Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The absolute victory of habit is death itself.”
“Life is apparently a phenomenon in this universe considerably more tenacious than stars.”
“When the democratic crunch hits, democratic values will go down the drain long before they turn off the lights and stop delivering the food.”
“The Net is a tremendous permission for eccentricity.”
“Freakery is the wave of the future.”
“If you’ve never read Moby Dick you certainly should. It’s a crash course in psychedelic metaphysics.”
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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 as of today, our fun drive is one half over, I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And as of today,
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our fun drive is one half over, but we’ve only brought in enough to cover about four
00:00:30 ►
months more of podcasting. And so far there have been, I guess, about 80 donors who have
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donated enough to pay for three months, and two of our wonderful salonners have gone over
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the top, and between the two of them, they also contributed enough for another month. So I’ll see what happens during the rest of this month before making any decisions about
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the future of these podcasts. And in case you aren’t aware of the Fund Drive, you can listen
00:00:54 ►
to podcast number 438, which is very short, and it’ll give you all of the details. But for now,
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let’s get on with today’s program. Now, some of our fellow slaughters may wonder why I left in the part of the talk that we’re about to listen to
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where Terrence was going on about all of the great things on the Internet.
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Duh, you say?
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Well, this talk was given in June of 1994.
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And for us old geeks, well, it’s fun to remember just how far we’ve actually come in the
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past 20 years. So I hope that it doesn’t bore you, but keep in mind that when he does give the number
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of people who went to the second largest site on the net, well, that’s a smaller number of people
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than who listen to these podcasts. So let’s now join Terrence McKenna and a few friends on a June day in 1994
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almost 21 years ago
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as he talks about the technology of spirituality
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and repeats one of my favorite McKenna-isms
00:01:54 ►
when he says that the only difference between a computer and a drug
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is a computer is a drug too large to swallow
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but our best people are working on it
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The computer is a drug too large to swallow, but our best people are working on it.
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I was thinking along the lines of kind of an intersubjective consciousness,
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kind of a collective consciousness. Do you see a change?
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Well, I think that this artifact which anthropology has brought back to us, which we call the psychedelic experience,
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is going to become part of our cultural inventory.
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Not the cultural inventory of mad bohemians or excellent raconteurs,
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but everybody.
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And that in fact,
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the psychedelic experience is already the model
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for what we call multimedia,
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how we think about education, so forth and so on.
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So with that experience under our belt,
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I think that will be sufficient permission then
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to create a whole new model of the world.
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And all this
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talk that has gone on throughout
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the 20th century beginning with the
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Golden Dawn and Madame Blavatsky
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and that crowd and coming up
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through the psychedelicos
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and the new ageists
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and the Gurdjieffians and all that
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all this stuff about spirituality
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is not going to get
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off the mark until you have a technology
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of spirituality. Well, a technology of spirituality is not done with levers and steam engines
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and pulleys. It’s done pharmacologically. And, you know, I’ve said in the past week, the only difference between a computer and a drug
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is a computer is a drug too large to swallow.
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But our best people are working to fix that.
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Johnny Quick.
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And, you know, there is, in a single breast implant there’s enough
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volume to put
00:04:07 ►
the entire downloaded
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database of the culture
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and so it’s
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not a problem data
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storage for us and
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accessibility it’s all
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what’s holding us back is
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simply habit
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you know if we didn’t if we weren’t 95% future terrified conservatives,
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imagine what we could put in place.
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But one of the weird things about democracy is that it is a somewhat phobic,
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it’s somewhat phobic in its relationship to change.
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You know?
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I mean, like, we have a democracy, ho, ho,
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and if somebody wants to close an air base,
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my God, you have headlines three inches high.
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How will the city of Fresno survive
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the closing of Screech Puke Air Force Base?
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Well, I’ve got news for you.
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There may be some tumbles on the way that make the closing of an Air Force Base look absolutely like peanuts.
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I mean, you may have to put your child on your back and set off into the radioactive rubble
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to forage for food.
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Well, then what will you think of Air Force Base closings
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and all the other enormous shocks
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that we’re supposedly subject to?
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The dollar drops below 99 yen
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and you’re supposed to physically hit the deck
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when it’s nothing
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to anybody who’s living in reality
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so
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somehow culture has to be
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streamlined for survival
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and my hope for that
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there are only two ways to do it, I think.
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A kind of super democratization, probably through electronics, or fascism.
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But fascism is, one thing it has, is the long view.
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And, you know, democracies cannot function with the idea that anything past four years
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can’t be discussed
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because when the pressure comes on
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when the cultural crunch hits
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democratic values will go down the drain
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long before they turn off the lights
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and stop delivering the food
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or stop printing books and stuff like that.
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Democratic values are so fragile you can’t even imagine.
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That will just go with the morning mist.
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And that’s why managing this all is very tricky.
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And the key is to broaden the minds of the people.
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And I maintain, based on the fact that I’ve grown up
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around psychedelic communities and people and plants my whole life,
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that the curious…
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that our cultural myopia is culturally induced,
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that people are not naturally as stupid as we seem to be.
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We seem to be the way we are because of bad cultural practices,
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bad educational practices, bad ethics, bad religion, bad this, bad that.
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And there is in people, I really feel, and I don’t think I’m Pollyannish about this,
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feel, and I don’t think I’m Pollyannish about this,
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an innate
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depth and wisdom
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and interest in the larger
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issues of life.
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I mean, why didn’t the Greeks write
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soap operas instead of
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talking philosophy?
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Well, because talking philosophy was
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clearly more interesting
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than writing soap operas.
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Well, then why isn’t it to us?
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Well, because our playing field is not level.
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We’re dealing with engines of manipulation and suasion
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that have studied us with greater care than you would wish to imagine
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in order to attain certain ends, not necessarily friendly to you.
