412 - Permitting Smart People To Hope

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“What’s happening is that the computer is allowing us to go beyond the mathematical objects of Greek philosophy.”

“The unconscious of the species is actually being hard wired as an artifact. We’re pouring glass, and gold, and silicon down the microtubials of the racial imagination. And as it were, making a kind of casting of the state of the human imagination at the close of the millennium.”

“Technology is facilitating the drive toward community, at this incredibly accelerated rate..”

“The Earth is on the brink of the greatest change since the end of the mesozoic, but people don’t like to think about that because all they can think about is the possibility of personal extinction.”

“No one can run or program these vast networks except guys with ponytails.”

“My intuition was always that the psychedelic experience was a fractal anticipation of human history.”

Previous Episode §

411 - Our Involvement With Matter

Next Episode §

413 - Plant Medicines As Healing Agents

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Transcript §

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

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salon.

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And the man burns in a few hours. That’s

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how a burner, that is someone who has been to Burning Man, that’s how they keep track

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of time. Not by the day, week, or even year. It’s just how many days or right now, how

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many hours until the man burns. It’s just one repeating cycle of burning the man and

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then counting down until the next time the man burns.

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But sadly, a young woman from Wyoming who was one of the participants at Burning Man died after she fell under a large vehicle.

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And to put to rest the rumors that started spreading immediately after this tragic event, an accidental death at Burning Man is really quite rare.

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Yesterday I saw someone on Twitter claim that there was more than one accidental death every year.

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Not so.

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If I’m not mistaken, this is only the second accidental death in over ten years.

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Of course, there have been several heart attack deaths and at least one suicide I know of.

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and at least one suicide I know of.

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But the low number of such incidents is quite astounding when you realize that we’re talking about a city of over 60,000 people, I guess closer to 70,000 now.

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Name one other city with over 60,000 people that has such a low accidental death rate.

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And on top of that, what really surprises me the most is that

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hundreds or maybe even thousands of people don’t die there each year. I bet that got your attention if you were just waiting for me to quit talking.

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Of course, I’m kidding about the number of potential accidents. And the reason that I’m

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kidding is that, well, once you’ve been there and participated for yourself, you realize that

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Burning Man is probably the safest large event in the country, at least when

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you factor in the ratio of dangerous activities per capita. I mean, your first year there

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will just blow you away. It seems like every other guy is carrying a flamethrower, and

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many of the women are spinning huge pots of fire around like crazy. And then there are

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the art cars and the large works of art as well that are rigged out with all kinds of fire-breathing devices.

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It’s one of the world’s largest, most exciting, and safest displays of anarchy that you’ll find.

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So, while we do mourn the loss of one of our own, as we should,

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we would be wise to also keep in mind the fact that just because we’re having a good time,

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it doesn’t mean that we can ever let our guard down, at least when we’re not safely home in our nests, and particularly when

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at Burning Man. And I guess I should also note for our fellow slaughters who may hear this for the

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first time several years from now, this was also the year that the first day of the event saw the

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gates close due to, are you ready for this, rain.

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That’s right, there apparently was quite a rainstorm that came across the previously dry playa.

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And from what little I can gather from the brief messages I’ve been receiving from friends who are there right now,

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the mud became so sticky that everyone there had to just stay in place or risk getting seriously stuck in the mud. I don’t even want to think about that long line of traffic

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waiting on that little two-lane road that leads to the event.

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Traffic in normal times is backed up for miles and miles,

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as I know from frustrating experience.

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But after waiting in that line for hours

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and then being told that the gates wouldn’t be opening until the next day,

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well, I thank my lucky stars that I couldn’t afford to go to Burning Man this year.

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There are some definite advantages to being short on disposable income.

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And by the way, a big shout out to the video crew this year for streaming the event in HD.

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I almost feel like I’m there myself, but without the dust.

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Okay, I’ve got to stop talking here, or we’ll never get to another conversation with Terrence McKenna.

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And this one took place in June of 1994.

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And you’d better hang on to your seat, because this is a total Terrence McKenna geek-out.

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There’s so much concrescence of time

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and compression of historical development

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going on in the world right now

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that you can hardly

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pick up a journal in your favorite field

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without seeing that all paradigms

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are being challenged

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and this is happening regardless

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of the area

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you’re working in

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it may be the design of solid state

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circuitry, it may be

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quantum mechanics or cosmology

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or

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information theory

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they’re simultaneously now

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going on so many breakthroughs

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in the investigation of nature

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and mathematics

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that one of the themes

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of these discussions

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will be how unpredictable

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the consequences are

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of all this knowledge

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flowing together.

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No one is planning how these various technologies, insights and tools are going to fit together.

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And in a way it creates opportunity because there is so much chaos,

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because very small forces can exert major changes.

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I’m sure you all know the cliché about the butterfly

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whose wing beat starts the hurricane.

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I got a fax the day before I came down here

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saying that Interpol had put out an all-points bulletin

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for that very butterfly

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and was attempting to corner it

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and to halt the hurricane season.

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So they do take this stuff seriously.

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So they do take this stuff seriously.

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So just, I mean, I would, just to review some recent developments that may or may not be related to each other,

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but they are certainly related in the sense that they are all occurring right now.

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Some of you may have followed

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the detection of the top quark

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in a recent series of experiments

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at Schirn in Geneva.

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Well, this essentially ends

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an entire program

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of nuclear and particle physics

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that’s been carried on since the 20s.

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Now the quark model of matter

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is essentially complete

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in its more modest formulation.

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All the predicted particles have been detected.

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There is good agreement between theory

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and theoretical

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formulation

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and this represents

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the culmination

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of an effort to come to

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grips with matter that’s been

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underway since the Greeks

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and it essentially

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you know in 1994

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the general

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sense is that it’s now pretty well nailed down.

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This is astonishing and ends a whole intellectual effort

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that, as I say, began with the Greeks,

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gained momentum with Newton,

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gained incredible intellectual focus throughout the 20th century,

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and is now completed.

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It’s the equivalent of the sequencing of the human genome in biology,

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which is the next subject that I wanted to mention,

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which is this project, which was slated to be finished around 2020,

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is now probably going to be finished well before 2000

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because once they got into it,

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they discovered that it’s like riding a bicycle.

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The more you do it, the easier it is to do

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and very, very sophisticated computer-driven chemical simulation techniques

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have been invented

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and the human genome is

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just filling up like a crossword puzzle

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day by day, week by

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week as we

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speak

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could you explain what that is?

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oh well

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every organism

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in nature is specified

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by a unique sequence of chemical labels called nucleotides.

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And they are stored in the DNA.

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And this nucleotide message, in the case of human beings, is like up to 20 million

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units long

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and it’s basically the script

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for a human being

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now whether you get you or me

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depends on whether the switches

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are set in up and down positions

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but all human beings have the same

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gene sequence

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it’s called

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and so if you can

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sequence, if you can determine

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the human genome

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you can

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predict the occurrence of all kinds

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of hereditary diseases

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and you know

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have a kind of utopian

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approach to medicine

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where everyone throughout their entire

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life knows what they are at risk for

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and in contemplating any possible pairing for procreation you know just down to a gnat’s eyelash

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what the child’s genetic predisposition for various diseases and enzyme deficiencies and this sort of thing. So this is happening

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at a startling pace.

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Can I ask you something?

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Sure.

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So if you say that it’s predetermined,

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is that like,

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do we have anything to say about it?

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Can you prevent then?

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Oh, yeah.

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You can definitely prevent

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because you see if you can locate

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where on the genome the defective gene is…

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How do you spell genome?

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G-E-N-O-M-E.

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M-E, okay.

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If you can locate where in the genome

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the problem is for any genetic defect,

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then you can design a repair gene

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that can go in there

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and actually just scissor the bad piece out

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and put the good piece in.

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And this is not science fiction.

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This is being done in a laboratory now.

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And it will…

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It’s happening.

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The main point of what I’m talking about tonight

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is all these crazy, far-out Flash Gordon things

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are well advanced

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and yet, and the other point,

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highly ignorant of each other

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so that the cross-fertilization process

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that is really going to make all this

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come into a kind of new paradigmatic order hasn’t yet been revealed.

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Okay, other items. And some of these range toward the, oh wow, remember ultimately this is just a laundry list of things on my mind.

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The events that will occur in the vicinity of Jupiter

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in the third week of July of this year

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are extraordinarily interesting from all kinds of points of view.

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Are you all aware of what I’m talking about?

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No.

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Okay, in January an object was detected

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breaking up under the tidal forces of Jovian gravity,

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and this object was named Schumacher-Levy 9.

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And it is now in about 25 pieces

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that are 3 to five kilometers in diameter each

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and the Newtonian

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mechanics of this

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decaying system

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of orbits dictates

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that between the 19th

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and the 26th of July

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of this year

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these objects will smash into

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the planet Jupiter on the

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dark side, on the side turned away from the Earth at the moment of impact.

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But because, well, it’s a fascinating event for many reasons.

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First of all, it’s going to churn up an enormous amount of material

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from deep below the cloud tops of Jupiter and within six hours

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the parameter will turn into view

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of Earth-based telescopes.

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The other thing is

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these planet crushing events,

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these collisions of large objects in the solar system

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have a very interesting

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and not fully understood role in the formation of our own Earth

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and the way the history of life has developed on it.

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For example, and this is the next new thing I wanted to talk about, There has been a sudden coalescence of agreement in planetary geophysics over the past six months

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over a problem which may not have been bothering you,

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but bothered me,

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which was, where did the moon come from?

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And there have been been for hundreds of years

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different theories. I mean, clear back

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to Laplace. One theory

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Laplace noticed that

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galaxies and solar systems, everything

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condensed down out of dust

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and he put, this is

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in the 1770s, put forth

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the very plausible theory

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that the moon simply was

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an aggregation of material in the same way that the moon simply was an aggregation of material

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in the same way that the earth was an aggregation of material

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and it formed around the earth.

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Well, then there are problems with this, technical problems.

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It just doesn’t check out.

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So then another theory that had its vogue

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was that the earth was spinning very rapidly in its early history,

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and a blob actually had just separated off a hot blob of stuff

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which went off into space.

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Suddenly, new techniques for analyzing Apollo rocks

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and stuff brought back from the moon

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and all kinds of conferences and so forth

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they figured it out

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and the answer is extraordinary

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and none of the above

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the answer is that 4.1 billion years ago

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the earth was struck by an object

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the size of Mars

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and that in this catastrophe,

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enough ejecta went into orbit around the planet

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to condense as the moon.

