Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The moment is where we spend most of our time.”

“Reality is a term that if it’s used at all it’s used in philosophy, in ontology, in epistemology. It is not a concept that you hear very often on the lips of scientists.”

“The ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ is the belief that there is something, somewhere which is real, which can be depended upon, which everything else can be referenced back to. And as long as you are victim of this fallacy you are philosophically naive and probably not at ease psychologically.”

“The ego is this strange transference of loyalty from the group to the self, the individual body.”

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

00:00:22

Salon.

00:00:23

And you’re probably wondering

00:00:25

if I ever even returned from the Arizona Wild Wild West Festival. Well, my body is back here

00:00:32

in Southern California, but my heart and mind are still out in the desert near Tucson. So I guess

00:00:38

that lets you know that I had a wonderful time. Actually, I was going to post this podcast as soon as I returned a little over a week

00:00:47

ago, but for this past week out here, we’ve had a heat wave, otherwise known as a Santa Ana condition,

00:00:53

and when it gets hot, I get lazy. But since we only get a handful of hot days each year, there’s

00:00:59

no need for air conditioning, and I guess that means when it gets hot, I just sit back, sip a cool drink, and wait for it to cool off a bit.

00:01:07

Which it now has done.

00:01:09

So I no longer have an excuse for goofing off.

00:01:12

But getting back to the festival, I want to thank Life and the rest of the organizers and staff for putting on such a wonderful event.

00:01:20

There were several stages, and so the live music only took a break, well, during a little

00:01:25

rainstorm on Saturday afternoon. And, oh, the music was excellent. There was just a really wide

00:01:31

selection, and, well, I only wish that I’d had more energy and could have stayed up later each night

00:01:36

to hear some of the bands that I had to miss. Now, I know there’s been some criticism of the

00:01:42

festival circuit, mainly by grumpy old curmudgeons who think that you young kids should get more serious

00:01:48

and get jobs instead of going to music festivals.

00:01:51

But I, for one, am not only not such a critic, I’m instead a huge supporter of these events.

00:01:58

I had some really great conversations at the Arizona Festival,

00:02:01

and we had a lot of really interesting people there.

00:02:05

And contrary to what some people seem to think,

00:02:08

the people attending these events aren’t trying to escape the challenges of life,

00:02:12

but are instead embracing them.

00:02:14

For example, all of the people I met over the weekend,

00:02:17

well, they either had jobs, they were in college,

00:02:19

or were traveling musicians and artists.

00:02:22

And contrary to what some old fogies might think

00:02:25

about the young people attending these events,

00:02:27

I found them to be not only well-informed,

00:02:30

but also intent on creating better ways of living on this little planet.

00:02:35

So I salute the organizers and the attendees

00:02:38

at the Arizona Wild Wild West Festival

00:02:40

and congratulate you on achieving something quite difficult,

00:02:44

which is giving birth

00:02:45

to a new festival. Not only was this the first year for this event, it was also the scene of

00:02:51

the first and so far only live sessions of the Psychedelic Salon. And if all goes well, then

00:02:57

next year I’ll be back again to host some more sessions of the Salon at this great new festival.

00:03:03

And for those of you that I got to

00:03:05

hang out with over the weekend, I want you to know how much I enjoyed it. I’m remembering all

00:03:10

of you right now as I introduce yet another Terrence McKenna talk. And for you guys in Phoenix

00:03:16

who are working the night shift right now, I don’t think that there’s anything in today’s

00:03:20

program that’s going to cause you to turn down the volume when your supervisor comes by.

00:03:27

Now, originally, I’d planned on today’s podcast, and the next one that’s going to follow,

00:03:33

to be from the 2013 Palenque Norte lectures.

00:03:37

However, as I prepared the thumb drives that I’ve promised to the donors from our recent pledge drive,

00:03:43

I discovered that I didn’t have quite

00:03:45

enough McKenna soundbites to fill my promise of a hundred of them. And so I’m doing podcasts 399

00:03:51

and 400 with Terrence in an effort to be sure that I capture enough of these little gems to

00:03:58

add to your thumb drive. And hopefully nobody will be too upset about the delay in the Planque Norte talks, which will be winging their way to you in a couple of weeks.

00:04:08

So now let’s continue with the Terrence McKenna workshop that we’ve been listening to.

00:04:13

As you know, this workshop took place in August of 1991.

00:04:18

Now, at one point, you’ll hear in a little bit, Terrence takes off on a short riff about different types of mathematical logic.

00:04:26

And while I did take some advanced math courses during my undergraduate days as an electrical engineering student,

00:04:32

that was so long ago that, well, I’ve got no idea whether Terrence is even close to correct in what he’s saying.

00:04:40

So before you go repeating that riff to your friends, you’d better consult with a friendly math major just to be sure.

00:04:47

But hey, let’s get on with the show, and you can be the judge of that for yourself.

00:04:52

Something that occurs to me as you’re talking that might be interesting to pursue a little bit is

00:04:57

at Esalen we’re just starting an arts program,

00:05:02

and in fact tomorrow we’re having an auction for a dance platform.

00:05:06

And I’ve heard you say that you think that the arts, creativity is sort of the answer.

00:05:16

And so that might be a topic for comment, at least, of something about what you have to say about the arts

00:05:25

and how the arts are going to be an answer

00:05:30

you mean how can doing art save the world

00:05:33

or a smaller version of that

00:05:37

oh no we always go to the top

00:05:40

if it doesn’t save the world

00:05:42

why bother even discussing it

00:05:45

yeah well

00:05:49

it’s an interesting question

00:05:51

in a nutshell and I’ll go back to it

00:05:54

the reason I think it’s so important

00:05:58

is because when we grapple

00:06:01

with the problems that are

00:06:04

many When we grapple with the problems that are, you know, many and complex around us,

00:06:10

the tendency is to go for rational solution.

00:06:15

But you might bear in mind that the consequences of rational solutions

00:06:22

are what we are dealing with at the present.

00:06:26

Rationalism has been the dominant paradigm for problem solving

00:06:30

for about 500 years, and it has led us deeper and deeper

00:06:35

into contradiction, resource mismanagement, dehumanization,

00:06:42

misperception of each other, so forth and so on.

00:06:46

That’s why, in a way, I think that the art reflex is more important or more efficacious.

00:06:55

Because if we act from the point of view of wanting to create art, what we’re really saying is that reality has outrun apprehension.

00:07:09

We can no longer make rational sense out of reality.

00:07:14

So the ego is set aside and the logos or the muse is invoked and then we produce art and the the almost the

00:07:30

distinguishing characteristic of great art is that it not be fully

00:07:35

comprehensible to its creator so we then act as agents of the logos when we create art.