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This is what I meant when I said culture is not your friend.
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Culture is out to screw you in some way.
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It wants to sell you something
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or it wants to have you react in a certain way.
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Culture is not your friend.
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Did you want to say more?
00:08:47 ►
Yeah, let’s…
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I had a comment about…
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You were saying that time was out there.
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I thought sort of the contemporary view of time,
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that time was really one of the a priori forms of sensibility,
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coming out of time and space
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are really functions of our own consciousness
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and really part of nature, they’re part of us.
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That is a perfect articulation of the enemy position.
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You got it absolutely right.
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That’s what they’re saying.
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Let me see here.
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Where is it dealt with
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the laws of nature must be considered
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as possibilities that are changing
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with the evolution of the system itself
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they are built up in stages
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and are progressive
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what Pregosian is saying
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and what I’ve been saying for some time
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is that
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time is that time is
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a thing. Time is not
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what Kant said. It is not
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a category in the human
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mind. It is a real
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thing. It is as real
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as matter and
00:09:59 ►
energy and
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the idea that
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time has no error that processes can be run backward and forward,
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he is concerned to attack. Time matters. Resonance drives change. Let me see if I can find this here.
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The notion that natural laws operate independent of time is crucial to predictability. Scientists speak of time reversibility. A pendulum swings, it returns, the has denied time, duration, irreversibility
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this denial has made us foreigners in the world
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he said, and if time is an illusion
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a mere artifact of perception
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what of the simple fact of biological evolution
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how do we account for ourselves
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we are the children, not the fathers of time
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Pergogion said
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this is a great guy, he’s a great guy the children, not the fathers of time, Prigogine said.
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This is a great guy. He’s a great guy.
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He’s definitely the best-dressed person
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in science. Go ahead.
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You know, the first one to say that,
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I think Schopenhauer came along
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and made the observation that this concept
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of time-space and causality
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being a priori forms of sensibility
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was also part of the
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Vedic system.
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Well, I think German idealism is something that we are struggling mightily to come back from.
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German idealism is rooted in Greek idealism,
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in Platonism.
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I am certainly a Platonist,
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but I’m a very cautious Platonist. I I’m a very cautious Platonist.
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I’m a provisional Platonist.
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I think, you know, if you want to get this nailed down philosophically,
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then Alfred North Whitehead is your guy.
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Because Whitehead is a Platonist, but he understands the danger of pure idealism.
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Pure idealism contains paradoxes and problems
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that are almost insoluble.
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For instance, the idea of eternal laws of nature.
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This is an impossible thing to maintain,
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though it is science’s position,
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because where were these eternal laws of nature
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before the universe existed?
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Do they exist in some superordinate platonic hyperspace?
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And it’s one thing to talk about the laws of nature like the speed of light,
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but what about laws of nature like gene segregation?
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Where were the laws of gene segregation before there were any genes in the universe?
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This effort to keep a platonic world of the idios free from contamination by the world of phenomena,
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I think, won’t withstand modern logical laundering. And that what we have to see is as Whitehead understood that
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the universe is an organism it’s changing it’s evolving it has it has an
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internal dynamic of unfoldment but final causes are not fixed the whole thing is
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somehow open and freely determinable throughout. This is a radical break with what
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we’re used to, but it is supported by experiment. Yeah.
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One thing, a bit more. Do you think that there’s a metaphysical moment at the change of the
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direction of the pendulum, applying Zeno’s paradox, you know, for the pendulum to get
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up to its height
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it has to go first halfway
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and then halfway again
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and halfway again
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and halfway again
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how does it ever
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well that Zeno’s paradox
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is not exactly a paradox
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it’s a simple misunderstanding
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an infinite series
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does not add up to infinity
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for example
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take the infinite series
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1 half, 1 quarter, 1 eighth, 1 sixteenth,
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1 thirty-second, 1 sixty-fourth, 1 one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth,
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and so forth.
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What do you get if you add this infinite series?
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You get 1.
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There’s no mystery there.
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It’s an infinite series
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yet it will sum to one
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it took Cantor
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to figure this out
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I mean it remained unsolved for a long
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long time but it turns out it was
00:14:36 ►
just you know people should have had
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another drink and tried harder
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or something
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it really isn’t that mysterious
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I think at this point
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in the history of mathematics.
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Yes?
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What you are saying,
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especially about the laws,
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then the environmental equilibrium
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isn’t so, and we can never reach
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that harmony?
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Also physiologically,
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we’re getting so diseased we’ve lost our harmony. Well physiologically, we’re getting so deceived
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we’ve lost our harmony.
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Well, harmony,
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where has there ever been
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harmony in the history of the Earth?
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The Earth has constantly
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been bombarded by
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planetesimal impact,
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by fluctuations in the incidental
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solar radiation,
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by geomagnetic reversals,
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by continental drift,
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by episodes of volcanism.
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Nature, you know, if you think of life
00:15:37 ►
as something which tends toward perfection,
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then I heard a brilliant orthodox geneticist once say the first form of life was perfect.
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It was perfect.
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And then it was damaged by radiation and mutated and a repair was made.
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And then there was further damage and further repair and further damage and further repair
00:16:05 ►
and what we are are the inheritors of 10 to the high 16 band-aided bad fixes.
00:16:14 ►
We are essentially a monstrous tumor that has evolved off
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from the perfect primary first life form.
00:16:24 ►
I think what nature likes is to transcend itself.
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It is an artificer.
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It makes things.
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It solves problems,
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and then it solves them again more elegantly
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and keeps going back.
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And it can produce exquisite environments,
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ecosystems, and organisms if left to itself.
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But if the whole pot is stirred,
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then it doesn’t mind having the reset button hit.