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It’s remarkable that such a catastrophic and dramatic theory

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could get unanimous acceptance in the field of planetary science

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where all this stuff is most tackled over.

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What was the planet the size of Mars that hit the Earth?

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Was it Mars?

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No, it wasn’t Mars.

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It doesn’t exist.

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Its core has now sunk into the core of the Earth.

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It had an iron core.

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It is now part of the Earth.

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And the lightweight pyrocene ejecta

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formed the moon

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and if you’re interested in this

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this month’s Scientific American

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has it on the cover

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a photo of the event

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so

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just extraordinary

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revolution

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in theory in a very fundamental matter

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because some people claim that the moon was captured

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and that it was captured as recently as 65 million years ago

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and that the complexity of mammalian phylogeny

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is related to the presence of the moon

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and now all that’s out.

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The moon is very old.

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It emerged in this catastrophe

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basically at the moment of the solidification

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of the surface of the Earth.

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It was a climactic event

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that came at the end of a series of asteroid limb falls

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that basically built the planet.

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So then, other things…

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How does that tie into this thing with Jupiter, then?

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Is that just to give us an idea how that happened?

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Yeah, that we’ve never had an opportunity

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to observe anything like this.

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The event, the extinction event,

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which killed the dinosaurs

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and created the beginning of the Mesozoic era 65 million years ago

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was not as energetic an event as this thing that’s going to happen in July.

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It was very interesting to watch how the scientific press played this thing

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because like Schumacher Levinine was discovered on January 9th, and the Bulletin of Astrophysics on the 12th

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broke the news to everybody who wasn’t already following it

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on email or something,

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and they called it a once-in-a-hundred-million-year event,

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which, interesting that this once in a hundred million year event

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would occur at a moment when human beings have instruments on their way to Jupiter.

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So then, within a month, they had it down to once in a million year event.

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And now I think they’re saying nobody has any idea.

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This may be once every hundred years it happens.

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But it’s very interesting.

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The explosion will be so large,

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and since it can’t be directly seen by Earth-based telescopes,

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the energy release will be measured

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by measuring the flash of

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reflected light off the moons of Jupiter in other words they will they will rise

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in luminosity and then fall very suddenly as this explosion takes place

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on the backside so that’s that sort of in line with all of this

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and with a kind of an Esalen spin on it

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something very interesting

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that’s been going on

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if you’re a fan of the history of science

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and ideas

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is that in the last six months

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there’s been a very interesting effort

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to look again at David Bohm’s work.

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David Bohm is now dead, and I believe he taught here,

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or he visited here many times.

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In any case, his ideas are well known here.

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And he was sort of always our physicist,

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our meaning the slightly flakier end of things.

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And for that reason, he was not taken seriously,

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as seriously as he should have been in the halls of physics.

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Well, then I think he died about 18 months ago.

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Well, now, in Scientific American and in physical review letters,

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there have been long editorials saying

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that a problem which

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has haunted quantum

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physics throughout the 20th century

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could be solved

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by admitting

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that the Copenhagen school

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which is Niels Bohr

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and Heisenberg

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and all those untouchable and godlike

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figures to admit that they were actually and Heisenberg and all those untouchable and godlike figures

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to admit that they were actually wrong about something fundamental

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and that David Bohm’s quantum physics,

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which gives the same numerical results as theirs,

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is in fact a more elegant formulation.

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And what it is that is at issue here is something that

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everybody who has concerned themselves with quantum physics for 10 minutes has encountered

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which is the famous uncertainty conundrum every school child knows by now that you cannot determine the velocity and the absolute position of an electron

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at the same time because as you bring velocity into focus absolute position smears out as you

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bring absolute position into focus velocity smears out this is called the uncertainty principle. And probably more muddle-headed prose

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has been generated around this problem in physics

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in the last 70 years than in any other.

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Well, it turns out that if you go with David Bohm,

00:22:00 ► §

there is no uncertainty.

00:22:02 ► §

You can know the position and the speed,

00:22:06 ► §

the velocity with perfect certainty

00:22:10 ► §

at the same moment of time.

00:22:12 ► §

The problem is, and the reason why he was never taken seriously,

00:22:16 ► §

is that all these quantum formulations

00:22:18 ► §

carry with them certain metaphysical baggage

00:22:23 ► §

that is hard for other theorists to accept and

00:22:27 ► §

the impossible baggage that bohms theory

00:22:30 ► §

carried was what is called non-locality

00:22:35 ► §

non-locality this is the peculiar

00:22:40 ► §

feature of nature which is built into

00:22:43 ► §

bohms formulation of quantum physics, that any two particles ever associated with each other at some time in what we call the past maintain a magical and instantaneous connection with each other, no matter how far apart they are, for the rest of their existence.

00:23:06 ► §

And that this is not subject to the inverse square law

00:23:10 ► §

that slows the speed of light.

00:23:13 ► §

This is some kind of magical property which is instantaneous.

00:23:18 ► §

Well, this seemed so outlandish

00:23:21 ► §

that it was just thought to prove on the face of it

00:23:24 ► §

that Bohm was wrong because they

00:23:26 ► §

said well look at the consequences if you were to accept this you’d do this insane thing would be

00:23:31 ► §

built in there but now because of what’s called Bell’s theorem they are actually doing experiments

00:23:38 ► §

which demonstrate in the same way you demonstrate the charge of the electron or the speed of

00:23:45 ► §

light, they’re actually doing experiments which demonstrate that non-locality is real.

00:23:51 ► §

You associate two electrons, you pass them through a grid of some sort which separates

00:23:59 ► §

them, you capture one of them, determine its charge, flip it to its opposite charge,

00:24:07 ► §

and having captured the other one, you notice that when you flip the charge on one,

00:24:13 ► §

the charge on the other one automatically reverses instantaneously,

00:24:17 ► §

and that these things behave as though they never left each other’s presence.

00:24:22 ► §

Non-locality.

00:24:24 ► §

Well, this sets the stage for a staggering realization

00:24:29 ► §

because if the universe is non-local

00:24:34 ► §

in terms of information,

00:24:37 ► §

then all the raving over the past 30 years

00:24:40 ► §

about holographic universes and psychedelic plenums and the

00:24:46 ► §

monadic fractal

00:24:48 ► §

higher dimensional

00:24:49 ► §

Akashic Kuha

00:24:51 ► §

all that is

00:24:54 ► §

suddenly begins to gain

00:24:56 ► §

vindication

00:24:57 ► §

and

00:24:58 ► §

okay so that’s all

00:25:02 ► §

happening meanwhile

00:25:03 ► §

three doors down the hall

00:25:06 ► §

in the branch of things marked information theory,

00:25:11 ► §

they’re realizing that there is a way to analyze physics

00:25:17 ► §

so that what you get is that what we call matter

00:25:23 ► §

is simply information

00:25:26 ► §

in association with energy.

00:25:30 ► §

That information associated with energy

00:25:33 ► §

is matter.

00:25:35 ► §

So then you go back

00:25:36 ► §

to this other branch of understanding

00:25:39 ► §

and they’re saying

00:25:40 ► §

that information is non-local.

00:25:46 ► §

And then what that begins to sound like then

00:25:48 ► §

is that matter also is non-local in some sense.

00:25:53 ► §

And if you could download that into a technology,

00:25:56 ► §

you could walk from here to Zenebel Ganubi

00:25:59 ► §

without ever going through high vacuum.

00:26:02 ► §

And that would be big news.

00:26:05 ► §

Do you understand what I’m saying?

00:26:07 ► §

Good.

00:26:09 ► §

Yes, it would be reasonable to ask a question at this point.

00:26:15 ► §

So how does the principle of non-locality

00:26:18 ► §

come in to prove that you can determine

00:26:22 ► §

position and velocity at the same time?

00:26:26 ► §

Oh, it

00:26:26 ► §

doesn’t.

00:26:27 ► §

It’s simply

00:26:28 ► §

that as a

00:26:30 ► §

consequence of

00:26:32 ► §

accepting the

00:26:33 ► §

parts of his

00:26:34 ► §

theory which

00:26:35 ► §

allow you the

00:26:35 ► §

absolute

00:26:36 ► §

prediction of

00:26:37 ► §

velocity and

00:26:38 ► §

position, you

00:26:39 ► §

get as a

00:26:41 ► §

kind of, you

00:26:42 ► §

can’t not

00:26:43 ► §

order it,

00:26:44 ► §

side dish, this non-locality thing and when really

00:26:49 ► §

a way of talking about non-locality is to say and then this goes to a whole other branch of

00:26:57 ► §

knowledge that’s also just boiling at fever pitch is to say, then what we’re really saying is that the universe is fractal,

00:27:05 ► §

that it’s an enfolded set of values such that you can extract the whole story from any subset.

00:27:15 ► §

And again, all of this, complexity theory, chaos dynamics, fractal mathematics,

00:27:27 ► §

what’s happening is that the computer is allowing us to go beyond

00:27:32 ► §

the mathematical objects of Greek philosophy,

00:27:36 ► §

which were, you know, what did we have?

00:27:38 ► §

We had the cube, the perfect circle,

00:27:47 ► §

the dodecahedron, so forth and so on,

00:27:50 ► §

and then through the genius of Newton and Leibniz and that crowd, the infinite set of ellipses

00:27:53 ► §

that we could extract from the section cone

00:27:56 ► §

that allowed us to do calculus,

00:27:58 ► §

that allowed us to do modern science,

00:28:01 ► §

but that’s sort of where it ended,

00:28:03 ► §

with Newtonian mechanics and

00:28:05 ► §

then statistical mechanics

00:28:08 ► §

to handle the quantum,

00:28:10 ► §

but now, with chaos

00:28:12 ► §

dynamics and

00:28:13 ► §

fractal mathematics and

00:28:16 ► §

complexity theory,

00:28:18 ► §

we are actually

00:28:20 ► §

producing mathematical

00:28:22 ► §

models of nature

00:28:23 ► §

that are more like nature than anything

00:28:26 ► §

we’ve ever seen before

00:28:28 ► §

and it’s in a sense

00:28:30 ► §

the culmination of the

00:28:32 ► §

holy grail of a certain branch

00:28:34 ► §

of human thinking that

00:28:36 ► §

out of numbers

00:28:38 ► §

and their relationships

00:28:40 ► §

which are after all objects in the human

00:28:42 ► §

mind, whatever that is

00:28:44 ► §

comes this incredible close correspondence which are after all objects in the human mind, whatever that is,

00:28:49 ► §

comes this incredible close correspondence to nature,

00:28:59 ► §

which is the most remotely removed and ontologically independent thing we know vis-a-vis the human mind.