00:07:45

And the art that is created is then put out

00:07:50

into the cultural environment of meaning

00:07:53

and is then subject to a kind of natural selection

00:07:59

similar to the kind of natural selection that goes on in an environment where biological species are competing.

00:08:10

The shorthand way of saying this is the best idea will win, but it won’t win unless it competes.

00:08:19

You can’t win the race unless you run the race.

00:08:23

you can’t win the race unless you run the race.

00:08:28

So rather than beating our brains against the end of history,

00:08:31

trying to create rational solutions to what is essentially an irrational situation in the first place,

00:08:36

it would be, I think, much better to become servants of the logos,

00:08:43

servants of the Gaian mind,

00:08:46

and then to let the chips fall where they may,

00:08:51

let the selective pressures of intellectual history sort out among the many options,

00:08:59

and those that are important will come to the fore.

00:09:04

Does that get it

00:09:06

as a brief pass

00:09:07

why it’s important

00:09:08

it’s important because it’s anti-rational

00:09:11

because it’s anti-ego

00:09:14

because it

00:09:15

says we are vessels

00:09:18

and agents of the solution

00:09:20

but we can’t

00:09:21

it doesn’t spring from our

00:09:24

our ability to integrate data and reflect it back.

00:09:30

It’s much more irrational than that.

00:09:34

This sort of goes to what I thought I would talk about a little bit tonight.

00:09:40

I used the phrase a few minutes ago, reality outruns apprehension.

00:09:46

This is actually a phrase from Moby Dick, not the part of Moby Dick that I will probably end up reading to you tonight. basically because of its intrinsic interest and its recent intensification,

00:10:11

is sort of the question,

00:10:12

what is reality, number one,

00:10:16

and then what’s so great about it?

00:10:20

Why bother?

00:10:23

Yeah, why bother?

00:10:24

I mean, we really have a bee in our bonnet about reality.

00:10:30

When you get out of touch with it, this is considered not a good thing.

00:10:36

Reality is the unmoving reference point in a universe of flux

00:10:42

to which we are always supposed to go back and re-reference ourselves. And it’s a funny concept. First of all, it is a concept. It’s not an object with its own interior ontos. In other words, it doesn’t have being outside of the culture’s assumptions

00:11:08

about it. This is the first big news about reality. The reality of the Witoto is a completely

00:11:15

different reality from the West European or the Canadian. And yet the reality is, we assume that there is a kind of bedrock,

00:11:28

and we call that reality, then everything is referenced back toward that.

00:11:33

Well, I wanted to talk about it tonight because it’s an incredibly slippery concept.

00:11:42

I mean, I would say getting your hands on reality is about as likely as getting your

00:11:48

hands on true love. You know, you’re always going toward it or looking back at it, but you rarely

00:11:55

have it in front of you in the moment. And yet the moment is where we spend most of our time.

00:12:05

So we’re kind of run ragged by the nostalgia for something we never knew,

00:12:12

is what it almost comes down to.

00:12:15

So, first of all, whenever we want to talk about something seriously and profoundly,

00:12:21

we have recourse to science.

00:12:25

However, reality is a term that if it’s used at all,

00:12:29

it’s used in philosophy, in ontology, in epistemology.

00:12:34

It is not a concept that you hear very often on the lips of scientists.

00:12:41

Well, why is this?

00:12:43

Well, it’s because science, which is the enterprise which seeks to carry out that any discussion of reality will tend to come back to. book, Process and Reality, created the great phrase that has now entered the language,

00:13:28

the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. You’ve all probably heard this phrase, or maybe you haven’t

00:13:36

heard this phrase. But anyway, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is the belief that there is something somewhere which is real, which can be depended upon, which everything else can be referenced back to.

00:13:51

And as long as you are victim of this fallacy, you are philosophically naive and probably not at ease psychologically.

00:14:03

probably not at ease psychologically because, you know, it’s like, as I said,

00:14:07

nostalgia for something you never knew.

00:14:13

The way, science’s method,

00:14:16

which worked very well for the first 450 years,

00:14:20

and by science I don’t mean science going back to the Greeks

00:14:25

I mean science

00:14:28

since the Renaissance

00:14:29

mathematically based

00:14:31

Cartesian materialism

00:14:33

is basically my notion of science

00:14:36

its method is what’s called

00:14:39

reductionism

00:14:41

this is the theory that if you want to

00:14:43

understand something an atom, a plant, a society,

00:14:48

a geological formation, what you do is you

00:14:51

take it apart. You deconstruct it.

00:14:56

You dismantle it and catalog its parts

00:15:00

and then define their relationships to each

00:15:04

other. And then somehow when you recombine all these maps of this deconstructed object,

00:15:12

you then somehow possess it.

00:15:15

And this worked very well up until well into the 20th century

00:15:20

because it was assumed that matter,

00:15:24

which was taken to be somehow a primary constituent

00:15:28

of reality, that matter was made out of tiny billiard balls that were called Hamiltonian

00:15:35

atoms and that these distinct and concrete billiard balls could be located absolutely in time and space and their

00:15:46

relationships to each other defined

00:15:48

as charge

00:15:50

force, momentum

00:15:51

spin

00:15:54

so forth and so on and that

00:15:56

out of these primary qualities

00:15:58

adhering to these

00:16:00

elementary particles

00:16:01

notice these words primary

00:16:03

elementary that are telling us we’re getting

00:16:06

close to bedrock, out of this you could reconstruct the world. The problem is, and I won’t bore

00:16:14

you with this because so many people have, quantum physics showed that these hard little

00:16:22

billiard balls were the most tragic example

00:16:26

of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

00:16:29

They don’t exist.

00:16:31

There isn’t such a thing.

00:16:33

When you go down and down and down,

00:16:36

suddenly everything becomes paradoxical.

00:16:41

Ordinary logic no longer applies.

00:16:46

And, you know, without beating a dead horse,

00:16:49

I would remind you that quantum physics, quantum electrodynamics,

00:16:53

which is always held up as the greatest intellectual edifice

00:16:57

ever constructed by the mind of man,

00:17:00

is a complete mess in terms of the aesthetic of its logics

00:17:08

because it requires two logics operating simultaneously.

00:17:13

You have what is called ordinary logic,

00:17:17

the logic that we as animals intuitively gravitate toward,

00:17:22

logic which says things such as,

00:17:24

if it is A, then it is not b

00:17:27

if it is now then it is not then if it is after then it is not before this is kind of logic that

00:17:35

assumes concrete objects in a linear time stream but quantum physics then to solve the problems it sets itself, it requires another kind of logic,

00:17:48

an extremely exotic logic called Boolean algebra.