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And then it goes back and it works it all through again.
00:17:02 ►
But the planet was old when consciousness appeared. Life
00:17:09 ►
was old. I mean, life, even fairly hefty life, has been around for 500 million years. So
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that’s 500 million. That’s 500 times longer than primates have been around.
00:17:27 ►
It’s 5,000 times longer than technological using humans have been around.
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And it’s interesting that so late in its existence,
00:17:38 ►
the planet would take such a radical turn toward a new level of emergent property.
00:17:49 ►
And certainly we are the time accelerators.
00:17:52 ►
That’s what we do.
00:17:54 ►
We catalyze process.
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You know, the formation of species
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before the advent of human beings,
00:18:01 ►
the formation of plant species
00:18:02 ►
was largely driven by rivers leaving their banks
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and clearing land and creating empty land that could then competitor species could rush in.
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And this was where the speciation was happening along the sandbanks of rivers.
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With the appearance of human beings, you know, the cutting of forests, the destruction
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of environment has accelerated tremendously. And many species have taken advantage of that.
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Only in the last half of our evolutionary unfoldment have we become a species limiting
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the exfoliation of other species.
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species, limiting the exfoliation of other species.
00:18:50 ►
So Greenpeace sends a few of the tents to all of the other organizations and what they’re trying to do?
00:18:51 ►
Well, what they’re trying to do, I take it, is raise consciousness.
00:18:56 ►
If they’re trying to save species from extinction, they’re probably out of luck.
00:19:02 ►
they’re probably out of luck.
00:19:10 ►
Anyway, 95% of all life that has ever lived on this earth is extinct.
00:19:14 ►
I mean, if you ask what does nature do best,
00:19:17 ►
create extinct species.
00:19:21 ►
That’s what nature seems to do very, very well.
00:19:24 ►
You wanted to say something? No? You.
00:19:25 ►
So at what point does novelty become habit?
00:19:29 ►
When new novelty pushes it into the background. In other words, agriculture was something
00:19:37 ►
once in the most radical activity you could do on this planet. It was the cutting edge of technology.
00:19:47 ►
People were hacking agriculture.
00:19:51 ►
Now agriculture is one of the most traditional human occupations you can pursue.
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It has been embedded in the background of human activity.
00:20:01 ►
Would your prediction be then that all social structures that we have built up currently
00:20:09 ►
in this country and in the West will disappear in the next 20 years?
00:20:14 ►
Well, in a sense, I think that’s already happening. It’s been predicted by people who didn’t even
00:20:21 ►
have my point of view. For instance, McLuhan predicted something
00:20:26 ►
which he called electronic feudalism.
00:20:28 ►
And he said the inevitable consequence of electronic media
00:20:33 ►
is a fragmentation of large systems of control.
00:20:40 ►
And by that he meant the nation state.
00:20:43 ►
And certainly this has occurred in the Marxist part of the world.
00:20:50 ►
But, you know, it’s only been five years since the last Marxist state collapsed.
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Everybody’s holding their breath.
00:20:57 ►
But it may be that the virus is headed our way.
00:21:01 ►
There are, you know, with the collapse of ideology, people are getting back to their old
00:21:08 ►
racial and territorial beefs and hassles. And so we’re getting, you know, Croatia, Rwanda,
00:21:17 ►
but also, you know, Palestinian self-rule, self-rule in South Africa. It’s not all bad news.
00:21:26 ►
But yeah, I think fragmentation is underway.
00:21:29 ►
I think the state is largely irrelevant.
00:21:32 ►
I think the corporations are these international electronic organisms
00:21:38 ►
made of capital that operate transparently and invisibly.
00:21:44 ►
And they are probably, it is probably their agenda which the planet is following.
00:21:50 ►
And I don’t say this conspiratorially.
00:21:54 ►
Somebody’s running the world,
00:21:56 ►
and corporations are a logical force to follow on.
00:22:01 ►
The nation-state didn’t do a good job.
00:22:04 ►
I mean, the nation- state, for crying out loud,
00:22:06 ►
brought us to the thermonuclear
00:22:08 ►
standoff.
00:22:10 ►
Sony just wants to muck
00:22:12 ►
with your mind with weird commercials
00:22:14 ►
but they don’t propose
00:22:16 ►
a thermonuclear exchange
00:22:18 ►
over commercial issues.
00:22:21 ►
And I think
00:22:22 ►
that nation states
00:22:24 ►
valued war as an instrument of policy, and I think
00:22:29 ►
corporations find war horribly disruptive and expensive. I mean, not the corporations which
00:22:36 ►
sell armaments, but that’s a minority. One of the good things about being ruled by corporations is that to do business you have to have stability.
00:22:47 ►
You can’t have a bunch of crazy political ideologies
00:22:51 ►
or people busting up the infrastructure and all that.
00:22:56 ►
That’s a horrible interruption of business as usual.
00:23:02 ►
I like what you said last night about things
00:23:06 ►
going asymptotic, and I
00:23:08 ►
sort of realized in my own little
00:23:10 ►
personal world of medicine and all the
00:23:12 ►
issues of health care, the
00:23:14 ►
thing that has prompted the health care,
00:23:16 ►
national health care debate is the
00:23:18 ►
extrapolation of
00:23:20 ►
the
00:23:22 ►
14% of our gross national product
00:23:24 ►
is now being spent on health care,
00:23:26 ►
and this was 7% a decade ago,
00:23:29 ►
and you draw the curve,
00:23:30 ►
and all of a sudden,
00:23:31 ►
you’re going to see it’s going to be 90%.
00:23:34 ►
And so it is, I don’t know,
00:23:40 ►
I can’t think of anything else off the top of my mind
00:23:43 ►
so specifically that fits into that asymptotic…
00:23:47 ►
Well, for example, there are…
00:23:50 ►
There’s more to the public than a political debate.