00:29:06 ► §

Okay, so that I was a little pan to David Baum and then moving through that

00:29:07 ► §

and going further

00:29:10 ► §

Ilya Prigozhin

00:29:12 ► §

who has also been to

00:29:14 ► §

Esalen and had an influence on

00:29:16 ► §

many people who taught at Esalen

00:29:18 ► §

and me among them

00:29:20 ► §

although I was just sort of like

00:29:22 ► §

sharpening his pencils at that stage

00:29:24 ► §

who has already established his them, although I was just sort of like sharpening his pencils at that stage,

00:29:28 ► §

who has already established his track record by winning the Nobel Prize for

00:29:30 ► §

Physics by destroying the second law of

00:29:33 ► §

thermodynamics, which was no small

00:29:36 ► §

accomplishment, believe me, because there

00:29:39 ► §

was no law of nature to emerge in the

00:29:42 ► §

19th century more tenaciously

00:29:46 ► §

believed in than the second

00:29:47 ► §

law of thermodynamics and

00:29:49 ► §

Prigogine just showed that

00:29:51 ► §

it was a generally true

00:29:53 ► §

statement of a rather complex

00:29:56 ► §

situation in which actually

00:29:58 ► §

sometimes it was bunk

00:29:59 ► §

and he secured that mathematically

00:30:02 ► §

that was 20 years ago

00:30:03 ► §

now Prigogine is coming forward with a theory that I modestly suggest

00:30:11 ► §

sounds somewhat like my notion about time,

00:30:18 ► §

that time is, first of all, not a construct of the human mind.

00:30:23 ► §

It is, in fact, a property of the universe,

00:30:28 ► §

like energy, like matter.

00:30:32 ► §

It’s a thang, is what we’re trying to say here.

00:30:37 ► §

It’s not an abstraction,

00:30:38 ► §

and this is not the first time science has had to make this leap.

00:30:42 ► §

I mean, the curved curved field the electromagnetic field

00:30:45 ► §

was at first thought to be

00:30:47 ► §

some kind of weird mathematical

00:30:49 ► §

contortion you had to go through

00:30:51 ► §

to understand electricity

00:30:53 ► §

but couldn’t possibly actually

00:30:55 ► §

have anything to do with what it was

00:30:57 ► §

and then it was realized

00:30:59 ► §

that it was actually

00:31:01 ► §

a point for point

00:31:03 ► §

description.

00:31:09 ► §

So Pregosian is beginning to say that time is a thing and that therefore it has an arrow

00:31:11 ► §

and that complexity is conserved as you approach the present,

00:31:16 ► §

which is what I’ve been saying year in and year out here for a while.

00:31:20 ► §

I didn’t call it complexity.

00:31:22 ► §

I called it novelty and used Whitehead’s vocabulary.

00:31:26 ► §

But there is, you know,

00:31:28 ► §

a very exciting

00:31:30 ► §

convergence

00:31:31 ► §

of intuitions here

00:31:34 ► §

that seem, you know, really to

00:31:36 ► §

hold the possibility of

00:31:37 ► §

a whole new way of thinking about

00:31:40 ► §

time

00:31:42 ► §

and determinism

00:31:43 ► §

and novelty

00:31:45 ► §

and the build-up of structure in time.

00:31:51 ► §

I understand that your theory of novelty

00:31:55 ► §

was that it was not conserved but increasing.

00:31:58 ► §

Well, what I mean by conserved is that

00:32:01 ► §

its general tendency is to never slip back. In other words, once some novelty is achieved, it’s tenaciously retained and it becomes instead the foundation for new novelty. time by building on pre-established levels of novelty so that for instance

00:32:25 ► §

molecular structure

00:32:27 ► §

very novel

00:32:30 ► §

at its inception

00:32:31 ► §

becomes ultimately the

00:32:33 ► §

precondition for biology

00:32:36 ► §

a later arriving

00:32:38 ► §

phase of novelty

00:32:39 ► §

and then culture builds on biology

00:32:42 ► §

and so forth like that

00:32:44 ► §

yeah so when you said that what was the other term not novelty but And then culture builds on biology and so forth like that.

00:32:45 ► §

Yeah? So when you said that, what was the other term, not novelty, but pre-goading?

00:32:51 ► §

Oh, complexity.

00:32:53 ► §

Complexity is maintained as we get closer to the present?

00:32:57 ► §

Yes, that complexity seems to be clustering near the present.

00:33:02 ► §

Meaning this present or any present?

00:33:04 ► §

No, this present.

00:33:06 ► §

In other words, what he’s saying,

00:33:08 ► §

part of his breakthrough is he’s saying

00:33:10 ► §

the arrow of time is real.

00:33:13 ► §

It is, the universe is from end to end

00:33:16 ► §

oriented in one direction.

00:33:19 ► §

It isn’t an artifact of human perception.

00:33:21 ► §

This is a break with ordinary physics,

00:33:25 ► §

which insists that all these transforms

00:33:28 ► §

can be run backward in time as well as forward.

00:33:31 ► §

He says no, and that’s what I’ve been saying.

00:33:34 ► §

My conception is that the cosmos

00:33:38 ► §

is what I call a novelty-conserving engine,

00:33:42 ► §

and that it, through sort of a one step

00:33:47 ► §

two steps forward one step back

00:33:49 ► §

process

00:33:50 ► §

marches ever deeper

00:33:53 ► §

into novelty and ever

00:33:55 ► §

faster that’s the other thing

00:33:57 ► §

that

00:33:59 ► §

interests me because I

00:34:01 ► §

am now

00:34:03 ► §

I have a very

00:34:06 ► §

palpable sense that time

00:34:08 ► §

is accelerating

00:34:09 ► §

and that the convergence of some of these

00:34:12 ► §

things we’ve been talking about

00:34:13 ► §

is going to eventually lead to

00:34:16 ► §

a discussion of what is

00:34:17 ► §

the nature of time and

00:34:19 ► §

experience that in fact

00:34:21 ► §

history does seem to be ending

00:34:23 ► §

this sort of vague and murky intuition of religious ontology

00:34:29 ► §

is now respectable in physics laboratories.

00:34:34 ► §

And the presence of human culture on the planet

00:34:41 ► §

at this incredibly advanced state of acceleration and novelty seems to indicate that, you know, we are making it impossible for ourselves to go anywhere but into another kind of cultural dimension.

00:35:01 ► §

on one level to one of the other things which I wanted to talk about,

00:35:03 ► §

which is, in a sense,

00:35:07 ► §

the illusion of stability in social space,

00:35:11 ► §

if there is one,

00:35:12 ► §

if you’re able to maintain the illusion

00:35:14 ► §

of stability in social space.

00:35:17 ► §

It’s because the exciting thing

00:35:21 ► §

that’s going on is invisible.

00:35:24 ► §

And what it is

00:35:26 ► §

is it’s the growth

00:35:28 ► §

of the net

00:35:29 ► §

it’s the rise of the

00:35:32 ► §

web which

00:35:34 ► §

hour by hour

00:35:36 ► §

day by day

00:35:38 ► §

is reaching around the planet

00:35:40 ► §

deeper and deeper and deeper

00:35:42 ► §

the number of people getting email

00:35:44 ► §

has doubled every six

00:35:46 ► §

months for the last five years it’s doubled every six months how if this goes on at the current rate

00:35:54 ► §

every man woman and child on the planet will have email before the year 2000 and of course there’s

00:36:00 ► §

nothing to see there’s nothing to touch i there’s nothing to touch. I mean, there’s some appliances involved, but they’re quiet and in the background.

00:36:09 ► §

And yet, what it is, is that the human neural net, the unconscious of the species, is actually being hardwired as an artifact.

00:36:26 ► §

We’re pouring glass and gold and silicon down the microtubules of the racial imagination

00:36:34 ► §

and, as it were, making a kind of casting of the state of the human imagination

00:36:41 ► §

at the close of the millennium.

00:36:44 ► §

of the human imagination at the close of the millennium.

00:36:49 ► §

And to what degree this imaging of ourselves in silicon will ever reach a limit is hard to tell.

00:36:54 ► §

I mean, we’ve begun with the past.

00:36:56 ► §

We’re archiving it, we’re virtualizing it,

00:37:00 ► §

we’re creating databases that allow us to stroll around in it but more and more time will

00:37:08 ► §

be consumed and eventually the only choice will be to allow it to flow over into the presence and

00:37:14 ► §

you know prosthesis is already practically a way of life what’s coming is is very hard to imagine.

00:37:26 ► §

And Prigogine, to loop one of these concerns back to another,

00:37:31 ► §

Prigogine got his start studying traffic theory on freeways.

00:37:37 ► §

Well, it’s now thought by the complexity people

00:37:41 ► §

that when you get somewhere above sixth to the ninth entities

00:37:47 ► §

operating in an environment of connectivity

00:37:50 ► §

that you get,

00:37:52 ► §

and now we switch philosophers and vocabularies,

00:37:54 ► §

what David Bohm called emergent properties

00:37:58 ► §

and what you and I would call anybody’s guess.

00:38:02 ► §

I mean, that’s what an emergent property is.

00:38:07 ► §

It means something utterly unexpected,

00:38:11 ► §

something completely unexpected.

00:38:14 ► §

For example, I mean, he used very simple examples.

00:38:17 ► §

For example, if you have five gold atoms,

00:38:21 ► §

you don’t have the color yellow.

00:38:24 ► §

You don’t get that until you have

00:38:26 ► §

hundreds of gold atoms that color is an emergent property it requires a large

00:38:33 ► §

number of gold atoms for the fact that gold is yellow to begin to be part of

00:38:38 ► §

the picture similarly wetness if you have a water molecule it is not wet in any sense that you can relate to wetness

00:38:48 ► §

is a property of thousands of water molecules it’s an emergent property so there’s obviously

00:38:55 ► §

nothing magical about this unless you happen to be conscious at one of these phase transitions and you actually see an emergent property

00:39:06 ► §

come out of a species.

00:39:09 ► §

And clearly what we are trying to do

00:39:11 ► §

is overcome our differences.

00:39:13 ► §

Our thing is a curious dichotomy

00:39:18 ► §

between our individuality

00:39:20 ► §

and our drive toward community.

00:39:22 ► §

And technology is facilitating

00:39:24 ► §

the drive toward community at And technology is facilitating the drive toward community

00:39:26 ► §

at this incredibly accelerated rate.