00:17:53

And so what you get when you look at a quantum mechanical explanation of nature

00:17:58

is you get what are called aisles of Boole

00:18:03

embedded in ordinary mathematical logic.

00:18:08

So there are actually transition zones,

00:18:13

very distinct transition zones,

00:18:16

where you simply switch logics in midstream,

00:18:20

literally in midstream,

00:18:22

in order to solve the problem.

00:18:23

literally in midstream, in order to solve the problem.

00:18:32

Well, this then gives you a nice set of numbers in an experimental situation where you’re trying to calculate the charge of the electron

00:18:35

or the displacement value of particles or something like that.

00:18:39

But it rests on this completely inelegant switching back and forth

00:18:44

from one logic to another

00:18:46

as the case requires,

00:18:49

which means the human observer is brought in

00:18:52

and you get to decide which logic to use

00:18:55

and then you can use one for a few minutes

00:18:58

and then switch back to the other and go back and forth.

00:19:01

And upon such shifting sand as this,

00:19:06

the entire edifice

00:19:07

of science rests.

00:19:10

Okay, well that’s really all

00:19:11

I want to say about the scientific

00:19:13

view of reality. It’s just to…

00:19:16

Yeah, Paul.

00:19:16

I just wanted to say that

00:19:17

I don’t see science that way.

00:19:21

And I think maybe one has to

00:19:23

switch from science and physics,

00:19:25

because in the 19th century there were many physicists who realized and argued against

00:19:33

the possibility of a mechanistic universe. And quantum mechanics was the final death

00:19:39

call of that point of view, but it was argued for a hundred years and maybe three hundred

00:19:44

years before that that mechanism can’t exist. The reality doesn’t exist.

00:19:49

You mean, are you thinking of vitalism?

00:19:52

No, no, I’m just thinking that it was clear to many physicists, at least, in the last

00:19:58

century, that we weren’t going to be able… In other words, this notion of atoms was very clearly understood to be just a model.

00:20:05

People, physicists, and some physicists, didn’t confuse the notion of a model or a concept with reality.

00:20:12

And in fact, argued quite clearly that these concepts aren’t reality.

00:20:17

In fact, we’ll never find a mechanism for our consciousness.

00:20:24

yeah well the great enlightenment of 19th century

00:20:26

physics occurred around

00:20:28

the issue of fields

00:20:30

because

00:20:31

until James Clerk

00:20:34

Maxwell and Lorenz

00:20:36

and these people

00:20:37

wrote the equations for the

00:20:40

electromagnetic field

00:20:41

it was denied that

00:20:44

such a thing was possible

00:20:45

because it had this apparent quality of action at a distance.

00:20:51

And that completely freaked out 19th century expectations

00:20:56

of how nature should behave.

00:20:58

We take this completely for granted.

00:21:01

I mean, there’s a radio sitting in this cabinet

00:21:04

that we could flip on,

00:21:05

and if we weren’t in such a benighted geographical situation,

00:21:11

we could hear hundreds of AM and FM radio stations.

00:21:15

Well, those are wave mechanical systems

00:21:19

that are filling this room

00:21:22

that are invisible to ordinary perception. To the 19th century

00:21:26

mind this was completely occult

00:21:28

and astonishing.

00:21:30

We take it for granted.

00:21:32

Marshall McLuhan at one point

00:21:34

suggested that

00:21:36

the worldwide electrification

00:21:38

of the planet through the spread

00:21:40

of radio and television

00:21:42

and electrical systems was

00:21:44

actually the descent of the Holy Ghost into history,

00:21:49

that electricity was the Holy Ghost to control and to understand,

00:21:55

because we can do it.

00:21:57

We don’t need the second coming of Christ.

00:22:00

We don’t need divine intervention to destroy this planet.

00:22:04

We can do it well enough

00:22:05

on our own, thank you. So a huge responsibility evolves upon people within the global culture

00:22:15

to try and come to terms with what is possible and what is to be done. And I think we have to doubt everything that we’re told.

00:22:27

All the theology that we have inherited

00:22:30

served a different kind of world.

00:22:33

I mean, don’t forget that as recently as 100 years ago,

00:22:37

people believed that the earth was created on September 15th, 4004 BC.

00:22:43

on September 15th, 4004 BC.

00:22:47

I mean, the steam engine was the most powerful form of technology that existed.

00:22:52

In the last hundred years,

00:22:54

we have gone more than half of the distance

00:22:59

that we’ve traveled in the last 50,000 years.

00:23:03

And you can actually begin to see the outlines of what it’s all about.

00:23:08

As caretakers of the earth, as caretakers of intelligence,

00:23:14

because this is all the intelligence that we know of,

00:23:17

we must, in fact, come to terms with what is being asked of us

00:23:25

what is it that we are

00:23:27

supposed to be doing

00:23:29

how can we rationally order our societies

00:23:32

to maximize the values

00:23:35

that we inherently

00:23:36

and intrinsically feel

00:23:38

to be worth saving

00:23:40

you mean what?

00:23:44

why did we fall into

00:23:46

history? Why did we create

00:23:48

culture? What were we afraid of?

00:23:50

What were we afraid of?

00:23:52

I’ve been reading

00:23:54

Camille Paglia and she says it’s

00:23:56

the… You rascal.

00:23:58

Oh.

00:24:00

The, the…

00:24:02

Well, you know what she says. Oh, I know

00:24:04

what she says, I know what she says

00:24:05

so the chaos

00:24:06

the underworld that quality

00:24:08

the violence of nature

00:24:10

the disorder

00:24:11

well we were

00:24:14

I think what happened

00:24:15

and you know you’ve all heard me

00:24:18

talk about it in operational terms

00:24:20

that we were as embedded

00:24:22

in nature

00:24:23

as the fox and the leaf-cutter ant and the polar bear

00:24:29

until a hundred thousand years ago or something like that.

00:24:35

And then this ability to signify, it has something to do with our relationship to shamanism and psychedelic drugs.

00:24:49

You see, when you look at primates of all types going clear back to squirrel monkeys,

00:24:58

you always get male dominance.

00:25:01

Male dominance was not invented in the Middle East 3,000 years ago.

00:25:07

Squirrel monkeys have alpha male primates

00:25:10

and anthropoid apes.

00:25:12

All of the primates have this problem.