00:23:51 ►
There are many of these areas.
00:23:53 ►
How about, I mean, let’s take an obvious one, the population curve.
00:23:59 ►
You extrapolate the population curve based on current conservative statistics, and there isn’t room to stand on each other 70 years down the line.
00:24:10 ►
We’ll then take the curve of data,
00:24:14 ►
microminiaturization of data storage.
00:24:18 ►
It tells you that within 30 years,
00:24:21 ►
the entire cultural inventory of the species
00:24:25 ►
can be stored on the head of a pin.
00:24:29 ►
Well, then take the energy release curve,
00:24:34 ►
extrapolate it out 30 years,
00:24:36 ►
and we will be able to blow the entire planet apart
00:24:40 ►
like a stick of dynamite inside a rotten apple.
00:24:50 ►
part like a stick of dynamite inside a rotten apple, extrapolate the speed curve and assume no upper limit and you discover that within 30 years we should be able to travel 100 times
00:24:57 ►
the speed of light. Well, suppose this is all going to happen. Suppose these curves are real
00:25:05 ►
and there is no switching out,
00:25:09 ►
no laws in our way.
00:25:12 ►
See, all that’s holding us together right now
00:25:15 ►
or all that is holding together
00:25:18 ►
the illusion of the historical world
00:25:20 ►
is our inability to communicate with each other.
00:25:24 ►
Here is somebody over here. They are working on data encryption. Here is somebody who’s working
00:25:33 ►
on nanotechnology. Here’s Starflight. Here’s longevity. Here’s viral cures for viral diseases.
00:25:44 ►
Well, none of these people talk to each other.
00:25:46 ►
None of them know of each other’s existence.
00:25:49 ►
And yet, one by one, they will arrive at their goals.
00:25:53 ►
And this will all be fed together into a civilization that nobody is managing and nobody can imagine.
00:26:02 ►
and nobody can imagine.
00:26:06 ►
McLuhan was the one who pointed out that we have never been able to anticipate
00:26:09 ►
the impact of any technology.
00:26:12 ►
We always get it wrong.
00:26:15 ►
Most recently, I can remember as recently as 1977
00:26:20 ►
when home computers began to be sold on the market
00:26:24 ►
and there was a whole lot of bellyaching about how this was the end of literacy.
00:26:30 ►
And now people would watch computer screens, it was the end of literacy.
00:26:34 ►
No one predicted that small computers would bring the greatest explosion in publishing since the invention of the printing press,
00:26:44 ►
and that what they would be used for by people is desktop
00:26:47 ►
publishing and this was a completely unexpected
00:26:51 ►
effect
00:26:53 ►
who could have predicted that the automobile would actually
00:26:59 ►
function as a bedroom with wheels
00:27:02 ►
and break down the Calvinist
00:27:06 ►
structure
00:27:07 ►
of mate choosing and marriage
00:27:10 ►
obligation within the community
00:27:12 ►
who would dream that the
00:27:14 ►
railroad would destroy
00:27:15 ►
the extended family and allow
00:27:18 ►
people to move hundreds of miles
00:27:19 ►
from their family
00:27:21 ►
and I think
00:27:23 ►
that the ultimate result
00:27:25 ►
of all this electronic technology
00:27:27 ►
is the literalizing of consciousness,
00:27:31 ►
that consciousness is coming into being.
00:27:34 ►
That’s why, you know,
00:27:35 ►
the 19th century had no industry
00:27:38 ►
equivalent to Hollywood.
00:27:42 ►
And Hollywood is a huge sector of the national
00:27:46 ►
economy and what is it concerned
00:27:48 ►
with? It builds
00:27:50 ►
dreams
00:27:51 ►
it peddles images
00:27:54 ►
it’s entirely involved
00:27:56 ►
in the production of the
00:27:58 ►
imagination
00:27:59 ►
and think of a company like
00:28:02 ►
ILM
00:28:03 ►
industrial light and magic they’re not kidding And think of a company like ILM, Industrial Light and Magic.
00:28:06 ►
They’re not kidding.
00:28:08 ►
And when you look at their corporate ledger, you understand they’re not kidding
00:28:12 ►
and wish you had stock in it because Industrial Light and Magic is making very real money. so I think that all of these technologies
00:28:25 ►
and the psychedelic shamanism
00:28:29 ►
and the emphasis on a vocabulary of spiritualism
00:28:32 ►
and direct experience
00:28:33 ►
that what this is all leading to
00:28:35 ►
is the greatest empowering of the imagination
00:28:39 ►
since the birth of language
00:28:42 ►
and that the effects are similarly unpredictable.
00:28:47 ►
I mean, who could have imagined
00:28:48 ►
sitting around the Paleolithic campfire
00:28:51 ►
that deciding that ugg-nugg meant water
00:28:54 ►
would lead to the World Trade Center,
00:28:59 ►
you know, in a direct line of development.
00:29:03 ►
But the thing is that it’s happening
00:29:06 ►
faster than any straight
00:29:08 ►
person can anticipate.
00:29:11 ►
Somebody
00:29:12 ►
not presently
00:29:14 ►
in the room, but brought me a book
00:29:16 ►
called Metaman.
00:29:18 ►
And it looks very far out.
00:29:20 ►
It says the coming evolution
00:29:22 ►
of the human machine
00:29:23 ►
intelligence. And it shows a picture of Europe with all these lights going everywhere.
00:29:29 ►
But when you open it up and read it, it has phrases in it like
00:29:33 ►
within several decades human beings will this and that.
00:29:38 ►
No, there aren’t several decades.