00:39:30 ► §

Traffic is accelerating.

00:39:33 ► §

And my enthusiasm for psychedelic states of mind,

00:39:39 ► §

I see simply as a kind of aboriginal precognitive anticipation

00:39:46 ► §

of this state of electronic data fusion

00:39:52 ► §

and information transparency that is being put in place.

00:40:00 ► §

Essentially what we’re doing is we’re realizing our cultural ideals,

00:40:07 ► §

whether we’re conscious of them or not.

00:40:19 ► §

And one of our cultural ideals is agape, Christian love, or transparent, telepathic sharing.

00:40:25 ► §

And so our technology becomes this that’s why we invented printing presses and clear windows and lingerie

00:40:28 ► §

and the computer and all of these things

00:40:31 ► §

facilitate

00:40:32 ► §

you think that everybody reading the Celestine Prophecy

00:40:36 ► §

what do you think about that?

00:40:40 ► §

I think that’s both right in line with what you just said

00:40:44 ► §

well you know

00:40:47 ► §

Henry said

00:40:49 ► §

never read a book

00:40:50 ► §

till it’s five years old

00:40:52 ► §

and I don’t always

00:40:56 ► §

follow his advice

00:40:56 ► §

but in the case

00:40:57 ► §

of the Celestine prophecy

00:40:59 ► §

I have

00:41:00 ► §

I’m kind of weird

00:41:01 ► §

I was very embarrassed

00:41:03 ► §

a week ago

00:41:04 ► §

or ten days ago I was in New York City and I

00:41:07 ► §

was with some friends of mine who were in a rock and roll band and they were on the Letterman show

00:41:12 ► §

so I went with them to the Letterman show for the taping of the show it was the spin doctors

00:41:17 ► §

and I had never seen the Letterman show so I kept saying to people is that Letterman you know the janitor would go

00:41:29 ► §

by and then because we were there an hour ahead of time so I’m not very au courant with these

00:41:35 ► §

cultural icons I wish the author of the Celestine prophecy he she them or, whoever it may be, good luck, a he.

00:41:50 ► §

But I do, if what I’ve been able to glean from the ether about the Celestine prophecy

00:41:52 ► §

is that it is a species of anticipatory visionary breakthrough, right?

00:42:05 ► §

Saying that the world is going to change

00:42:08 ► §

beyond our possibility of recognizing it.

00:42:12 ► §

I think this is absolutely true.

00:42:14 ► §

The details are where it gets tricky.

00:42:18 ► §

Part of my notion of how we should all behave

00:42:21 ► §

as we move toward this attractor

00:42:25 ► §

or this transcendental object that is the telos of the historical process

00:42:30 ► §

is to just try and spread calm and good vibes so that people,

00:42:37 ► §

you know, it’s like a roller coaster, the sign which says,

00:42:40 ► §

do not stand up, you know.

00:42:43 ► §

People should not just keep your mouth shut keep your hands on the

00:42:47 ► §

handlebars and you know you can yell your head off if you want but do not stand up please um

00:42:54 ► §

my just a word about this i mean to the immense boredom of half the people in the room who’ve

00:43:01 ► §

heard me say this before but this question about anticipations of the millenn in the room who’ve heard me say this before, but this question about

00:43:05 ► §

anticipations of the millennium, the way I think of it is that huge events have a kind of

00:43:15 ► §

backwash into the past. They are not cleanly divided from the time which precedes them,

00:43:22 ► §

cleanly divided from the time which precedes them

00:43:24 ► §

so that before they happen

00:43:27 ► §

you can almost

00:43:29 ► §

feel the

00:43:30 ► §

certitude of their arrival

00:43:32 ► §

and so

00:43:36 ► §

this thing that lies ahead

00:43:39 ► §

of us now not very far

00:43:41 ► §

in the historical continuum

00:43:42 ► §

is the grandmother of

00:43:44 ► §

all of this kind of

00:43:48 ► §

thing and social theories philosophers psychedelic trips visions had in the

00:43:55 ► §

desert all of these things will just organize themselves like iron filings

00:44:01 ► §

around the presence of this object ahead of us in time.

00:44:06 ► §

And so in a sense, all of history is an anticipation of the end of history.

00:44:13 ► §

And the closer you get to the end of history,

00:44:16 ► §

the clearer the anticipations become.

00:44:20 ► §

So, you know, when you’re 2,000 years from it, it’s something about how God and man will be fused in one body and a messiah will take a chosen people into a land of milk and honey.

00:44:36 ► §

And that’s the best anybody could do.

00:44:38 ► §

That’s the clearest image anybody could get of what the deal was. So then circa 1948, you’re up to, you know,

00:44:48 ► §

the Rigelians will come with enormous ships

00:44:51 ► §

and advanced medical techniques

00:44:54 ► §

and teach us how to clean up our earth

00:44:57 ► §

and love one another and grow food from the sea

00:45:00 ► §

and so forth and so on.

00:45:01 ► §

Turns out, no, that isn’t it either.

00:45:03 ► §

And as we get

00:45:05 ► §

closer, the amount

00:45:08 ► §

of prophetistic

00:45:10 ► §

speculation

00:45:13 ► §

is just going to grow exponentially

00:45:15 ► §

because all the

00:45:17 ► §

old systems of thought

00:45:19 ► §

are failing.

00:45:21 ► §

And all the old systems of thought are

00:45:23 ► §

capable of doing is denying the obvious, which is that the earth is on the old systems of thought are capable of doing is denying the obvious

00:45:26 ► §

which is that the earth is on the brink

00:45:29 ► §

of the greatest change

00:45:31 ► §

since the end of

00:45:33 ► §

the Mesozoic

00:45:35 ► §

you know

00:45:36 ► §

but people don’t like to think about that

00:45:40 ► §

because all they can think about

00:45:41 ► §

is the possibility of personal extinction

00:45:44 ► §

technology religion because all they can think about is the possibility of personal extinction,

00:45:50 ► §

technology, religion, psychedelic drugs,

00:45:55 ► §

archaeology that could at any moment spew something out of the ground that would completely scramble everybody’s notion of what really did go on.

00:46:00 ► §

And I’m not a face-on-Mars guy or some malarkey like that, let me make that

00:46:06 ► §

clear. But still, you have to be

00:46:08 ► §

open to the fact that something

00:46:09 ► §

might come along.

00:46:13 ► §

Well, what else do we

00:46:14 ► §

want to say about that? Let me see if I covered

00:46:16 ► §

my list.

00:46:19 ► §

I think we were

00:46:20 ► §

talking about the nets and the webs.

00:46:24 ► §

Yeah,

00:46:24 ► §

this collectivity that is coming

00:46:26 ► §

into being is exists is coming into

00:46:29 ► §

existence more rapidly than anyone can

00:46:33 ► §

chart or clock or understand you know I

00:46:38 ► §

have a protocol that goes on in the

00:46:42 ► §

middle of the night and searches

00:46:44 ► §

databases all over the world

00:46:47 ► §

for key words of interest to me.

00:46:51 ► §

And when I get up in the morning,

00:46:53 ► §

these files are just stacked on the screen,

00:46:58 ► §

ready to be gone through.

00:47:00 ► §

And, you know, it can be trivial,

00:47:03 ► §

but it could be, you know it can be trivial but it could be you know a heresy a greek orthodox heresy

00:47:08 ► §

of interest to fully a dozen people on the planet and you know if the information is out there

00:47:16 ► §

the computer will eventually winnow and winnow and winnow because it is so tireless and so deeply dedicated to my wishes.

00:47:28 ► §

I mean, what else does it have to do? It doesn’t, no.

00:47:31 ► §

What’s the word that you’re talking about?

00:47:34 ► §

Well, the word I was thinking of is Mandaian,

00:47:37 ► §

which is a religious cult that I’m interested in

00:47:40 ► §

that’s existed continuously for about 2800 years

00:47:46 ► §

Mandayan

00:47:48 ► §

and they now are down to a few

00:47:50 ► §

hundred people in the swamps of

00:47:51 ► §

Iran and Iraq

00:47:53 ► §

and I wonder

00:47:56 ► §

about the state of their

00:47:57 ► §

community, I wonder how they came through the

00:48:00 ► §

Gulf War, I wonder

00:48:01 ► §

if they were able to preserve

00:48:04 ► §

their very strict kosher laws and a bunch of

00:48:07 ► §

other things. I mean, you may wonder, why do I care about this? I have a lot on my menu.

00:48:15 ► §

Did you say kosher?

00:48:17 ► §

Well, they had, by kosher, I mean, they had rules as a religious community that would be almost impossible to follow in the 20th

00:48:25 ► §

century. For instance, one of their rules was that if your eye fell on a non-believer,

00:48:33 ► §

if you were a Mandaian and your eye fell on a non-believer, then you had to have six days

00:48:39 ► §

of purification. Well, since there are only a few hundred Mandaeans on this planet, it was tough

00:48:46 ► §

to not occasionally encounter a non-believer, you can imagine. So then huge amounts of community

00:48:54 ► §

time and energy were being taken up in these ritual abutions and cleansings to try and make it okay.

00:49:02 ► §

And I wonder how they fare under Saddam Hussein

00:49:05 ► §

so then you go on to the net and program

00:49:08 ► §

this word and you discover that

00:49:10 ► §

in Pennsylvania there’s a committee

00:49:12 ► §

of people who are

00:49:13 ► §

concerned about the Mandaian community

00:49:16 ► §

and then in Germany there’s some people

00:49:18 ► §

who are preserving Mandaian liturgy

00:49:20 ► §

and at the University of Heidelberg

00:49:22 ► §

there’s a guy who can read

00:49:24 ► §

the books and and it’s

00:49:26 ► §

just you know tim leary said a wonderful thing years and years ago he said find the others

00:49:34 ► §

find the others and the computer is the tool for finding the others. And it was never intended for folks like you and me.

00:49:45 ► §

It’s one of these things that fell off the military vehicle

00:49:50 ► §

as it rumbled by.

00:49:52 ► §

And, you know, we peasants pulled it out of the bushes

00:49:55 ► §

and discovered what you could do with this thing.

00:49:59 ► §

But you can find the others.

00:50:02 ► §

There are hundreds and hundreds of conferences going on on Usenet.

00:50:07 ► §

And if it’s a work of literature, if it’s a sexual preference,

00:50:13 ► §

if it’s a complex programming problem,

00:50:15 ► §

if it’s an issue of historical research or diet or anything else,

00:50:23 ► §

there are 50 or 60 people just waiting to talk to you about this.

