Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
In this continuation of a Terence McKenna workshop from June 1994, he does brief riffs about Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” and Orwell’s “1984”. He then continues with some speculations about what he thought 2012 would bring. Step 1, he speculated, would be that everyone in the world would go outdoors and get naked. And from there he takes off on a wild flight of mind that you have to hear for yourself to truly appreciate his relationship (at that time) to a potential 2012 event. Ultimately he reaches a point where he speculates about why it was (and still is) necessary for a species like us humans to evolve.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And today we’re going to rejoin Terrence McKenna and listen to a bit more of his June 1994 workshop,
00:00:35 ►
which also includes his take on the state of the world back then,
00:00:38 ►
and, well, to me it sounds almost as if it was given last night.
00:00:44 ►
Actually, I’d kind of forgotten how prophetic and, well, almost religious Terrence could get when he was
00:00:45 ►
deep in the thrall of his visions of 2012. And since I didn’t come into contact with Terrence
00:00:51 ►
and his work myself until, well, about five years after this talk was given, my remembrance of him
00:00:57 ►
doesn’t include such wild speculations as we’re going to hear in this talk. In other words, and
00:01:03 ►
this is only my personal impression, but some of
00:01:06 ►
the scholarship that’s currently underway might confirm or deny this, but it’s my impression that
00:01:11 ►
as the 2012 date became closer, Terrence began to temper some of his more wild speculations like the
00:01:19 ►
ones that we’re about to hear today. But his payoff really comes when he challenges us with the question,
00:01:26 ►
why do I believe this? And when you hear him say that in a few minutes, you may agree with me that
00:01:33 ►
the only reason I can see that any of us really believe those wild 2012 speculations that he was
00:01:39 ►
coming out with back in the 90s, was because we wanted to believe them.
00:01:50 ►
Which, if you think about it, well, it actually comes kind of close to a religious belief.
00:01:56 ►
Now, when he gets to the point where he says that what is accelerating right now is our technology,
00:02:00 ►
well, keep in mind that this is being said in June of 1994.
00:02:07 ►
At that time, only 3% of the U.S. classrooms had an internet connection, and this was also 13 years before the iPhone was announced. Just think about how much that device has caused us to
00:02:13 ►
evolve. To me, well, it seems clear that Terence was really onto something back then, so let’s join I wondered, Joyce says history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
00:02:30 ►
He could have said history is a nightmare from which I am hoping to awake,
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or history is a nightmare from which I am waiting to awake.
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But he said try.
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Do you think that was chosen and pivotal?
00:02:45 ►
Is there some kernel of truth to be explored there?
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Well, he didn’t.
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Joyce put these words into the mouth of Stephan Dedalus,
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who said,
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history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken,
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showing that Joyce could write
00:03:04 ►
because he didn’t
00:03:05 ►
put the participle where it would
00:03:07 ►
dangle
00:03:08 ►
but this was
00:03:12 ►
in Ulysses
00:03:13 ►
I think
00:03:16 ►
Joyce came to terms
00:03:17 ►
with all this ten years later
00:03:20 ►
in The Wake
00:03:20 ►
I mean The Wake
00:03:23 ►
I’m now speaking of Finnegan’s Wake,
00:03:27 ►
was his masterpiece
00:03:28 ►
and to my mind,
00:03:30 ►
the urtext of what I’m saying.
00:03:34 ►
Finnegan’s Wake is a book
00:03:36 ►
about everything melting
00:03:38 ►
into everything else.
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It’s about all, as he says,
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all space in a nutshell.
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It’s about union of opposites and dissolution of boundaries.
00:03:55 ►
And in that sense, as all great literature must be, it’s prophecy.
00:04:01 ►
And it’s prophecy about the world we’re now living in, but it’s a deeper prophecy about the world we’re going to live in. Yeah, I think that is the text we should be studying.
00:04:25 ►
for all the unused words in the English language and so forth and so on.
00:04:27 ►
It is many things.
00:04:32 ►
But he had an incredible awareness of the sweep of history and of the stages of history and of the necessary conclusion of history.
00:04:37 ►
He was a Viconian.
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He was a fan of Giambattista Vico,
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who was the first person to
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actually lay
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out one
00:04:47 ►
of these
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cyclical
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historical
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schemes of
00:04:50 ►
collapsing
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ingress.
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Yeah.