00:29:40 ►
This is far closer than you wish to suppose. It is essentially, it is upon us.
00:29:49 ►
What is impeding our recognition of it is the presence of so much momentum in the system from
00:29:56 ►
the old way of doing things. I mean, for instance, what we are doing at this moment is incredibly unnecessary and archaic.
00:30:06 ►
And we do it because it’s how we’ve always done it, gather together and talk.
00:30:14 ►
But, you know, Tim Leary had a wonderful saying back in the 60s.
00:30:20 ►
He said, find the others, find the others.
00:30:22 ►
He said, find the others.
00:30:24 ►
Find the others.
00:30:28 ►
Well, if you go on to the net,
00:30:31 ►
no matter what your concern is,
00:30:35 ►
you know, the restoration of South German harpsichords or whatever it is,
00:30:37 ►
there are hundreds of people waiting
00:30:40 ►
to share their secrets with you,
00:30:43 ►
to passionately communicate with you, to draw you into a community.
00:30:48 ►
The net is a tremendous permission for eccentricity.
00:30:52 ►
You know, if you’re a 245-pound white male and you want to present yourself as a seven-year-old black girl
00:31:00 ►
who’s made a great victory over polio, hey, nobody can stop you from doing that on
00:31:07 ►
the net. On the net you are who you say you are. And all interest groups, no matter how
00:31:15 ►
peculiar and formerly insulated, can contact each other instantly. And so the idea the very notion of orthodoxy
00:31:26 ►
is melting away
00:31:29 ►
freakery
00:31:31 ►
is the wave of the future
00:31:34 ►
the bohemians knew it
00:31:35 ►
the pataphysicians knew it
00:31:37 ►
the dada’s knew it
00:31:38 ►
the surrealists knew it
00:31:40 ►
the hippies
00:31:40 ►
even the zittis
00:31:44 ►
eccentricity and the empowerment of individuality the hippies, even the zippies.
00:31:49 ►
Eccentricity and the empowerment of individuality is a paradoxical part of living in an electronic collectivity.
00:31:56 ►
Yeah.
00:31:57 ►
Talking about the net,
00:31:59 ►
is there a lot of interest in psychedelics on the net?
00:32:04 ►
And have you been using the internet?
00:32:06 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:32:06 ►
I mean, I only relate to a single conference,
00:32:10 ►
alt.drugs,
00:32:12 ►
which has 700 postings daily,
00:32:17 ►
and it’s broken down into alt.mdma,
00:32:22 ►
alt.silocybin, alt.this.
00:32:25 ►
I mean, there are more,
00:32:27 ►
I mean, there is a conference on the net
00:32:29 ►
called alt.terrencemckenna,
00:32:31 ►
which I have never gone to.
00:32:34 ►
I have not the courage or the stomach,
00:32:37 ►
you know, to do that.
00:32:40 ►
But it shows you how fragmented it is.
00:32:43 ►
And anyone can start a conference.
00:32:46 ►
And some of them involve thousands and thousands of people.
00:32:49 ►
I mean, like all.sex.
00:32:51 ►
You can imagine what that’s like.
00:32:53 ►
I mean, you couldn’t get all those people in Hollywood Stadium.
00:32:57 ►
It was very interesting.
00:32:59 ►
In the last issue of Wired, which you haven’t received yet,
00:33:04 ►
but which I somehow have a hold of, there
00:33:07 ►
is a very interesting market analysis of use of the net, who uses what, and what it turns
00:33:18 ►
out, here it is, most popular news groups in April, these are the 10 most popular news groups on the net. The first most popular is news
00:33:28 ►
announce. That you would expect. That’s just headline flashes. Something happens. Someone’s killed. Something
00:33:38 ►
happens. You go there. You look. That would make sense. But the second most most popular visited in the month of April
00:33:47 ►
by half a million users
00:33:49 ►
was alt.sex.stories
00:33:53 ►
that’s a group where people just write
00:33:57 ►
racy things that may or may not
00:34:00 ►
have happened to them
00:34:01 ►
500,000 people
00:34:03 ►
now we’re being told that there are 20 million people
00:34:06 ►
on the net right now. That means one in 40 in the month of April of the entire net population
00:34:14 ►
accessed alt.sex.stories. Number three, with 450,000 visitors, was altbinaries.pictures.erotica.
00:34:27 ►
Now, what’s interesting about that one is that that requires special equipment,
00:34:32 ►
a slip connection and mosaic.
00:34:34 ►
It vastly restricts the number of people who could have accessed it,
00:34:39 ►
and yet it’s only 50,000 short of the alt.sex thing. In fourth place, with 440,000 visitors in April, alt.sex.
00:34:51 ►
In fifth place, news and answers,
00:34:53 ►
but in sixth place, with 380,000 users,
00:34:57 ►
rec.humor.funny.
00:35:01 ►
So what’s going on here is people are turning to the net
00:35:05 ►
for erotic thrills
00:35:07 ►
and laughs
00:35:08 ►
in staggering numbers
00:35:11 ►
a major proportion
00:35:12 ►
well that’s funny
00:35:14 ►
we thought it was all about
00:35:16 ►
transferring business files
00:35:19 ►
and spreadsheets
00:35:22 ►
and similar nerdishness
00:35:24 ►
no it turns out
00:35:27 ►
sex and humor
00:35:28 ►
are what most people
00:35:30 ►
according to the self-monitoring
00:35:32 ►
programs of the net itself
00:35:34 ►
are into, well where is that
00:35:37 ►
going, and you know now it’s
00:35:38 ►
text, it’s 90% text
00:35:41 ►
which is incredibly
00:35:42 ►
tedious and retro
00:35:44 ►
you can’t believe this is the cutting
00:35:47 ►
edge as you’re typing away but with slip connections and protocols like mosaic within
00:35:56 ►
i mean it’s galloping it’s happening as we speak within six months eight eight months, it will be 50% visual. And within a year, that’s what it will be.