00:25:16

But I really believe

00:25:18

that we temporarily overcame it

00:25:21

about from, let’s say, 25,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, we temporarily overcame

00:25:30

the tendency for male dominance to occur as a natural part of our being social animals. And this happened because shamanism evolved as an institution which relied

00:25:49

on psychoactive plants to dissolve the male ego. And it’s not only, I mean, we don’t have to call

00:25:58

it the male ego, that just polarizes and genderizes the thing. It’s the ego. The ego is this strange transference of loyalty

00:26:10

from the group to the self, the individual body.

00:26:17

And then we call that the self.

00:26:20

The reason this…

00:26:21

So that psychedelic shamanism,

00:26:24

specifically the use of psilocybin on the plains of Africa, was like a chemical inoculation against the formation of ego. language and social roles and rudimentary

00:26:46

agriculture and nomadism

00:26:48

all of these things

00:26:50

but then

00:26:51

the psychedelic substances

00:26:54

which made this possible

00:26:56

began to become less

00:26:58

and less available

00:26:59

this is simply because of

00:27:02

climatic change

00:27:04

in Africa.

00:27:05

You see, what is now the Sahara Desert was a veldt of grassland throughout prehistory.

00:27:13

As late as Roman times, the Roman historian Pliny referred to North Africa as the breadbasket of Rome.

00:27:22

It means that climatologically it was entirely different. And in that African

00:27:27

theater, we emerged out of animal organization and into a world of language, cognition, ritual,

00:27:39

ceremony, so forth and so on. And it was a style of psychedelic shamanism

00:27:47

complexed with an orgiastic religious style

00:27:53

now the reason this is important

00:27:55

this orgiastic style

00:27:57

is because it makes it impossible to trace lines

00:28:02

excuse me

00:28:04

lines of male paternity.

00:28:06

Women know who their children are

00:28:08

because they see their children come out of their bodies.

00:28:12

But men couldn’t know that.

00:28:15

And so all values were group values.

00:28:21

The tribe was as identified with true being as we now identify our ego. So people were altruistic, not in any holier-than-thou or pietistic way. It’s just simply how they were, in the same way that the members of an anthill are altruistic. I mean, ants don’t

00:28:46

flee from a problem because

00:28:47

they’re trying to save their own necks.

00:28:50

They hurl themselves at the

00:28:52

problem until it is solved because

00:28:54

conservation of the

00:28:55

group values is

00:28:57

the most important thing.

00:28:59

Well, when…

00:29:00

Instead of being a

00:29:03

male society, why then couldn’t this be passed on

00:29:07

by the female?

00:29:08

I mean, the female knows who are our offspring.

00:29:10

It’s why…

00:29:11

But the female has built into her physiology

00:29:15

a boundary-dissolving experience

00:29:18

in the form of the birth experience.

00:29:21

And in these African tribal societies,

00:29:24

you know, it didn’t happen once or

00:29:26

twice in a woman’s life it happened

00:29:28

a dozen or twenty

00:29:30

times so women

00:29:32

by virtue of giving birth

00:29:34

and by virtue of this experience

00:29:36

of seeing another person

00:29:38

come out of their body

00:29:39

can never get

00:29:41

so firmly embedded

00:29:43

this notion of their inviolate and unique self.

00:29:48

So it’s just biologically scripted into femaleness that several times in your life you’re going to be melted down into this situation.

00:29:59

And it’s a very deep imprinting.

00:30:03

It’s, you know, a very deep imprinting.

00:30:07

In the absence of psychedelic plants or drugs,

00:30:11

a male can go from birth to the grave and never have this experience.

00:30:14

You know, and millions of people do that.

00:30:18

And millions of people go from the birth to the grave

00:30:21

without ever discovering the relativistic nature of the ego.

00:30:26

They entirely identify it with the self,

00:30:29

when in fact it isn’t that at all.

00:30:33

When we were…

00:30:34

Now, the mystery in all of this is the fact that

00:30:38

it’s kind of reductionist to say that taking these psychedelic plants

00:30:44

dissolves the ego

00:30:46

because there has to be something then which rushes into this now empty space

00:30:52

where the ego previously held sway.

00:30:55

What rushes in to that liberated space is what I call the Gaian mind,

00:31:04

is what I call the Gaian mind,

00:31:13

that there is actually a hyper-intelligent being on this planet or in this planet.

00:31:17

It perhaps is this planet, but it is sentient.

00:31:20

It thinks. It can communicate. We are like atoms inside the body or cells inside the body of this enormous organism, which is the cause of our religious obsessing. on a planet inhabited by a super intelligence that we have lost contact with.

00:31:47

And so we deny its intelligence.

00:31:50

We, at this point, even deny its vitality.

00:31:53

I mean, you know, the Judeo-Christian shtick is

00:31:56

that nature is to be at the service of man.

00:32:01

And, you know, this is a complete inversion

00:32:04

of the idea that human beings

00:32:07

should be the active hands of the guy in mind.

00:32:12

And this didn’t happen for any…

00:32:17

There’s no bad guy in this scenario.

00:32:20

It’s simply that the climatological conditions

00:32:24

which allowed this social mode that was characterized by nomadic pastoralism, orgy, and psychedelic shamanism was gradually replaced by, because of drying of the African continent,

00:32:44

because of drying of the African continent,

00:32:49

the psychedelic substances were no longer available.

00:32:54

And there was even an intermediate phase where the psychedelic substance, if it was the mushroom,

00:32:58

was preserved in honey

00:33:00

so that the great festivals became further and further apart in time and the ego

00:33:08

enters them like a tumor. It begins to form in the personalities of human beings. If you’re engaging

00:33:17

in psychedelic intoxication and orgy at every full moon, there is no chance for the ego to get a hold.

00:33:25

I mean, it’s just an aberration

00:33:27

that everybody jumps on and has gotten rid of.

00:33:30

But if these ceremonies become yearly

00:33:33

or less frequent,

00:33:36

then these funny notions get going

00:33:40

in the more powerful males.

00:33:43

Why shouldn’t I control more females?

00:33:47

Why shouldn’t I have more of the food supply?

00:33:52

Why shouldn’t this area in fact be for me to hunt in alone?

00:33:57

You get all these concepts of mineness

00:34:00

that arise out of the growth of this tumorous, cancerous, maladaptive, self-defining,

00:34:09

because that, it doesn’t serve.

00:34:12

And we have committed ourselves to this thing so whole hog for the past 5, 10,000 years

00:34:20

that now we’re so deep into it that it’s not clear we can ever extricate ourselves

00:34:26

from it except and this is the raison d’etre for my career is we have to go back to the archaic

00:34:34

solution which is and it can’t be orgy that can’t be the archaic solution that we implement because we’re not a nomadic tribe of pastorless,

00:34:46

only 70 or 80 human beings.

00:34:48

We’re a global culture of 5 billion people.