00:50:30 ► §

So, you know, I sort of believe that the psychedelic revolution

00:50:38 ► §

is beginning to bear fruit,

00:50:41 ► §

and that we shouldn’t have thought of it as the 60s revolution we should have thought

00:50:46 ► §

of it as the 30 years war and you know victory is now within sight no one can run or program

00:50:57 ► §

these vast networks except guys with ponytails and the suits who are depending on all of this stuff

00:51:07 ► §

to hold the world together

00:51:08 ► §

are entirely beholden on, you know,

00:51:11 ► §

guys with one earring and ponytails and all that.

00:51:17 ► §

Everything that loathes and revolts them

00:51:20 ► §

is interposed between them and the technology

00:51:22 ► §

because printheads can’t hack it.

00:51:25 ► §

Literally, they can’t hack it.

00:51:28 ► §

And as Thomas Kuhn said

00:51:30 ► §

in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, you know,

00:51:33 ► §

the way you really make revolutions

00:51:36 ► §

is by waiting for the old guard to die off.

00:51:39 ► §

And they are dying off.

00:51:43 ► §

And then the synergy that comes from all of these fields melting together.

00:51:50 ► §

I mean, it is like my intuition was always that the psychedelic experience

00:51:56 ► §

was a fractal anticipation of human history.

00:52:02 ► §

You know, that it starts out the same way,

00:52:05 ► §

everything’s normal,

00:52:06 ► §

you’re just cooking your food around the fire,

00:52:09 ► §

and then it builds,

00:52:11 ► §

and then there’s structure,

00:52:13 ► §

and then dissolution of structure,

00:52:14 ► §

and then technical accretions,

00:52:17 ► §

and vast downloading of ideas,

00:52:20 ► §

and so forth and so on.

00:52:22 ► §

And it’s happening.

00:52:23 ► §

I mean, the unitary mind is being created.

00:52:26 ► §

It is, in fact, in existence.

00:52:28 ► §

The autonomic functions of the human superorganism

00:52:32 ► §

are already in place.

00:52:34 ► §

And what do I mean by the autonomic functions?

00:52:37 ► §

I mean the daily pricing of gold,

00:52:43 ► §

the computer transactions that characterize the banking system, this

00:52:48 ► §

is all going on all the time.

00:52:51 ► §

Machines are talking to machines, moving billions of dollars around, setting the values of currency

00:52:57 ► §

and precious metals and commodity.

00:53:00 ► §

I mean, most of this is on automatic. Human operators are only called in when unexpected fluctuations are picked up inside the system.

00:53:12 ► §

And yet it’s not clear, you know, what is being maximized.

00:53:16 ► §

The topmost level of control is only assumed to exist.

00:53:21 ► §

This is very exciting. We all assume that if you follow these trees of control

00:53:26 ► §

up and up, finally at the level of the IMF, the World Bank, the National Security Council,

00:53:34 ► §

someone is running it. But it’s actually not true. It isn’t a tree. It doesn’t lead to focal nexus of control. It’s a net.

00:53:45 ► §

It’s a web.

00:53:47 ► §

And, you know, when you realize this,

00:53:50 ► §

you realize that a very large amount of power is in your hands.

00:53:56 ► §

The people in this room,

00:53:58 ► §

even if a couple of homeless have crept in here this evening,

00:54:03 ► §

which is not likely,

00:54:04 ► §

the people in this room probably represent A couple of homeless have crept in here this evening, which is not likely.

00:54:07 ► §

The people in this room probably represent the upper 5% of the most powerful manipulators on the planet.

00:54:14 ► §

Because if you just have a telephone credit card,

00:54:17 ► §

you’re in the upper 10% of the powerful manipulators

00:54:21 ► §

of information on the planet.

00:54:24 ► §

Yeah, a calling card.

00:54:25 ► §

And if you own a power book and an email address,

00:54:28 ► §

you are a member of the 20 million elite

00:54:32 ► §

that is running the planet through the cybernet.

00:54:36 ► §

And talking to those people, changing their minds,

00:54:39 ► §

interacting with them is the way to steer it.

00:54:42 ► §

And they are not the suits.

00:54:44 ► §

They are not the guys chewing the black

00:54:47 ► §

cigars they’re a much more malleable and open crowd it it’s it’s hard to pass a capitalist

00:54:58 ► §

dominator through the keyhole of cyberspace you you know You have to be young and lean and mean.

00:55:07 ► §

Tattoos help.

00:55:09 ► §

That sort of thing.

00:55:12 ► §

Yeah.

00:55:13 ► §

Can you say something about

00:55:15 ► §

artists and, say, religious or spiritual sages

00:55:21 ► §

who might look at the technology that

00:55:26 ► §

you’ve been talking about and the science that you’ve been talking about and say, well,

00:55:28 ► §

we’ve known this all along. This is sort of old hat. And how you integrate that sort of

00:55:37 ► §

state of consciousness is much different from the scientific way of seeing things. And where

00:55:43 ► §

are these people?

00:55:44 ► §

Well, you mean like yogans

00:55:46 ► §

or something like that?

00:55:47 ► §

Yogans and

00:55:48 ► §

people that,

00:55:51 ► §

shamans that have no need

00:55:52 ► §

for these ideas.

00:55:55 ► §

Well, shamans, I think,

00:55:57 ► §

are a good case

00:55:58 ► §

in that apparently

00:55:59 ► §

they have no need

00:56:01 ► §

of these ideas.

00:56:02 ► §

And what I mean by that is

00:56:04 ► §

their societies are at dynamic equilibrium,

00:56:07 ► §

left alone, they seem to do fine, so forth and so on.

00:56:11 ► §

India, I would argue, shows no such ability to deal with its problems.

00:56:18 ► §

I mean, socio-politically, it’s a mess.

00:56:22 ► §

They should be, and in fact fact are very interested in this kind

00:56:26 ► §

of technology.

00:56:28 ► §

You see the difference between eastern and western

00:56:30 ► §

religion, I mean there are many differences

00:56:32 ► §

but an important one for what

00:56:34 ► §

we’re saying here this evening is

00:56:36 ► §

that eastern religion is

00:56:38 ► §

basically timeless.

00:56:41 ► §

When time is

00:56:42 ► §

invoked it’s either

00:56:44 ► §

in the Hindu system where it’s kilia chasms of eternity

00:56:48 ► §

and they’re just cycles upon cycles in you or it’s the time of taoism which is the time of a moment

00:56:55 ► §

and an insight the weird thing about western religion judaism christianity and is Islam and all the cults that they have spawned is the

00:57:06 ► §

insistence that God will enter history which is a crazy idea that God will

00:57:14 ► §

enter history at a given moment it will be redeemed and the hell of toiling for

00:57:21 ► §

our daily bread and the whole thing will somehow be made right by God’s direct manifestation

00:57:27 ► §

at a certain point.

00:57:30 ► §

And this idea finds just no support in the East.

00:57:36 ► §

So then when you ask about how these religious teachers

00:57:39 ► §

relate to this technical thing,

00:57:41 ► §

to me the more interesting relational approach to it is through somebody

00:57:49 ► §

like Teilhard de Chardin, who I take as my direct inspiration. I never read de Chardin

00:57:59 ► §

that carefully when he was hot, but since I’ve come out where I am about all this,

00:58:05 ► §

I’ve looked back at it.

00:58:07 ► §

And he and I are basically in 100% agreement

00:58:10 ► §

except I go further.

00:58:12 ► §

I say the date.

00:58:15 ► §

And he is crafty enough in his Jesuitical way

00:58:19 ► §

to stay away from anything so likely to expose you

00:58:23 ► §

to scorn and ridicule.

00:58:25 ► §

But what he’s saying in The Phenomenon of Man

00:58:28 ► §

is that we are now generating what he calls the noosphere.

00:58:36 ► §

And the noosphere is the atmosphere of technical accretions

00:58:43 ► §

and electronic information transfer

00:58:46 ► §

and electromagnetic fields, VHF, UHF, so forth and so on.

00:58:53 ► §

And that this is part of evolution.

00:58:56 ► §

His great insight was to see geology, biology, and sociology

00:59:02 ► §

as a continuous spectrum

00:59:06 ► §

and you know

00:59:09 ► §

well McLuhan talked a lot

00:59:12 ► §

about Teilhard de Chardin

00:59:14 ► §

with McLuhan you never knew

00:59:16 ► §

whether he was being entirely serious

00:59:19 ► §

or just going for the good line

00:59:21 ► §

but he maintained

00:59:23 ► §

he said that the age of the Holy Ghost, which was

00:59:28 ► §

to occur immediately before the end of the world, that the age of the Holy Ghost, we had Edison to

00:59:35 ► §

thank for it, and that the spread of electricity around the world was the direct descent of the

00:59:42 ► §

Holy Ghost, and that as cities turned to oceans of electric light,

00:59:47 ► §

he saw it as an epiphany of the third person of the Trinity.

00:59:51 ► §

This is an argument for keeping Catholics

00:59:53 ► §

far from the machinery of power.

00:59:56 ► §

They’re clearly screwballs of some sort.

01:00:01 ► §

But it seems to me that if consciousness,

01:00:06 ► §

if you make a religion out of consciousness,

01:00:09 ► §

which unconsciously I think we in California have done,

01:00:14 ► §

that this is what the new age is about,

01:00:16 ► §

we worship mind, we worship mind,

01:00:20 ► §

well, if you make consciousness your religion,

01:00:47 ► §

Well, if you make consciousness your religion, then clearly the body of consciousness is the technical accretion, the we’re still involved in the alchemical concerns of the 16th century

01:00:52 ► §

that consciousness achieves its fullest perfection

01:00:55 ► §

through the fusion with matter

01:00:58 ► §

you know, that the union of spirit and matter

01:01:02 ► §

which in materialist scientific terms is crazy talk, doesn’t happen.

01:01:09 ► §

But in the terms of the magical pre-Cartesian attitudes toward matter,

01:01:16 ► §

this is what they were going for.

01:01:17 ► §

And in a sense, you know, Mercilio said this.

01:01:21 ► §

He said it’s ironic that the 20th century,

01:01:25 ► §

with its scorn for the magical notions of the 16th century,

01:01:29 ► §

has achieved the full program that those notions set forth.

01:01:34 ► §

In other words, changing of lead to gold, we do this.

01:01:38 ► §

It costs a lot of money, but we can do it in our reactors,

01:01:43 ► §

our cyclotrons, We change lead to gold. We sequence the genome.