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Are you
00:04:54 ►
suggesting
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that
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individuals
00:04:58 ►
that
00:04:58 ►
ingest
00:05:00 ►
the five
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grams of
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mushrooms
00:05:04 ►
will have
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an effect on what happened in 2012?
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Or what’s the significance of people that do experience that landscape that’s not seen?
00:05:15 ►
I think it’s a way to liberate yourself from anxiety.
00:05:20 ►
It’s sort of a way to grow up.
00:05:22 ►
If you’re worrying about your car payments
00:05:26 ►
or how you need breast enlargement or any of these things,
00:05:32 ►
then I’m not sure you are fully grounded in the big picture.
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And psychedelics give you the big picture.
00:05:41 ►
I mean, they show you exactly where in the cosmic scheme
00:05:45 ►
you fit,
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which doesn’t mean
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that they diminish you.
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It’s not a,
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oh goodness,
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I’m a mere speck
00:05:52 ►
in the cosmos perception.
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It isn’t that.
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It shows you precisely
00:05:58 ►
where you fit.
00:06:00 ►
And that relieves anxiety.
00:06:04 ►
And as things proceed toward the concrescence,
00:06:08 ►
it’s going to get crazier.
00:06:10 ►
We have an immense capacity for craziness.
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I mean, as an example,
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the Soviet Union, the great menace,
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this historical nightmare, yada, yada, yada,
00:06:24 ►
it’s gone. It doesn’t exist anymore.
00:06:28 ►
It’s nowhere to be seen. And most people’s attitude is, yeah, so what else is new? So
00:06:36 ►
this immense event happened. It only happened five or six years ago, and we’re already on to yeah, so what, something.
00:06:47 ►
But as time speeds up,
00:06:50 ►
change is going to come
00:06:52 ►
faster and faster.
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We will have our perestroika.
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And all the smugness
00:06:58 ►
about those silly Marxists
00:07:00 ►
and how they couldn’t
00:07:01 ►
get it together.
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This society is fraught
00:07:04 ►
with contradictions
00:07:05 ►
like nothing Marxism ever dreamed of
00:07:08 ►
and when the chickens come home to roost in this scene
00:07:12 ►
you may be sure the shit will hit the fan
00:07:15 ►
am I stringing my metaphors here?
00:07:21 ►
and the hardest thing to do
00:07:24 ►
is to preach catastrophic,
00:07:27 ►
transformative change
00:07:29 ►
in a place like Esalen.
00:07:31 ►
I mean, I’ve been coming to Esalen
00:07:33 ►
since 1975.
00:07:35 ►
Every time you come here,
00:07:37 ►
the staff, the people I know
00:07:39 ►
who live here,
00:07:40 ►
they take me aside and say,
00:07:41 ►
oh, it’s just getting wilder and wilder,
00:07:44 ►
and the factions are rising.
00:07:47 ►
We’re having big changes.
00:07:48 ►
There’s been a lot of big change recently.
00:07:51 ►
Well, hell, they must have microscopes I don’t have
00:07:57 ►
because as far as I can see,
00:07:59 ►
they haven’t tightened a bolt
00:08:01 ►
or turned a screw around here since 1980.
00:08:07 ►
And Esalen, I’m not knocking Esalen
00:08:09 ►
Esalen though is a microcosm
00:08:12 ►
of our society
00:08:13 ►
we say change?
00:08:15 ►
what change?
00:08:17 ►
I have to decide whether I’ll vacation
00:08:19 ►
in Hawaii or Southampton this year
00:08:22 ►
that’s change
00:08:23 ►
go to Bosnia.
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Go to Rwanda.
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Go to Bangladesh.
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Go to Bangkok, Calcutta.
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The sense, or even, you know, Moscow.
00:08:35 ►
The sense of chaos is palpable.
00:08:39 ►
It’s palpable.
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And I don’t mean you have to go to a crisis scene like Rwanda.
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Just fly into Bangkok
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on a normal business day and you will suddenly understand something that you can’t understand
00:08:53 ►
by reading newspapers in this country. You’ll understand what population bomb, third world
00:09:00 ►
explosion, high technology, what all these terms mean, because those folks are eating it
00:09:07 ►
right and left. And here in the quiet ivory towers of the managerial societies where the grand
00:09:15 ►
metaphors are handed down to everybody, not much seems to be happening. It’ll come here last,
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seems to be happening.