00:34:52

If we tried to resuscitate lunar orgies,

00:34:57

we’d have a wave of social and sexually transmitted diseases

00:35:03

that would probably finish us once and for all.

00:35:06

So the orgy thing is not the answer.

00:35:09

But the psychedelic option still exists,

00:35:14

it still dissolves the ego,

00:35:17

and it still puts you in contact with viable group values.

00:35:23

So this is perhaps an answer.

00:35:28

And I don’t advocate it

00:35:30

because I think it’s a sure thing.

00:35:32

I advocate it because I think

00:35:34

it’s the only game in town.

00:35:37

Hell, if hortatory beating on people

00:35:41

could have worked,

00:35:43

then we would have solved all our problems thousands of years

00:35:46

ago, because Buddha and Christ and all these other people, they had the right idea. It’s just that

00:35:51

ideas don’t cut the mustard. It has to be an experience, a real experience. And a boundary

00:36:01

dissolving experience is so corrosive to all the institutions of dominator society

00:36:08

that no religion in the West, since Ur,

00:36:14

has been able to come to terms with the psychedelic experience

00:36:17

because it mitigates male dominance, hierarchy,

00:36:22

and all the other things that are the methods

00:36:25

by which we do business

00:36:27

why do you think that nature would have it

00:36:29

that there would be this window of opportunity

00:36:32

to develop an ego to begin with

00:36:34

what

00:36:34

well it was

00:36:38

that we had a chemically

00:36:40

mediated symbiosis

00:36:42

with the guy in mind

00:36:44

and it was

00:36:46

a

00:36:46

it wasn’t a locked

00:36:49

symbiosis like you get

00:36:52

in lichens

00:36:53

or something like that, it was a kind of

00:36:56

flirtation with

00:36:57

symbiosis, it was that

00:37:00

we took these

00:37:02

psychedelic plants

00:37:04

and

00:37:04

contacted this hyperdimensional mind of nature

00:37:10

and discovered that because it was hyperdimensional,

00:37:14

because it wasn’t constrained in space and time the way we are,

00:37:18

that it had useful information,

00:37:22

very practical information.

00:37:27

Where has the game gone?

00:37:30

This is what shamans are good for,

00:37:32

is to tell you where the game has gone.

00:37:35

How will the weather be next year?

00:37:40

Classical problem for shamans.

00:37:42

Well, how do they know this stuff?

00:37:44

How can… You see, shamanism is essentially

00:37:48

a going into a higher dimension

00:37:50

to obtain information

00:37:52

that then feeds back into the group destiny.

00:37:56

Well, how can these shamans know this stuff?

00:37:59

How can they attain to this superhuman level of understanding?

00:38:03

It’s that they get in touch with a different kind of intelligence.

00:38:08

An intelligence to whom where the game will

00:38:12

be next year is as transparent as where the game

00:38:16

was last year. Because past and future

00:38:20

don’t exist for that intelligence. And our

00:38:24

relationship to that intelligence

00:38:26

was one of devotee to goddess

00:38:31

or supplicant to mystery.

00:38:34

But eventually the connection was broken

00:38:37

and meanwhile the ego was arising

00:38:41

and the ego is like a mirroring

00:38:44

of this larger psychic function. In other words, the ego

00:38:48

is our pathetic attempt to

00:38:51

create God on our own. This was

00:38:56

Julian Jayne’s theory. He thought, you see, that up until

00:39:00

as late as Homeric times, which is 800 B.C.,

00:39:04

that if you got into a tight

00:39:08

spot and were about to be offed or something,

00:39:12

miraculously a voice would appear,

00:39:16

would come on, it would just turn on in your head, and it would say

00:39:20

you should get out of there. And people

00:39:24

thought this was a god.

00:39:26

It was a god.

00:39:28

But eventually they were able to

00:39:31

assimilate this psychic function

00:39:35

into the personality.

00:39:38

And then they said,

00:39:38

well, that’s not God talking.

00:39:40

That’s me.

00:39:42

That’s myself.

00:39:44

And this is the idea where God is then located inside my body.

00:39:50

And I take orders from this inner God that I call the ego. And if it is allowed to develop,

00:39:58

and it’s strange, it always develops along these patriarchal lines, you know. It brooks no babbling. It’s not interested in argument.

00:40:07

It knows what is to be done.

00:40:09

And then the only time you get a problem

00:40:11

is when you place one ego in contact with another.

00:40:15

And then, of course, they go at it, hammer and tongs.

00:40:18

But originally what we had was a symbiotic relationship

00:40:22

with this Gaian mind.

00:40:24

And this is

00:40:26

the mystery that haunts this

00:40:29

planet, haunts our history

00:40:31

haunts our psychedelic experiences and our dreams

00:40:35

it’s that there really is

00:40:38

a controlling super

00:40:41

intelligence that can be contacted

00:40:44

through psychedelic

00:40:46

drugs, presumably religious

00:40:48

practice, when you see how long they’ve

00:40:50

been making the claim, although it must

00:40:52

be a high noise signal

00:40:54

when you do it that way, because they

00:40:56

seem to get it always skewed

00:40:58

off in some weird

00:41:00

direction that then reinforces

00:41:02

paternalistic institutions.

00:41:04

But this is what all this goddess talk is about,

00:41:09

is either we are becoming more sensitive to the presence of the Gaian mind,

00:41:14

or the Gaian mind, under pressure of the approaching apocalyptic crisis,

00:41:21

is beginning to raise its voice louder and louder and louder.

00:41:27

So that now, you know, when you go into nature loaded,

00:41:33

every rock, every tree, every stream is saying,

00:41:37

awaken, awaken, come to focus.

00:41:42

There’s minutes to go, as William Burroughs likes to say.

00:41:46

So we have to connect up.

00:41:49

And so we are, in a sense,

00:41:52

the hands of this diffuse super mind

00:41:56

that is spread through nature.

00:41:58

And our presence as thinking, reflecting,

00:42:02

culture-building individuals

00:42:04

is not simply an amazing but meaningless set of circumstances.

00:42:12

Our presence as a global technical civilization

00:42:16

signifies the onset of the final crisis.

00:42:20

It’s as though, you know, you watch a pond

00:42:24

and the surface is smooth, mirror smooth.

00:42:30

Well then the surface of the pond begins to churn.

00:42:35

This is the signal that something huge is about to emerge out of the pond.

00:42:43

And human history is that turbulence on the still surface of nature.

00:42:49

Nature would never have allowed a phenomenon like human history to get going

00:42:55

were it not in response to a deeply felt planetary crisis

00:43:00

that is approaching at ever-accelerating speed.