01:01:49 ► §

The secrets of life and longevity are unfolded before us. And then this final thing in the

01:01:57 ► §

computer. I mean, the computer is the union of spirit and matter. And, you know,

01:02:05 ► §

five or six years ago

01:02:06 ► §

you used to hear a lot of talk

01:02:08 ► §

about how computers

01:02:09 ► §

could never do

01:02:11 ► §

all kinds of things

01:02:12 ► §

and they were simply

01:02:13 ► §

adding machines

01:02:14 ► §

and this and that.

01:02:16 ► §

Well, that’s a kind of computer,

01:02:18 ► §

but those voices have grown

01:02:20 ► §

strangely muted

01:02:21 ► §

as massive parallel processing

01:02:24 ► §

and neural nets and stuff like this.

01:02:29 ► §

So I don’t know where all this rests.

01:02:33 ► §

You know, James Joyce said,

01:02:34 ► §

man will be dirigible,

01:02:37 ► §

which is like the flying saucer faith.

01:02:40 ► §

I would like to think that the philosopher’s stone

01:02:44 ► §

is a suitable goal for human evolution, that we are actually downloading ourselves into a solid state realm where all that moves is ideas in a kind of electronic collectivity of mind and then the earth

01:03:06 ► §

is left to itself but how this is to be accomplished I’m not sure but on the

01:03:13 ► §

other hand it’s not up to me I mean if you read people like Hans Moravec his

01:03:17 ► §

book what’s it called mind children the future of machine and human intelligence I mean there are ideas in

01:03:26 ► §

there so bizarre and far out and yet you know being discussed by someone with a

01:03:32 ► §

tenured position at Carnegie Mellon University that all that really holds us

01:03:39 ► §

back as these boundaries dissolve is our imagination. The difference between the psychedelic experience

01:03:45 ► §

and history is that history is real. And at the end of it, you’re going to be able to

01:03:53 ► §

stay there, wherever there is, if you want, and do those things. And I think it’s coming

01:04:00 ► §

very, very quickly. Even the wildest things that we’ve talked about here

01:04:05 ► §

to save certain theoretical constructs

01:04:08 ► §

such as time machines

01:04:09 ► §

are now being talked about

01:04:12 ► §

in the popular scientific press.

01:04:14 ► §

There was an article about time travel

01:04:16 ► §

three issues ago

01:04:17 ► §

in Scientific American.

01:04:27 ► §

So does anybody want to say anything?

01:04:28 ► §

yeah do you see a distinction between

01:04:29 ► §

understanding slash knowledge

01:04:32 ► §

and consciousness

01:04:33 ► §

or do you see those as one and the same thing

01:04:36 ► §

well this is a hot

01:04:38 ► §

and complex

01:04:39 ► §

thing that’s being debated right now

01:04:42 ► §

the materialists who hold

01:04:44 ► §

the high ground

01:04:45 ► §

in neuromolecular physiology,

01:04:49 ► §

what they like to say,

01:04:51 ► §

they’re very happy with this formulation,

01:04:53 ► §

they like to say that consciousness

01:04:54 ► §

is short-term memory plus attention.

01:04:59 ► §

This is the new buzzword.

01:05:03 ► §

Short-term memory plus attention.

01:05:06 ► §

Actually, Henry James, or William James,

01:05:08 ► §

said this first,

01:05:10 ► §

but it’s just been brought forward.

01:05:12 ► §

And if you think about it,

01:05:13 ► §

that’s a pretty good working model.

01:05:18 ► §

If you say that consciousness

01:05:20 ► §

is short-term memory plus attention,

01:05:22 ► §

then it’s probably a characteristic of most animals.

01:05:28 ► §

And so then you get a seamless web.

01:05:32 ► §

Where it gets complicated is that what we seem to be able to do

01:05:36 ► §

is build very, very flexible models of future courses of action.

01:05:44 ► §

And this may be a relationship to long-term memory. The relationship

01:05:49 ► §

of higher animals to long-term memory is not clear. In other words, a mountain lion hunting,

01:05:58 ► §

does she retain a memory of an incident with a important learning embedded in it months and months after it occurs

01:06:10 ► §

and in what way does she retain it does she retain it as a reflex or does she actually as we do recall

01:06:18 ► §

and when we say recall we mean picture a scene in our minds from the past and run it forward.

01:06:28 ► §

How, again, well, this leads to something that I wanted to say,

01:06:34 ► §

that memory, if you wanted to point to an incredible and significant failure,

01:06:42 ► §

I’ve been talking about all these far-out things that have been going on.

01:06:46 ► §

The greatest disappointment in science,

01:06:50 ► §

I would say, in the last 35 years

01:06:52 ► §

is the utter failure of science

01:06:54 ► §

to make any progress on the question of memory.

01:06:59 ► §

I mean, I’ve been following it for almost,

01:07:01 ► §

well, not 35 years, but 30 years,

01:07:08 ► §

and they’re nowhere. They have not gotten beyond the kind of stuff that Karl Prebram was talking about in Languages of the Brain,

01:07:14 ► §

which was published in 1973, for crying out loud. Walter Freeman’s work, creative, brilliant

01:07:23 ► §

work, no conclusion.

01:07:28 ► §

The hardcore materialists have gotten nowhere. And this is a central thing for understanding consciousness,

01:07:34 ► §

because where are the memories?

01:07:37 ► §

You know, Carl Lashley was the first person to ask this question,

01:07:41 ► §

and it’s never been satisfactorily answered.

01:07:42 ► §

person to ask this question and it’s never been satisfactorily answered. And

01:07:45 ► §

you know, now there are new theories

01:07:47 ► §

about interference patterns in the brain

01:07:51 ► §

and this sort of thing. But you know,

01:07:53 ► §

when the telephone was new,

01:07:56 ► §

neurophysiologists like Ramon de Cajal

01:07:58 ► §

said the brain was like an international

01:08:01 ► §

telephone network. Now suddenly we have a hot new metaphor

01:08:06 ► §

and we apply it to the darkest area of our ignorance,

01:08:10 ► §

which is the brain.

01:08:13 ► §

And then you have the hardcore mystics

01:08:17 ► §

who say the effort to understand consciousness

01:08:20 ► §

is intrinsically doomed to failure,

01:08:23 ► §

that brain cannot elucidate brain and there’s something to be said

01:08:28 ► §

for that you know girdles

01:08:30 ► §

incommensurability theorem and that

01:08:33 ► §

whole thing I don’t exactly understand

01:08:37 ► §

what it means to say explain

01:08:40 ► §

consciousness understand it I mean what

01:08:43 ► §

would that mean does that mean we would

01:08:44 ► §

start with a with a synaptic event and end with an experience and be able to

01:08:51 ► §

trace the transition from synaptic event to experience all the way through I like

01:08:58 ► §

and you know it’s a free enough field now you can say anything you want. I like the idea that the brain is an antenna, not a storage device.

01:09:11 ► §

And that seeking memory in the brain is like tearing transistor radios apart looking for little men.

01:09:18 ► §

There aren’t little men in there.

01:09:21 ► §

So what you have instead is a quantum mechanical antenna,

01:09:26 ► §

that would make sense because I really believe nature is

01:09:30 ► §

a kind of seamless self-regulating oscillator of some sort.

01:09:37 ► §

And so it’s much more important to be in tune

01:09:39 ► §

with the larger sets of what’s going on

01:09:44 ► §

than to be isolated from that

01:09:47 ► §

and somehow inwardly cognizant

01:09:50 ► §

of what philosophers call

01:09:52 ► §

an interior dimension of transcendence.

01:09:55 ► §

I don’t believe that.

01:09:56 ► §

I think that we are the most

01:10:00 ► §

existentially isolated of all animal species

01:10:03 ► §

as a consequence of language.

01:10:06 ► §

And that part of our difficulty

01:10:08 ► §

in correctly picturing the mind and its place in nature

01:10:14 ► §

is the fact that we assume our uniqueness

01:10:20 ► §

and our isolation and the strength of the ego boundary.

01:10:25 ► §

But if you saw the brain, that’s why, you know,

01:10:28 ► §

my idea of the regulation of culture through the psychedelic experience

01:10:33 ► §

is not that there is something magical about the psychedelic experience

01:10:38 ► §

in and of itself, but that what it is

01:10:41 ► §

is an attunement to natural harmonics on many levels

01:10:47 ► §

that we could call, I do call it, the Gaian mind.

01:10:53 ► §

It’s a higher intentionality, but it’s not mystical mumbo-jumbo, it’s biology.

01:10:59 ► §

That there’s level upon level of pheromones, oscillations, chemical oscillators,

01:11:08 ► §

all kinds of things that regulate biology

01:11:11 ► §

besides the gross activation of enzyme systems

01:11:16 ► §

inside the wetware of an organism.

01:11:19 ► §

When you’re in a jungle like the Amazon,

01:11:22 ► §

you see that this is seamless, this is seamless. This is one

01:11:26 ► §

thing. It’s only my style of knowing that tells me this is a palm tree, this is a crocodile,

01:11:34 ► §

this is a butterfly. But the way it’s all working is it’s just genes and gene exchange and

01:11:40 ► §

life and death and procreation and symbiosis and so forth and so on.

01:11:47 ► §

I was thinking of idiot savants too,

01:11:53 ► §

how they, with their minds in a antenna,

01:11:56 ► §

tapping into this incredible knowledge

01:11:57 ► §

that there’s no way they could ever learn.

01:12:00 ► §

Yes, well, I count myself among their number.

01:12:07 ► §

Without doubt.

01:12:13 ► §

No, that’s the only way, I mean, that is how I explain my career,

01:12:19 ► §

because it has, you know, fundamentally a mathematical basis that’s very solid and beyond reproach by all but the most stalwart.

01:12:26 ► §

And yet, clearly, I’m some kind of

01:12:29 ► §

cannabis-smoking lunatic.

01:12:31 ► §

So how did that happen?

01:12:33 ► §

Well, it’s the principle of the idiot savant, I think.

01:12:38 ► §

And that nature is knowable.

01:12:40 ► §

If you’re God’s fool,

01:12:43 ► §

the secret will be given over to you I

01:12:46 ► §

mean it’s everywhere it’s in every drop of water every everything has it in it

01:12:53 ► §

that was that’s that was the alchemical faith and it’s the fractal faith that

01:12:58 ► §

wet as well the antenna thing is I understand it in terms of picking

01:13:07 ► §

up certain ideas or whatever, but when you talk about receiving specific memories that

01:13:13 ► §

you as a single entity have experienced, so you as an entity have experienced this thing

01:13:19 ► §

and now it’s just floating out there in whatever.