00:36:06 ►
People are building their realities right now.
00:36:11 ►
Ralph Abraham came down and told me
00:36:13 ►
that he bought a storefront on the net.
00:36:17 ►
And there he sells his books on dynamics and chaos theory
00:36:21 ►
and his tapes and some t-shirts
00:36:24 ►
and he posts his latest papers in progress.
00:36:28 ►
It’s, for crying out loud, it’s a shop front about advanced mathematics.
00:36:34 ►
And the automatic turnstile is telling him that a thousand people a day are checking out his little kiosk on the net and they know it’s advanced mathematics
00:36:47 ►
so what if he were selling i don’t know vibrators or something how many how many customers would he
00:36:55 ►
have per day so uh and what’s great about the net is that it’s not visible. We don’t see bulldozers crashing through
00:37:06 ►
neighborhoods. We don’t see the ordinary disruption that we associate with
00:37:10 ►
progress. In fact, we don’t see nothing. It’s going on yonder in hyperspace.
00:37:19 ►
Somehow the people who aren’t doing it think it has something to do with making
00:37:23 ►
telephone calls faster or something.
00:37:26 ►
They haven’t the faintest.
00:37:28 ►
And every one of us is in danger of being disenfranchised.
00:37:35 ►
You’ve got to keep up.
00:37:37 ►
Just living in the 20th century is becoming a full-time educational experience.
00:37:43 ►
You can never stop going to school.
00:37:46 ►
You have to master endless protocols,
00:37:50 ►
passwords, software.
00:37:52 ►
And it’s just like learning to drive
00:37:54 ►
or learning to walk.
00:37:55 ►
It’s net surfing and it’s here to stay.
00:37:58 ►
And it is curiously like what shamans have been doing
00:38:03 ►
for a long, long time with psychedelic plants.
00:38:07 ►
One way of thinking of it is that what is happening is that the engineering mentality
00:38:14 ►
is simply catching up with the shamanic intent.
00:38:19 ►
And so what was previously done with plants and ritual and magical song is now being done with protocols and code
00:38:30 ►
writing and encryption and so forth and so on. Because the machines are extensions of
00:38:37 ►
ourselves, not our hands as the age of mechanical technology was but they are literal extensions of our minds
00:38:47 ►
and this is very new stuff
00:38:50 ►
and it’s a great comfort to me
00:38:53 ►
that no one understands this
00:38:56 ►
because if no one understands it
00:38:58 ►
no one can control it
00:39:00 ►
and the people most given to control fantasies, the suits, are the least able to deal
00:39:09 ►
with this technology. I mean, they have to hire short-haired women and guys with ponytails
00:39:16 ►
to explain it all to them and to keep it up and running. And, you know, that’s why, you know, they even tolerate
00:39:25 ►
people like that around
00:39:27 ►
because, you know,
00:39:28 ►
very few middle
00:39:31 ►
and upper level executives
00:39:33 ►
can do anything
00:39:34 ►
on their own.
00:39:36 ►
So they’ve just priced
00:39:37 ►
themselves out of the game.
00:39:39 ►
I mean, they are dinosaurs
00:39:40 ►
and they will be given
00:39:42 ►
their golden parachutes
00:39:43 ►
and sent off to Palm Springs and Pebble
00:39:46 ►
Beach and that’ll be it
00:39:48 ►
I think. Yeah.
00:39:50 ►
I noticed you brought up your copy
00:39:52 ►
of Moby Dick and you have a marker in it
00:39:54 ►
and I’m dying to know
00:39:55 ►
what that marker, what chapter
00:39:57 ►
is that?
00:39:59 ►
Well, it’s my
00:40:01 ►
fallback position.
00:40:03 ►
I can always
00:40:05 ►
if things get slow
00:40:07 ►
make a literary analogy
00:40:09 ►
I read to my son
00:40:11 ►
I read chapter 36
00:40:13 ►
is that the quarter deck?
00:40:15 ►
that’s the quarter deck
00:40:16 ►
that’s the marked chapter
00:40:17 ►
why do you read it to your son?
00:40:20 ►
I just think
00:40:21 ►
you know
00:40:22 ►
I just do
00:40:23 ►
just for him to hear
00:40:24 ►
the sounds of the words.
00:40:26 ►
I plan, who lives out there will be dead.
00:40:30 ►
So I’m introducing him to things early.
00:40:33 ►
But that’s my favorite chapter.
00:40:36 ►
I’m of the opinion that there might be a future world
00:40:41 ►
where all that will be remembered
00:40:43 ►
about the people who populated North America
00:40:47 ►
is that they built amazing roads and they hunted whales. And people will say we built amazing roads
00:40:56 ►
because even atom bombs can’t destroy a freeway clover leaf. And they will say we hunted whales because this book is the American Iliad. I mean
00:41:08 ►
this book will last as long as language lasts and it’s a very psychedelic book. I don’t know how germane it is to all of what we’re talking about
00:41:26 ►
but it’s about a quest
00:41:28 ►
and it’s about an
00:41:30 ►
unrelenting devotion
00:41:32 ►
to a certain
00:41:34 ►
kind of truth
00:41:35 ►
and it’s a
00:41:37 ►
tremendous allegory. I mean
00:41:40 ►
Melville was no fool
00:41:42 ►
and he was perfectly aware
00:41:44 ►
of the Osirian
00:41:45 ►
religion that James
00:41:48 ►
Fraser was sketching out
00:41:50 ►
and of the comparative mythology
00:41:52 ►
movement and he used language
00:41:54 ►
to layer
00:41:56 ►
resonance in the same
00:41:58 ►
way that we have been talking here
00:42:00 ►
about how the world is made that
00:42:02 ►
way. Joyce did
00:42:04 ►
the same thing. Essentially what
00:42:06 ►
I’m arguing is a kind of allegorical view of reality. You know, the genius of Ulysses,
00:42:14 ►
Joyce’s Ulysses now, is that a guy wants to buy some kidneys to fry for breakfast. And
00:42:22 ►
so he wanders around his neighborhood and he chats with the butcher
00:42:26 ►
and he has some adventures
00:42:27 ►
and in the meantime he’s constantly
00:42:30 ►
thinking about his weird
00:42:31 ►
relationship and
00:42:33 ►
the 20th century and science
00:42:36 ►
and medicine and all this stuff
00:42:38 ►
and he
00:42:39 ►
on another level is Odysseus
00:42:42 ►
visiting the various
00:42:44 ►
ports of call in the Iliad.