00:43:05

And I have enough faith in nature to believe

00:43:09

that when the moment finally is upon us, we’ll be ready.

00:43:13

But the tools are being laid up right now.

00:43:17

The ultimate tools, not the prototype tools.

00:43:20

The bow and arrow, that was a prototype.

00:43:22

The catapult, that was a prototype.

00:43:27

The B-17, that was a prototype the catapult, that was a prototype the B-17, that was a prototype but thermonuclear tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles

00:43:32

this is not the prototype

00:43:34

this is the actual instrument by which you could save a planet

00:43:38

as well as destroy it

00:43:40

because you’re at last dealing on the level of energies

00:43:44

necessary to make those kinds of changes.

00:43:47

And I think the evidence is all around us that the historical mode cannot persist. It can’t.

00:43:57

Just draw all the curves. Output of petroleum distillates, output of energy, population growth,

00:44:07

proliferation of weapons.

00:44:09

When you draw all of these curves,

00:44:11

they can’t be propagated

00:44:13

500 years into the future.

00:44:16

Sometime in the next 50 years,

00:44:19

you know, we’re going to have to

00:44:22

make or break

00:44:24

what history was all about.

00:44:28

And the arising of global culture,

00:44:32

the arising of an integrated electronic awareness,

00:44:35

high-speed computational machinery,

00:44:38

tremendously powerful weapons, spacecraft,

00:44:42

all of this stuff looks to me like the raw material for a

00:44:47

salvational exercise. And notice that it’s not only a way to save the planet,

00:44:57

it’s in a sense a way to save not only ourselves, but to save our ancestors as well.

00:45:06

If we can act in a moment of great crisis

00:45:12

to preserve the planet from ruination,

00:45:16

we will redeem human history.

00:45:20

Then it all makes sense.

00:45:22

The pogroms, the migrations

00:45:25

the brutality, the stupidity

00:45:27

it was all toward a purpose

00:45:31

and then somehow those lives that were lost

00:45:34

in those pogroms and invasions and migrations

00:45:38

and so forth are given meaning

00:45:40

a meaning which they will totally not have

00:45:44

if we simply blow the planet apart

00:45:47

and wreck nature and ruin the oceans

00:45:49

and blow off the atmosphere.

00:45:52

Then it just looks like a tale told by an idiot

00:45:55

full of sound and fury that signifies nothing.

00:45:59

So it’s as though the meaning itself is in our hands.

00:46:07

What shall we make of this?

00:46:09

Is it just, as James Joyce said, atoms and ifs?

00:46:13

Or is there a plan, a process, a plot, and a role for us

00:46:20

that will give us some dignity in this situation,

00:46:26

which otherwise, up to this point, as far as I can see, we totally lack.

00:46:31

I mean, it’s all very well to spend an afternoon wandering around the Louvre,

00:46:35

but on the other hand, you know, spend the next day wandering around the slums of Calcutta,

00:46:40

and you just really have to wonder about what the human enterprise is about.

00:46:46

Now I will read you this little quote from Moby Dick,

00:46:49

which sort of gets to some of this.

00:46:54

Are you all familiar with Moby Dick?

00:46:56

Are any of you familiar with Moby Dick?

00:46:59

You should be.

00:47:00

I mean, this is the greatest work of prose ever written by an American

00:47:04

without contest,

00:47:06

I think. I mean, I like to think that when human history is written, Americans will be remembered

00:47:13

for two things. They went to the moon, and they’re the people who produced Moby Dick. I mean, this is

00:47:20

our odyssey. This is our odyssey and our Iliad.

00:47:27

Nobody’s ever gone past it.

00:47:29

Okay, there’s a scene early on.

00:47:32

You all know that it’s a whale hunt, right?

00:47:37

Okay, so there is a scene where the captain,

00:47:41

who is running this show and driving this thing,

00:47:46

this hunt for this whale, to a truly apocalyptic conclusion because for him this is no hunt for an animal.

00:47:49

This is a confrontation with an alien god and he is determined to murder this thing

00:47:56

because it, as he delicately puts it, dismasted him,

00:48:02

meaning it bit off his leg and destroyed his sexual machinery.

00:48:07

And his first mate, who functions as Christian right reason,

00:48:13

wimpy little Starbuck, says,

00:48:17

Vengeance on a dumb brute, cried Starbuck,

00:48:21

that simply smote thee from blindest instinct?

00:48:23

starbuck that simply smote thee from blindest instinct? Madness.

00:48:26

To be enraged with a dumb thing,

00:48:29

Captain Ahab, seems blasphemy.

00:48:34

And Ahab says,

00:48:36

hark ye yet again the little

00:48:38

lower layer. All visible

00:48:41

objects, man, are but as pasteboard

00:48:44

masks.

00:48:45

But in each event, in the living act, the undoubted deed,

00:48:50

there some unknown but still reasoning thing

00:48:54

puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.

00:49:01

If man will strike, strike through the mask. How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me the white whale is that wall. enough. He tasks me, he heaps me. I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice

00:49:29

sinning it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate. And be the white whale agent, or be the

00:49:38

white whale principal, I will wreck that hate upon him. talk not to me of blasphemy

00:49:46

I would strike out the sun

00:49:49

if it insulted me

00:49:51

for could it do that

00:49:53

then could I do the other

00:49:55

since there is ever a sort of fair play

00:49:59

and that was the point I wanted to make

00:50:03

about two points

00:50:04

striking through the mask

00:50:06

to achieve reality

00:50:07

and that we can do it

00:50:10

because there is ever

00:50:12

a sort of fair play

00:50:14

the field is level

00:50:15

the cards are not stacked against us

00:50:18

if we play our hand right

00:50:21

we can take the whole game

00:50:24

they wouldn’t have it any other way

00:50:28

that’s right by the way I’m getting into that book by Camille Paglia called

00:50:35

sexual persona and it’s definitely the read of the season and I didn’t realize the publication date is listed as September

00:50:46

1991

00:50:47

so it’s hot

00:50:49

and

00:50:50

I read

00:50:54

the section on Moby Dick

00:50:56

which comes very close to the end

00:50:57

and if all of it’s as good

00:51:00

as that then

00:51:01

it’s really something

00:51:03

there hasn’t been that much fun

00:51:06

between the covers of one book since Marshall McLuhan

00:51:09

wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy.

00:51:12

So, you know, if you think of yourself as a feminist,

00:51:15

an art historian, a literary critic,

00:51:19

an egghead,

00:51:21

all these things, she’s just outrageous.