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It’ll come here last.
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I’m sure.
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I’m sure.
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I mean, even Europe is in turmoil compared to the United States
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by a long shot.
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I mean, Europeans are not so weirdly
00:09:35 ►
childish or something,
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like that film last night.
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You know, they had problems.
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They dealt with them.
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It didn’t require exegesis
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of
00:09:49 ►
second Daniel
00:09:51 ►
as it would here.
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They just solved their social problems
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by lightening up a little
00:09:57 ►
and society didn’t fall
00:10:00 ►
apart. This is a bastion
00:10:02 ►
of recidivism
00:10:03 ►
and conservatism and let’s do it the old wayism.
00:10:08 ►
And it’s a disgrace, you know, we’re losing money, we’re losing time, and we’re losing a sense of
00:10:13 ►
participation in the global adventure. But it doesn’t matter because the changes that are coming can overwhelm any political scheme.
00:10:26 ►
I mean, eventually the planet itself will weigh in.
00:10:30 ►
And this is not something that can be finessed by politicians
00:10:35 ►
in collusion with the New York Times.
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It’s bigger than that.
00:10:40 ►
Instead of suggesting that people should go to Bangladesh or someplace,
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you might as well suggest they should go to Watts in Los Angeles.
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But the interesting thing happens.
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Watts doesn’t exist anymore because we have decided it doesn’t exist.
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I got a map from the automobile shop, a fairly recent one,
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which shows all the suburbs, and Watts isn’t on it anymore.
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Well, how Orwellian right
00:11:05 ►
it’s not there
00:11:07 ►
I had to look on an old map
00:11:09 ►
because I wanted to show somebody
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where it was
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and I had to dig out old maps
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on my car
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to find it
00:11:15 ►
but the AA club said
00:11:17 ►
never happened
00:11:20 ►
it never happened
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it doesn’t exist
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well remember in 1984
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in George Orwell’s Dystopia
00:11:28 ►
the hero or the anti-hero
00:11:30 ►
the main character Winston Smith
00:11:32 ►
he worked for the Bureau of Records
00:11:36 ►
in the Bureau of History
00:11:37 ►
and the Bureau of History was this enormous skyscraper
00:11:41 ►
and it had this neon sign that went 24 hours a day
00:11:44 ►
that said,
00:11:45 ►
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. And this was the motto of the state.
00:11:56 ►
And under that motto, they rewrote history constantly for the party’s purposes.
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for the party’s purposes and this goes on
00:12:05 ►
just exactly as this example
00:12:08 ►
but my basic thing
00:12:11 ►
is not political
00:12:13 ►
I think we can practice smart politics
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or silly politics
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but the wave that’s coming
00:12:19 ►
will wipe out all politics
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because it’s not a political deal
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it’s an evolutionary and
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transformational deal
00:12:27 ►
where we’re headed you can’t even imagine
00:12:29 ►
I can’t imagine
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have you ever tried to
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mention the post
00:12:34 ►
oh yeah there’s hard and soft
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visions of it
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for example
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well a very soft vision for example well
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a very soft vision
00:12:48 ►
meaning not requiring
00:12:51 ►
Christ and the angelic host
00:12:53 ►
to land on the south lawn
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of the White House would be
00:12:56 ►
suppose people just started behaving
00:12:59 ►
appropriately
00:13:00 ►
we talked about this
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how if we began to behave appropriately
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the world would completely change
00:13:08 ►
I mean suppose we began to behave appropriately
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right now
00:13:13 ►
first of all we’d have to think for a minute
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but when you decide to behave appropriately
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the gnosis usually cuts in
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my fantasy is that we would, first of all,
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get outside.
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We would walk out of the building.
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And then we would take off our clothes.
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And then, having left the building,
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having taken off our clothes,
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we would have changed the context of reality so much
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that it’s hard to say what the
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next appropriate thing would be. Maybe we would all make love in a heap, or maybe we would all
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go get large heavy objects and begin smashing all machines. I don’t know what appropriate behavior would be, but that’s one vision of it.
00:14:05 ►
I think it’s something much more dramatic than that.
00:14:09 ►
I think we have to go to religious epiphany to understand what’s happening.
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And that all boundaries will be dissolved.
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That’s what I think will happen.
00:14:27 ►
And then trying to imagine it, I can’t.