00:42:47 ►
And so into the mundane life of this Irish Jew in 1906
00:42:52 ►
comes this great historical echo of the Iliad.
00:42:59 ►
If you’ve never read Moby Dick, you certainly should.
00:43:02 ►
read Moby Dick you certainly should it’s a crash course
00:43:04 ►
in
00:43:05 ►
psychedelic
00:43:08 ►
metaphysics
00:43:09 ►
I would think here I can’t
00:43:12 ►
resist it let me
00:43:13 ►
read you a very small
00:43:15 ►
part this is from
00:43:17 ►
chapter 36 which is
00:43:19 ►
called the quarter deck
00:43:21 ►
and those of you who’ve read it
00:43:23 ►
but forget the story,
00:43:27 ►
Ahab, at last, the captain of the Pequod,
00:43:30 ►
he calls the crew together and he reveals what this is about,
00:43:36 ►
that this is no search for whale oil, for the lamps of New Bedford,
00:43:41 ►
that he had an encounter with the Leviathan, as he calls it, with this thing,
00:43:49 ►
which basically bent him completely out of shape and in fact emasculated him. That’s very clear
00:43:58 ►
from the text. So he is Osiris who lost his penis, you’ll recall, in a confrontation with an enormous sea monster called Typhon, Typhset, and then had to search through, or the goddess Isis searched through the underworld trying to reconstruct Osiris. And in this chapter, the quarter deck, the philosophy
00:44:30 ►
of American transcendentalism, which is what Melville was operating under, and which we
00:44:37 ►
know too little of, I often think how much deeper and richer American environmentalism would be if people would read their Emerson.
00:44:47 ►
I mean, Emerson is the American Blake, in a sense.
00:44:53 ►
And Melville comes out of that.
00:44:56 ►
But there is a moment in which the first mate,
00:45:02 ►
I’m sorry, yes, the first mate, Starbuck,
00:45:07 ►
Ahab is raving on, and Ahab, and the first mate,
00:45:16 ►
who represents Christian right reason,
00:45:19 ►
tries to inject a note of sanity into this undertaking.
00:45:23 ►
In other words, he’s the straight man
00:45:25 ►
he stands for Calvinism
00:45:27 ►
rectitude, reason, science
00:45:29 ►
and he says
00:45:31 ►
speaking to Ahab
00:45:34 ►
Starbuck says
00:45:36 ►
Ahab has just
00:45:39 ►
shouted to the crew
00:45:41 ►
art not game for Moby Dick
00:45:44 ►
and Starbuck says I am game for his crooked jaw
00:45:48 ►
and for the jaws of death too Captain Ahab if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow
00:45:55 ►
but I came here to hunt whales not my commander’s vengeance how many barrels will thy vengeance
00:46:02 ►
yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab?
00:46:05 ►
It will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.
00:46:10 ►
Nantucket market, hoot!
00:46:12 ►
But look closer, man.
00:46:14 ►
Thou requirest a little lower layer.
00:46:17 ►
If money’s to be the measure, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house, the Globe,
00:46:24 ►
by girdling it with guineas one to every three parts of an inch,
00:46:28 ►
then let me tell thee that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here.
00:46:35 ►
He smites his chest, whispered Stubb.
00:46:38 ►
What’s that for?
00:46:39 ►
He thinks it rings most vast but hollow.
00:46:43 ►
And then Starbuck delivers the famous line
00:46:46 ►
vengeance on a dumb brute cried Starbuck
00:46:49 ►
that simply smoked thee from blindest instinct
00:46:52 ►
madness to be enraged with a dumb thing
00:46:57 ►
Captain Ahab seems blasphemous
00:47:00 ►
and Ahab says
00:47:02 ►
hark ye yet again
00:47:05 ►
the little lower layer
00:47:07 ►
all visible
00:47:09 ►
objects man
00:47:10 ►
are but as pasteboard
00:47:13 ►
masks but in each
00:47:15 ►
event in the living act
00:47:16 ►
the undoubted deed
00:47:18 ►
there some unknown but
00:47:20 ►
still reasoning thing
00:47:22 ►
puts forth the moldings of its features from beneath the
00:47:26 ►
unreasoning mask if man will strike strike through the mask how can the prisoner reach outside except
00:47:35 ►
by thrusting through the wall to me the white whale is that wall shoved near to me sometimes
00:47:42 ►
i think there’s not beyond but tis enough he tasks me he heaps me
00:47:47 ►
i see in him outrageous strength with an inscrutable malice signaling it that inscrutable
00:47:54 ►
thing is chiefly what i hate and be the white whale agent or be the white whale principal I will wreck that hate upon him talk not to me of blasphemy man
00:48:07 ►
I’d strike out the sun if it insulted me for could the sun do that then could I do the other
00:48:15 ►
since there is ever a sort of fair play herein jealousy presiding over all creations but not my master man is even that fair play
00:48:25 ►
who’s over me
00:48:26 ►
truth hath no confines
00:48:28 ►
take off thine eye
00:48:30 ►
more intolerable than fiends glaring
00:48:33 ►
this is a doltish stare
00:48:34 ►
so so thou reddenest and palest
00:48:38 ►
my heart has melted thee to anger glow
00:48:40 ►
but look ye starbuck
00:48:42 ►
what is said in heat
00:48:43 ►
that thing unsays itself. There are men
00:48:46 ►
from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go, let it go. Look,
00:48:53 ►
yon Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn, living picture, breathing pictures painted by the sun,
00:49:00 ►
the pagan leopards, the unrecking and unworshipping things that live and seek and
00:49:06 ►
give no reasons for the torrid life they feel the crew man the crew are they not one and all with
00:49:14 ►
ahab in this matter of the whale see stub he laughs see yonder chilean he snorts to think of it
00:49:21 ►
stand up amid the general hurricane thy one tossed-tossed sapling cannot, Starbuck.