00:51:24

I think we have to get her here as fast as

00:51:27

possible because she’s really freewheeling and makes a lot of people mad, which is always

00:51:34

a good sign, I think. It’s called Sexual Persona by Camille Paglia maybe some of you saw about a month ago

00:51:46

in the Image magazine

00:51:48

which is the insert

00:51:49

in the Sunday there was an article about her

00:51:52

and they put her on the cover

00:51:53

and she’s very controversial

00:51:56

and says lots of provocative things

00:52:01

and the article stressed

00:52:04

her dumping on Derrida and lucan and foucault and that whole

00:52:10

crowd and saying you know all of them put together worth were not worth

00:52:15

one page of william burroughs basically and you know not that we care about this but in academia this is big news

00:52:26

because they’re in awe of all those people

00:52:28

I tried to read Derrida

00:52:30

I couldn’t make head nor tails of it

00:52:32

it just seemed to me like anti-thought

00:52:36

all of this is inspired by a number of papers

00:52:40

that have recently been called to my attention

00:52:42

if I can get this the way I want it.

00:52:47

And one of them is called, and I recommend it to your attention,

00:52:52

it appeared in the June 1989 issue of Zygon,

00:52:57

and it’s called The Omega Point as Eschaton,

00:53:01

Answers to Pannenberg’s Questions for Scientists.

00:53:04

And this is by Frank Tipler. as Eschaton, Answers to Pannenberg’s Questions for Scientists.

00:53:05

And this is, it’s by Frank Tipler.

00:53:10

And this is a very interesting article which tries to argue for the reality

00:53:17

of Christian eschatological hermeneutics in the light of information theory

00:53:25

and actually makes a number of points

00:53:29

that I thought I would be alone in making

00:53:34

for my entire life

00:53:36

and now I see that I’m actually

00:53:39

an infant in this department

00:53:44

and that these people have thought more deeply

00:53:48

and more widely and with a

00:53:51

more stunning commitment to radical

00:53:54

ideas than I could have even conceived

00:53:57

of. I mean, it’s humbling stuff.

00:54:00

I mean, they’re talking here about

00:54:02

computer strategies to resurrect the dead not some of the dead, all of the dead. And a number of ideas that I confess were completely alien and exciting to me.

00:54:27

have a correspondence between Frank Tipler and Hans Moravec, the author of this little thing I just read you, and a paper by Moravec that apparently has not yet been published called Time Travel and

00:54:34

Computing. And time travel is sort of what I wanted to talk about this evening from a certain peculiar perspective one of the ideas that

00:54:47

I’ve had to embed in my system

00:54:52

fairly uncomfortably

00:54:54

because I think of myself basically as a skeptic and a rationalist

00:54:59

is the idea that

00:55:02

the world is on the brink of a tremendous transformation,

00:55:10

a transformation on a scale such that it can really only be compared

00:55:16

to the events which created the universe in the first place.

00:55:21

This is what ties this series of notions to Christian eschatology,

00:55:29

because the unique preoccupation of Western religion, whether it be Judaism, Islam, or Christianity,

00:55:52

Christianity is this weird insistence on the end of the world, the collapse of reality as we know it. You don’t get this in Eastern thinking. As you all probably know, Hinduism is a theory of what is essentially

00:56:05

a steady state

00:56:07

there are cycles of outpouring

00:56:10

of phenomena

00:56:11

and then regressive cycles

00:56:13

when everything recondenses

00:56:15

but the universe is basically thought

00:56:18

to be eternal

00:56:19

and this then

00:56:20

poses no problem

00:56:24

for

00:56:24

rational expectation

00:56:29

because it’s very easy to imagine an eternal universe.

00:56:34

In Christianity, to preserve the rationality of expectation,

00:56:41

the eschatological event, I guess I should explain that term,

00:56:46

all these E-S-C-H words, eschaton, eschatological, so forth and so on,

00:56:53

mean we’re referencing the final things.

00:56:58

The branch of theology that is called eschatology is the study of the final things,

00:57:05

the end of the world.

00:57:07

And the way Christianity has handled it

00:57:10

to preserve rationality,

00:57:12

at least superficially,

00:57:14

is by setting it far, far in the future.

00:57:19

Then it doesn’t irritate

00:57:21

or demand a great deal of thought and consideration

00:57:26

my

00:57:28

notion

00:57:30

has

00:57:32

against my own

00:57:33

intellectual

00:57:35

gravity has pushed

00:57:38

me toward the conclusion

00:57:39

that it is near

00:57:41

which puts me in the same category

00:57:44

as all those people in cartoons carrying signs which say, you know, repent for the end is near.

00:57:54

And I, it’s the thing, I mean, I feel, I don’t know, shy.

00:57:59

I don’t know if I have the decency to feel shy, but I feel always reluctant to talk about it because

00:58:06

it is the most counterintuitive position in the system that I’ve tried to elaborate because

00:58:15

not only do I think it’s near, but I think that we can say when it is, and just so you aren’t kept hanging in suspense.

00:58:28

Tomorrow at 8.30.

00:58:30

Close, close.

00:58:34

December 22nd, 2012, at dawn, Eastern Standard Time,

00:58:40

the universe will roll up like one of those blinds, you know?

00:58:47

It will just roll up.

00:58:49

The stars will fall from heaven.

00:58:52

Reality as we know it will completely disappear

00:58:56

to be replaced by something else.

00:58:59

Now, why would anyone think such a thing?

00:59:03

Why would anyone think such a thing?

00:59:10

I mean, what set of rational premises could lead to such an irrational notion?

00:59:22

Well, I have this idea that there is a counter-entropic principle built into the universe that has not been described by science at all.

00:59:29

It may have been noticed, but never in its inclusive nature.

00:59:34

And I call this anti-entropic principle novelty.

00:59:51

Novelty has been increasing since the very first moments of the birth of the universe.

01:00:07

Whether you subscribe to the orthodox cosmology of a Big Bang, which I would like to sit on the fence about, it seems to me, I mean, you may think my notion is unlikely, but you should remind yourself that what science believes is that the universe sprang from nothing in a single

01:00:14

instant from an area whose diameter was less than that of the electron. It seems to me this is almost like the limiting case for the incredible. I mean, if you could believe that, what would you resist believing? I mean, if you believe that, you may be interested in a large bridge over the Hudson River that my family has had for generations and that we’re willing to sell you for a dollar.

01:00:47

But this is what science believes. This is what most scientists believe, although in all fairness,

01:00:54

in the last five years, this has gotten more shaky. Not everybody now believes in the Big Bang.

01:01:01

now believes in the Big Bang.

01:01:06

Well, what I would like to substitute for the Big Bang is what I call the Big Surprise.