01:13:22 ► §

You mean, does it actually call you up and say,

01:13:25 ► §

hey, you, is it like that?

01:13:27 ► §

What is it that produces that once?

01:13:30 ► §

I mean, I can imagine receiving certain things

01:13:34 ► §

that are cultural or, you know, diet or whatever,

01:13:37 ► §

but when you receive, you’re talking about

01:13:39 ► §

your own personal memory of, you know,

01:13:41 ► §

stubbing your toe eight years ago.

01:13:44 ► §

You know, why is that floating around?

01:13:45 ► §

Oh, I see what you’re saying. Well, this is the great problem for all theories of memory.

01:13:50 ► §

We know that if you live to be 70 years old, that every molecule in your body will be exchanged changed approximately ten times. Well, then how is it that a 70-year-old woman

01:14:07 ► §

can remember what it was like to be taken in the arms of her grandmother

01:14:13 ► §

and the smell of the perfume that the old lady wore?

01:14:18 ► §

I mean, that is just an absolute mystery.

01:14:23 ► §

And if you’re a hardcore materialist,

01:14:26 ► §

and God knows they’re around somewhere,

01:14:29 ► §

probably not here,

01:14:30 ► §

but if you’re a hardcore materialist,

01:14:33 ► §

then you say, well, something must persist.

01:14:37 ► §

And if we could figure out the one thing that persists,

01:14:39 ► §

then we’d have it nailed.

01:14:41 ► §

Well, it turns out there is something which persists.

01:14:41 ► §

then we’d have it nailed.

01:14:44 ► §

Well, it turns out there is something which persists.

01:14:51 ► §

The neurons do not cycle over.

01:14:54 ► §

You are born with a certain number of neurons and you die with a few less,

01:14:57 ► §

depending on your drug-taking history,

01:15:00 ► §

and they are never replaced and they are never cycled out.

01:15:05 ► §

Well, we… But then the materialists break down

01:15:09 ► §

because this magical substance

01:15:12 ► §

which you would think would help them solve

01:15:14 ► §

their memory problems,

01:15:16 ► §

the theories necessary to turn it into

01:15:19 ► §

the storage side of memory

01:15:20 ► §

are too fantastic for them to swallow.

01:15:23 ► §

You would have to go to something like the invisible landscape, plug, plug,

01:15:29 ► §

to find a theory radical enough to account for that,

01:15:33 ► §

because you would have to hypothesize molecular storage

01:15:41 ► §

almost at the speed of a tape recorder,

01:15:47 ► §

of theoretically an entire lifetime.

01:15:51 ► §

So 70, let’s make it 35 years,

01:15:55 ► §

because presumably you don’t retain your dreams very useful.

01:15:58 ► §

So let’s say 30 years of continuous tape recording being downloaded into something under 8 angstroms in diameter

01:16:05 ► §

with no degradation of the data stream and so forth and so on.

01:16:12 ► §

I mean, it becomes insupportable and fantastic in their minds,

01:16:17 ► §

but perhaps not.

01:16:18 ► §

I mean, why is…

01:16:21 ► §

I mean, nature has a peculiar way of using redundancy.

01:16:28 ► §

Like once nature finds a way to do something,

01:16:31 ► §

she will tend to use that technique over and over again in different applications.

01:16:36 ► §

We see that the problem of storage of information and retrieval of information and

01:16:45 ► §

non-degradation

01:16:48 ► §

of that information

01:16:49 ► §

has all been solved in the

01:16:51 ► §

functioning of DNA.

01:16:55 ► §

But

01:16:55 ► §

the information that is

01:16:57 ► §

stored in DNA, if you talk

01:16:59 ► §

to an information theorist, they will

01:17:01 ► §

say, well, it’s not like

01:17:03 ► §

memory, it’s not like people’s faces or their addresses say, well, it’s not like memory. It’s not like people’s

01:17:05 ► §

faces or their addresses and telephone numbers. It’s just protein synthesis. It’s structures

01:17:12 ► §

for protein synthesis. And you mustn’t be so naive as to confuse this with real information

01:17:19 ► §

and pat on the head, so forth and so on. But here we have the DNA,

01:17:26 ► §

the central molecular machinery of life,

01:17:29 ► §

and for reasons known to nobody,

01:17:33 ► §

vast sections of it are what are called silent DNA.

01:17:38 ► §

What does that mean?

01:17:39 ► §

It means those parts of the DNA don’t code for proteins.

01:17:44 ► §

Well, but maybe they code for something else.

01:17:48 ► §

Maybe they code for memory. And maybe the so-called random or trash arrangement of nucleotides

01:17:55 ► §

in those sections of the DNA are, in fact, our memory. I mean, memory is very mysterious, and the mechanism which explains it may involve principles at the edge of or beyond the grasp of current science.

01:18:11 ► §

I mean, think of it. I have memories going back to eight months, and many people report memories under three years.

01:18:30 ► §

three years. And often these are movies, you know. The most highly degradable and data-dense form of image storage there is. I mean, that’s why it’s so maddening to store images, you

01:18:36 ► §

know, videotape on computers today, because it’s so memory-intensive, as they say in the biz. And yet this seems to be how we store our memories.

01:18:50 ► §

Oh, let’s see what else needs to be said.

01:18:54 ► §

Well, again, this is simply a laundry list of things,

01:19:00 ► §

cutting-edge concerns and ideas

01:19:03 ► §

in the realm of what I’ve left out,

01:19:06 ► §

and I’ll mention it and then maybe we can knock off,

01:19:09 ► §

are pop political ideas.

01:19:13 ► §

I’ve talked to you guys before

01:19:16 ► §

about the idea of one woman, one child.

01:19:20 ► §

I’ve slightly modified it recently

01:19:23 ► §

or made an addendum to it,

01:19:26 ► §

which is, I think it would be very interesting if 75,

01:19:33 ► §

if every woman had one child.

01:19:35 ► §

We’ve talked about that and the social consequences of that.

01:19:38 ► §

But how interesting it would be then if 75% of those children were female,

01:19:50 ► §

and that the feminization of society, I think,

01:19:53 ► §

should not proceed through the feminization of men. It should proceed by dialing down

01:19:58 ► §

the overall number of men in the society.

01:20:04 ► §

And I think probably the 50-50 sexual ratio that is actually an

01:20:09 ► §

artificial ratio maintained by crazed monogamites and their dominator stooges not to judge it of And that usually in large mammalian social animal groups, males are more at a premium.

01:20:32 ► §

And so that’s something I’ve to urge you all to

01:20:45 ► §

consider the zippies and their crusade

01:20:49 ► §

to save the soul of America which you

01:20:52 ► §

may not have heard of well that’s how it

01:20:54 ► §

is with crusades the zippies are a bunch

01:21:00 ► §

of English bohemians who are trying to

01:21:03 ► §

launch a third

01:21:05 ► §

British

01:21:06 ► §

cultural

01:21:06 ► §

wave

01:21:07 ► §

following

01:21:07 ► §

in the

01:21:08 ► §

model of

01:21:09 ► §

the Beatles

01:21:09 ► §

first and

01:21:10 ► §

Malcolm

01:21:11 ► §

McLaren

01:21:11 ► §

and the

01:21:12 ► §

Sex Pistols

01:21:13 ► §

second

01:21:13 ► §

and now

01:21:14 ► §

come the

01:21:15 ► §

Zippies

01:21:15 ► §

and they

01:21:17 ► §

exemplify

01:21:18 ► §

a certain

01:21:19 ► §

kind of

01:21:19 ► §

syncopated

01:21:20 ► §

house

01:21:21 ► §

trance

01:21:22 ► §

dance

01:21:23 ► §

techno

01:21:24 ► §

music and what I like about house, trance, dance, techno, music.

01:21:26 ► §

And what I like about them is that they operate

01:21:31 ► §

under the banner of what they call pro-noia.

01:21:34 ► §

And pro-noia is the creeping idea

01:21:38 ► §

that people are plotting behind your back to help you.

01:21:43 ► §

And I see pro-noia

01:21:46 ► §

as part of the phenomenon

01:21:48 ► §

of boundary dissolution.

01:21:51 ► §

You know, things are going to get

01:21:52 ► §

better and better because everyone…

01:21:55 ► §

And what a zippy is

01:21:56 ► §

is basically a freak

01:21:58 ► §

who has their shit together.

01:22:01 ► §

You know, zippies are freaks,

01:22:04 ► §

but they don’t have large amounts of garbage in their

01:22:08 ► §

apartments freaks who recycle that’s a that’s your typical zippy and so they’ll be making

01:22:17 ► §

their way across country and if you get a chance to attend any of their raves you should do it raves are very good for the soul and there’s a lot of youth

01:22:29 ► §

bashing going on in this country and it’s very weird and directed from large glass and aluminum

01:22:41 ► §

boxes along Madison Avenue in Manhattan.

01:22:49 ► §

You do not, you know, there’s nothing wrong with people under 25.

01:22:52 ► §

They’re fine, thank you.

01:22:57 ► §

It’s the culture that they’re inheriting that is so toxic and weird that they don’t know what to do with it.

01:22:59 ► §

Somehow the response of that culture is to stigmatize them

01:23:04 ► §

and lay down all kinds of horseshit trips about

01:23:07 ► §

generation x and this and that and the other thing that i really think the zippies are the real

01:23:12 ► §

youth culture and it’s psychedelic and it’s experience-based that’s the other thing something

01:23:20 ► §

we’ve preached here over and over again, that the primacy of direct

01:23:25 ► §

experience is what life is about. Not what Time magazine is telling you, but, you know, how you

01:23:32 ► §

feel in your body right here, right now. And, you know, the drugs you take and the sexual acts you

01:23:39 ► §

participate in and the things you do with your mind and body in real time and everything else is highly

01:23:50 ► §

abstract and not to be trusted, I think. In New York, I gave a talk for the zippies trying

01:23:59 ► §

to formulate what it is and it’s mostly what it isn’t you know it’s about not believing not consuming

01:24:08 ► §

not following uh it’s about taking taking back direct experience if we could feel

01:24:18 ► §

our circumstance if we could feel what we’re doing to the earth and each other we wouldn’t do it it’s that simple

01:24:27 ► §

because it’s too horrible but you know you can anesthetize yourself with ideology with wealth

01:24:34 ► §

with distance with religious obsession so forth and so on and And then, you know, you can’t tell shit from Shinola.

01:24:47 ► §

But pain is pain, agony is agony.