00:49:27 ►
And what is it?
00:49:28 ►
Reckon it.
00:49:29 ►
Tis but to help strike a fin.
00:49:31 ►
No wondrous feat for Starbuck.
00:49:34 ►
What is it more?
00:49:35 ►
From this one poor hunt, then,
00:49:37 ►
the best lance out of all Nantucket?
00:49:40 ►
Surely he will not hang back
00:49:41 ►
when every four-mast hand has clutched a whetstone.
00:49:45 ►
Ah, constraining sees thee, I see.
00:49:48 ►
The billow lifts thee.
00:49:50 ►
Speak, but speak.
00:49:52 ►
Ay, ay, thy silence then that voices thee.
00:49:57 ►
And then in an aside,
00:49:59 ►
something shot from my dilated nostrils.
00:50:01 ►
He has inhaled it in his lungs.
00:50:03 ►
Starbuck now is mine
00:50:05 ►
cannot oppose me now
00:50:07 ►
without rebellion
00:50:09 ►
the important part of that
00:50:13 ►
from our point of view
00:50:14 ►
is all visible objects
00:50:17 ►
are but as pasteboard masks
00:50:19 ►
but in each event
00:50:20 ►
in the living act
00:50:22 ►
the undoubted deed
00:50:24 ►
some unknown but still reasoning thing
00:50:27 ►
puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. I mean, that’s
00:50:35 ►
pure psychedelic philosophy.
00:50:39 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
00:50:43 ►
thought at a time.
00:50:44 ►
to the psychedelic salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:50:50 ►
So when Terence mentioned that their getting together and meeting in person wasn’t a very good use of their resources, well, did you smile to yourself in the satisfaction that
00:50:55 ►
his little workshop was now reaching thousands of people and without the use of huge amounts
00:51:00 ►
of fossil fuel per person? Also, did you notice that Terrence,
00:51:05 ►
when he was asked if there was any talk about drugs on the Internet,
00:51:08 ►
he said, I only relate to a single conference,
00:51:13 ►
Alt.Drugs, which has 700 postings daily.
00:51:18 ►
It makes you smile, doesn’t it?
00:51:20 ►
But keep in mind that at the time of this podcast,
00:51:23 ►
most of the internet action was
00:51:25 ►
on the alt.newsgroups, which, as our old-timers here know, was started by John Gilmore, who has
00:51:32 ►
been featured here in the salon on several occasions. And I should add that John is also
00:51:37 ►
one of those quiet, behind-the-scenes guys who does a lot to keep the Palenque Norte lectures
00:51:42 ►
going as well. But we should keep in mind that this talk was given in June of 1994, yet at the beginning
00:51:49 ►
of 1993, there were only 130 websites on 50 servers.
00:51:56 ►
And by the end of 1993, there were 623 websites on 200 servers.
00:52:03 ►
And that is the world at the beginning of the year in which this talk was given.
00:52:08 ►
I’d like to go on right now, but there’s something more important that I want to mention.
00:52:13 ►
The headline is that it’s time for another anonymous Hopkins psychedelic survey.
00:52:18 ►
I think that the best way to tell you about it is to read an email that I received from Roland Griffiths,
00:52:24 ►
who you know is also one of the Planque Norte lecturers, Hi Lorenzo, I humbly return to you once again requesting your help in getting the word out
00:52:39 ►
about another anonymous Hopkins psychedelic survey.
00:52:43 ►
This survey is directed at obtaining descriptive data about a possible,
00:52:48 ►
he quotes here, psychedelic theology, unquote.
00:52:52 ►
That is, experiences occasioned by classic hallucinogen compounds,
00:52:57 ►
for example, psilocybin, LSD, peyote, ayahuasca,
00:53:01 ►
of a personal encounter with something that might be described as
00:53:05 ►
ultimate reality, higher power, God, the example of God being the God that you understand.
00:53:13 ►
We hope to compare the results of this survey with those from a parallel survey
00:53:17 ►
directed at people who have had such experiences in the absence of any substance administration.
00:53:23 ►
We are seeking to get several thousand completers for each of the two surveys. Thank you. And that’s again, flyer.psychedelicencounteringthedivine.org.
00:53:47 ►
And I’ll put that link in today’s program notes, which you know you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:53:54 ►
And by the way, I did take the survey myself and found it to be quite interesting.
00:53:59 ►
It actually gave me some things that I need to be thinking about regarding my own seldom-examined opinions on these issues.
00:54:07 ►
I highly recommend it, and you might be surprised
00:54:10 ►
at how it’ll prod you to consider your own thoughts about the eternal.
00:54:15 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:54:19 ►
Be careful out there, my friends.