01:01:11

And the Big Surprise doesn’t come at the beginning of the universe.

01:01:18

It comes at the end of the universe.

01:01:22

Which seems to me, you know, if you want to, the battle of the universe which seems to me you know if you want to

01:01:25

the battle of the singularities

01:01:28

orthodox science

01:01:29

says the entire universe sprang

01:01:32

from a tiny area in a

01:01:34

single instant

01:01:35

the notion that

01:01:37

I mean it sprang

01:01:40

from pure nothingness

01:01:41

it sprang from a point

01:01:44

like dimension that was so far as we can from pure nothingness. It sprang from a point-like dimension

01:01:46

that was, so far as we

01:01:48

can tell, utterly without

01:01:50

any quality whatsoever.

01:01:53

This seems

01:01:54

to me the least likely

01:01:55

environment in which to seek

01:01:57

a singularity.

01:01:59

How can we imagine,

01:02:02

unless we call upon

01:02:03

God Almighty,

01:02:05

a perturbation in a flawless nothingness

01:02:10

that would usher into, you know,

01:02:12

ten high forty-seven particles of many types

01:02:16

streaming outward, symmetry breaks, so forth and so on.

01:02:20

It seems to me that all cosmological myths

01:02:24

require a singularity of some sort,

01:02:28

but some singularities are more likely than others. And so in my notion, and I call it my

01:02:38

notion because so many people have told me I’m completely welcome to it in my notion

01:02:45

the place to

01:02:48

look for a singularity

01:02:49

is in the most complicated

01:02:52

circumstances

01:02:53

imaginable not a

01:02:55

unflawed emptiness

01:02:58

but a world

01:03:00

where you have atomic

01:03:02

chemistry

01:03:03

polymer chemistry, organic chemistry,

01:03:09

advanced animals and plants, languages, cultures, technologies,

01:03:18

information coding and regurgitation systems.

01:03:21

In other words, the more complexity that you can pile into a situation,

01:03:27

the more likely you’re going to get what is called an emergent property or a singularity

01:03:34

or the big surprise. And so as I look back at the history of the universe, over any scale you care to name, the last five years, the last 500 years, the last 500 million years, the last 5 billion years, there is a generality which seems to hold, which is complexity once come into existence

01:04:06

is retained

01:04:08

and folded

01:04:09

back into

01:04:11

the interstices of being

01:04:14

to produce yet more

01:04:15

complexity. This is

01:04:18

linked and at least

01:04:20

appears linked

01:04:21

to the cooling of the

01:04:24

universe. At the Big Bang to the cooling of the universe at the Big Bang the

01:04:27

temperature of the universe was

01:04:29

trillions of degrees and there was no

01:04:32

there wasn’t even atomic chemistry

01:04:38

there was just a plasma of electrons and

01:04:44

then after some time

01:04:46

measured in nanoseconds

01:04:49

the temperature of the universe fell

01:04:52

sufficiently so that stable

01:04:55

orbits could be established around

01:04:58

atomic nuclei and then you have the emergence

01:05:01

of

01:05:02

simple inorganic chemistry.

01:05:08

Well, then after a further fall in temperature and a much longer period of time,

01:05:13

you get the thermal disruption of chemical bonds falls below the limit

01:05:22

where you can get complex molecular structures

01:05:27

and then a whole new set of emergent properties

01:05:32

building on the levels which preceded until finally you get the birth of stars

01:05:38

and that is basically huge lumps of condensed hydrogen,

01:05:43

the simplest of all elements.

01:05:45

The hydrogen aggregates into stars in such amounts

01:05:50

that tremendous pressures are set up at the center of these hydrogen masses,

01:05:57

sufficient pressures for fusion to begin to take place.

01:06:04

And fusion cooks out iron

01:06:07

and other heavy elements including carbon

01:06:10

and carbon then becomes the key

01:06:13

to the next level of emergent complexity

01:06:16

and from there to us

01:06:18

it’s only a series of these declensions

01:06:22

but what’s interesting about these declensions into complexity is that

01:06:28

each phase happens more quickly than the phase that preceded it. And we actually are not peripheral to this process. We’re at the center of this mandala

01:06:47

by several different ways of thinking about it.

01:06:54

The most convincing, I suppose,

01:06:57

is that the density of connections

01:07:02

in the human cerebral cortex in the human cerebral cortex

01:07:05

makes the human cerebral cortex, without contest,

01:07:11

the most densely ramified material in the universe.

01:07:17

We carry within ourselves, then,

01:07:20

the most complex organization that has been laid on to the material universe.

01:07:31

And it seems to me this is a strong argument that we are at the cutting edge

01:07:37

of this process of emergent novelty.

01:07:42

Now, up until a million years or so ago, we were just one more animal wandering

01:07:48

around on this planet, albeit a sort of weird animal, bipedalism, binocular vision, complex

01:07:56

pack signaling. But on the other hand, wolves and dogs and ants have complex pack signaling.

01:08:04

and dogs and ants have complex pack signaling. But then we began to elaborate.

01:08:09

Notice that up to that point,

01:08:12

the most sophisticated information storage system

01:08:17

that novelty had evolved was genetic storage,

01:08:23

storage in long polymerized molecules

01:08:28

that templated other molecules to reproduce themselves.

01:08:33

Well, with the emergence of human language,

01:08:38

you get what is called epigenetic storage

01:08:43

and conveyance of information

01:08:45

in poetry, dance, ritual of all sorts,

01:08:53

artistic endeavors of all sorts.

01:08:55

This is the unique domain of human beings

01:08:58

and it represents a vast acceleration

01:09:02

in the rate at which this kind of informational business can be transduced.

01:09:09

Well, then so it flows forward and then about 12,000 years ago we really get going by building cities,

01:09:20

beginning to notch wood with our observations of lunar cycles and stuff like that

01:09:29

and then you know the rest of the story.

01:09:31

I mean it’s just a jump from, as I said the other night,

01:09:35

chipping flint off a core to hurling an instrument outside the solar system

01:09:40

so that it can look back at our planetary system.

01:09:46

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time. And we’ll pick up on

01:09:54

Terrence’s little journey from the Big Bang until now in our next podcast, which will be number 400

01:10:00

and will come just before the end of my ninth year of podcasting from here in the salon.

01:10:06

However, I prefer to think of it as the beginning of my 10th year.

01:10:11

And since I’m still kind of behind in my correspondence with our pledge donors,

01:10:15

I’m going to keep my remarks brief today so that I can get back to my email duties and let you

01:10:21

get on with your life, your truly wonderful life, particularly when you

01:10:27

sculpt it in your own unique way. So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:10:34

Be well, my friends.