01:24:50 ► §

There’s plenty of it out there.

01:24:54 ► §

So I think the precondition for any kind of response to that,

01:24:59 ► §

any kind of like political or reforming response to it, is to feel.

01:25:01 ► §

And that means taking back your own social space

01:25:04 ► §

from the machinery of media and

01:25:07 ► §

domination and value manipulation and so forth and so on.

01:25:13 ► §

So I live life with an immense sense of intellectual excitement and hope.

01:25:19 ► §

That’s the thing. I think there are a whole bunch of cards on the table that permit intelligent people

01:25:29 ► §

to hope. Intelligence and cynicism, which have gone hand in hand throughout the 20th century,

01:25:36 ► §

are no longer good company with each other. It’s inappropriate. Cynicism is now inappropriate. It’s déclassé.

01:25:46 ► §

It’s not chic, my dears.

01:25:48 ► §

Something else is on the horizon.

01:25:51 ► §

And so permitting smart people to hope, that is the goal.

01:25:59 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:26:01 ► §

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:26:07 ► §

And what a wonderful goal that is, permitting smart people to hope. I’ve got a dozen ideas

01:26:13 ► §

about how to expand on that phrase, but for now I’m going to let you ruminate about that on your

01:26:18 ► §

own. Permitting smart people to hope. Not a bad goal, do you think? Actually, I wish I’d come across this talk

01:26:25 ► §

several years ago while Fraser Clark was still alive. He would have been thrilled to hear what

01:26:30 ► §

Terrence had to say about the zippies just now. Fraser was a friend of mine and has appeared here

01:26:36 ► §

in the salon on several occasions. If you go to our program notes blog, which you can get to via

01:26:41 ► §

psychedelicsalon.us, you’ll see that under the category sidebar,

01:26:45 ► §

there are several podcasts featuring Fraser.

01:26:48 ► §

And podcast number 45, which is titled Rave Culture and the End of the World as We Know

01:26:55 ► §

It, is the talk that Fraser gave at Stanford University during this zippy pro-noia tour

01:27:01 ► §

that Terrence was talking about.

01:27:03 ► §

It’s an interesting talk, and if you haven’t listened to it yet, you may want to check it out.

01:27:08 ► §

I hope that you also noticed that about 50 minutes into this talk,

01:27:13 ► §

Terrence said that if those assembled had an email account and a laptop,

01:27:17 ► §

they were then a member of the 20 million elite that is running the planet through the cybernet.

01:27:24 ► §

I wonder how he’d feel today,

01:27:26 ► §

knowing that the number of us humans who are now interconnected through the internet,

01:27:30 ► §

in one way or another, has already reached almost three billion. That’s right, almost one half of

01:27:37 ► §

all humans alive today have access to the net. And this is something completely new in human

01:27:43 ► §

history, completely unprecedented. It’s

01:27:46 ► §

just something not to be taken lightly. An entirely new human experience has begun to evolve on the

01:27:53 ► §

surface of this planet. And like it or not, we are here at its beginning. It’s not for nothing that

01:27:59 ► §

the title of my novel is The Genesis Generation. And while the talk we just listened to was given in June of 1994,

01:28:07 ► §

some 20 years before the events in Ferguson, Missouri,

01:28:11 ► §

even back then Terrence was speaking about the illusion of stability in social space.

01:28:17 ► §

Another little fascinating tidbit that Terrence brought out was that

01:28:20 ► §

overnight his computer would search the net for things that might interest him.

01:28:24 ► §

out was that overnight his computer would search the net for things that might interest him.

01:28:30 ► §

And in case you’re wondering, this talk was given four years before Google came along and Yahoo hadn’t even yet become a corporation. So what was he using to gather up all of this

01:28:36 ► §

information while he slept, you ask? Well, my guess is that he was probably using my old friend

01:28:41 ► §

the Gopher Protocol, that wonderful software from the University of Minnesota.

01:28:46 ► §

And I’ll bet that I’m not the only person

01:28:48 ► §

in the salon right now

01:28:49 ► §

who remembers Gopher with great fondness.

01:28:52 ► §

At the time, it seemed truly miraculous.

01:28:56 ► §

Now, one other thing that I feel obliged to comment on

01:28:59 ► §

for any newcomers to the salon

01:29:01 ► §

is where Terrence gave credit to Timothy Leary

01:29:03 ► §

for the phrase,

01:29:04 ► §

Find the Others. If you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, you know that at a later

01:29:10 ► §

date when the two of them met, the good Dr. Leary denied ever having said that. However, he did

01:29:16 ► §

allow that he thought it a good phrase, so I guess we have to credit Anonymous for that one.

01:29:21 ► §

And since in my older age, note that I acknowledge getting older, but I didn’t

01:29:27 ► §

say my old age. Anyway, I find that lately I have no trouble in telling embarrassing stories about

01:29:33 ► §

myself. What I’m thinking about is Terrence’s rhapsodizing about Teilhard de Chardin. You see,

01:29:41 ► §

the last time that I had a conversation with Terrence is when I was working on the final draft of The Spirit of the Internet, which rests on three pillars.

01:29:49 ► §

The Internet, psychedelics, and Teilhard’s writings.

01:29:53 ► §

So here’s the embarrassing part.

01:29:55 ► §

At the time, I asked Terrence if he was familiar with Teilhard, and his reply was, yeah, I’ve heard of him.

01:30:01 ► §

Well, and here’s the embarrassing part. I took that to mean that he didn’t know

01:30:06 ► §

much at all about him, so I proceeded to lecture him about how Teilhard had prophesied the

01:30:11 ► §

Internet, and Terence never let on that he’d already long ago come to the same conclusion,

01:30:17 ► §

which I later realized that he surely had. But at the time, he let me believe that I’d

01:30:22 ► §

come up with a great idea on my own, and he

01:30:25 ► §

encouraged me to push along and finish that book. Now, the reason that I tell this story is that

01:30:30 ► §

it’s often the case at a conference when a young student rushes up to a speaker, gushes something

01:30:36 ► §

in an attempt to make an impression, and then later on realizes that he or she has probably

01:30:41 ► §

looked a little foolish. Well, that’s exactly how I felt months later

01:30:45 ► §

when I learned how much Terrence actually knew about Tailheart.

01:30:48 ► §

But here’s the whole point.

01:30:50 ► §

Should you ever find yourself in a situation like that,

01:30:53 ► §

and then keep yourself awake at night thinking poorly of yourself,

01:30:57 ► §

like that great Saturday Night Live comedian Chris Farley would do in his routine of,

01:31:01 ► §

Why did I say that?

01:31:03 ► §

Well, just remember that it happens to all

01:31:05 ► §

of us, both young and old, for you see, at the time I made that faux pas, I was already over 50 years old.

01:31:12 ► §

And what’s more, Terrence was the young guy in that exchange. The moral of the story is to always

01:31:17 ► §

trust yourself. You’ll make some mistakes along the way, we all do, but just because you may be young

01:31:23 ► §

and even though you don’t have a great deal of life experience, there’s something deep inside all of us that we always know what to do.

01:31:31 ► §

Call it your instinct or your gut feelings or whatever you want, but trust it. Trust yourself,

01:31:38 ► §

no matter how old you are. And in case you’re wondering, the previous message is actually a reminder to myself,

01:31:48 ► §

because it’s so easy to forget sometimes.

01:31:52 ► §

But that doesn’t mean that I still don’t want to get in the last word.

01:31:58 ► §

I think that you’ll discover, if you read The Phenomena of Man by Teilhard,

01:32:03 ► §

you’ll discover that Terence was actually wrong in the way that he described the noosphere in this talk.

01:32:06 ► §

But I’ll leave that up to you to discover for yourself.

01:32:12 ► §

Finally, just now we heard Terence, once again, lament the fact that men’s voices continue to overpower those of women.

01:32:14 ► §

And he again spoke about his theory about what he called dialing down the number of

01:32:19 ► §

men.

01:32:19 ► §

Well, I think that he has a point.

01:32:22 ► §

And in fact, over a hundred podcasts ago, we heard the first rumblings about the fact that even here in the psychedelic community,

01:32:29 ► §

there are far more men’s voices being heard than there are those of women.

01:32:33 ► §

And here in the salon, there have also been several discussions about why that is.

01:32:38 ► §

But it seems to me that the times, they are changing.

01:32:42 ► §

With the ongoing success of the Women’s Visionary Congress

01:32:45 ► §

and other forums that are working

01:32:47 ► §

to include more women speakers,

01:32:50 ► §

I’ve been noticing ever more women

01:32:52 ► §

stepping up onto the stage.

01:32:54 ► §

And I like this trend,

01:32:55 ► §

and I want to do what I can to help it along.

01:32:58 ► §

So, for one thing,

01:33:00 ► §

I’ve taken my name off any list of potential speakers

01:33:02 ► §

at the various conferences

01:33:04 ► §

that invite me from time to time.

01:33:06 ► §

My plan is that this old white man won’t be up on any stage again.

01:33:11 ► §

But I’m only one old white man, and I don’t feel that it’s my place to convince any of my peers to do the same thing.

01:33:18 ► §

That decision should be theirs alone.

01:33:21 ► §

However, there is one other thing that I can do and actually i’ve already done it beginning with

01:33:27 ► §

my next podcast we will be featuring women speakers in every other program i’ve wanted to

01:33:32 ► §

do this for some time now but it’s been difficult to obtain enough audio material from women speakers

01:33:37 ► §

however after listening with you to shona nasa and lily and podcast 410 where they were speaking

01:33:44 ► §

about this very issue,

01:33:45 ► §

I got in touch with them, and to make a long story short,

01:33:49 ► §

they have agreed to not only continue with their ongoing conversations,

01:33:53 ► §

but they have also stepped up to the plate

01:33:55 ► §

and taken on the responsibility of obtaining the audio material

01:33:58 ► §

that will enable the salon to become significantly more gender balanced

01:34:03 ► §

than it has been in the past.

01:34:05 ► §

While I’ll still be doing the introduction and concluding remarks, just as I have for

01:34:09 ► §

over nine years now, the selection of material and speakers for every other podcast will

01:34:14 ► §

be entirely up to them, and whomever they recruit to help them, I should add.

01:34:19 ► §

I’ve promised not to censor them in any way, and even when they may say something that

01:34:23 ► §

may bruise my male ego.

01:34:25 ► §

Of course, at this stage of the game, that’s not very easy to do.

01:34:30 ► §

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

01:34:35 ► §

Be well, my friends, and have a good burn tonight..