00:01:18 ►

00:01:26 ►

00:01:33 ►

00:01:38 ►

00:01:47 ►

00:01:51 ►

00:01:57 ►

00:02:01 ►

00:02:05 ►

00:02:10 ►

00:02:16 ►

00:02:22 ►

00:02:26 ►

00:02:32 ►

00:02:34 ►

00:02:37 ►

00:02:42 ►

00:02:44 ►

00:02:47 ►

00:02:50 ►

00:02:52 ►

00:02:55 ►

00:02:59 ►

00:03:01 ►

00:03:02 ►

00:03:09 ►

00:03:16 ►

00:03:21 ►

00:03:25 ►

00:03:32 ►

00:03:37 ►

00:03:43 ►

00:03:45 ►

00:03:48 ►

00:03:49 ►

00:03:51 ►

00:03:54 ►

00:03:56 ►

00:03:59 ►

00:04:01 ►

00:04:04 ►

00:04:06 ►

00:04:09 ►

00:04:09 ►

00:04:18 ►

00:04:21 ►

00:04:24 ►

00:04:26 ►

00:04:28 ►

00:04:30 ►

00:04:32 ►

00:04:33 ►

00:04:36 ►

00:04:38 ►

00:04:39 ►

00:04:41 ►

00:04:44 ►

00:04:50 ►