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Because everything is defined by boundaries.
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I am me, you are you, the past is the past,
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the future is the future, here is here, there is there.
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If all these distinctions were to be removed, English would
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fail and everything would flow together into some kind of a plenum, a holographic manifestation of
00:14:55 ►
the fractal structure that underlies everything. Well, if that, then what that means is that what happens in 2012
00:15:05 ►
is everything
00:15:08 ►
happens
00:15:09 ►
and how can that be
00:15:12 ►
how could everything happen
00:15:13 ►
I mean how could things happen which were
00:15:16 ►
mutually opposed to each other
00:15:18 ►
well apparently one of the
00:15:20 ►
things that happens is
00:15:21 ►
that that kind of either or logic
00:15:24 ►
is exposed for the Aristotelian fraud that it is.
00:15:28 ►
And that, in fact, A can be A and B at the same time.
00:15:34 ►
A Boolean logic of some sort or a hyperdimensional logic replaces ordinary logic.
00:15:42 ►
I think we become immortal.
00:15:42 ►
replaces ordinary logic.
00:15:44 ►
I think we become immortal.
00:15:48 ►
I think that our religions are our guides,
00:15:54 ►
that something unimaginable is casting an enormous shadow
00:15:57 ►
over what we call history.
00:16:00 ►
And that something, from the very beginning,
00:16:04 ►
perhaps before life left the ocean, that thing at the end of time, now only 18 years away, was calling matter toward it, was calling organization toward it. It is trying to turn the universe into a mirror for itself. It is trying to see what it is.
00:16:31 ►
And biology, geology, psychology, human history, these are all mirrors of the divine, if you want to use an old fashioned word and it is
00:16:46 ►
coming into manifestation
00:16:47 ►
it is turning
00:16:49 ►
itself inside out
00:16:51 ►
the universe is becoming
00:16:54 ►
its creator
00:16:55 ►
if you want to think of it
00:16:57 ►
that way and
00:16:59 ►
it’s bigger
00:17:01 ►
than the biggest
00:17:03 ►
of us.
00:17:08 ►
And we human beings, you know,
00:17:10 ►
we are taught by Christianity that we were created in God’s image.
00:17:14 ►
Funny notion.
00:17:15 ►
You look at yourself standing naked
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in your bathroom on your scales
00:17:20 ►
and you wonder, God’s image?
00:17:23 ►
God must be a weird-looking sort of entity, if that’s true.
00:17:29 ►
But in a way, I think it is true.
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And our society is an image of this thing.
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And so the mind, the connectedness, the network,
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the wiring everything together,
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what we want to do is we’re trying to create something which is
00:17:46 ►
simultaneously the
00:17:48 ►
resurrection body,
00:17:50 ►
a flying saucer,
00:17:52 ►
the philosopher’s stone,
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the human soul,
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and the lotto jackpot.
00:17:58 ►
All at once.
00:18:01 ►
In one package.
00:18:03 ►
And as
00:18:04 ►
things previously separated flow together,
00:18:08 ►
the thing is gaining power.
00:18:11 ►
And it’s been building itself since the universe burst into existence,
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however many billion years ago.
00:18:18 ►
But now the pace has incredibly quickened.
00:18:22 ►
This is, strangely enough, the promise
00:18:26 ►
of all
00:18:27 ►
Western religions.
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Judaism, Christianity,
00:18:33 ►
Islam
00:18:33 ►
are united in one
00:18:36 ►
incredibly unlikely
00:18:37 ►
perception.
00:18:40 ►
The idea that God will
00:18:41 ►
enter history.
00:18:43 ►
That’s what those religions teach.
00:18:46 ►
To a Buddhist, this is the ravings of a diseased intellect.
00:18:50 ►
It makes no sense at all, that statement.
00:18:55 ►
God will enter history.
00:18:58 ►
And yet, this is what these religions have maintained over millennia.
00:19:03 ►
Refining it.
00:19:06 ►
First, you know, the primary revelation to Abraham and then the whole recension of the New
00:19:13 ►
Testament and then Mohammed’s final setting of the dials before secular
00:19:20 ►
scientism made this game obsolete. God will enter history.
00:19:26 ►
That’s the promise of our religions.
00:19:28 ►
And I think it’s an intuition.
00:19:31 ►
It’s not something that even the people who preach it understand.
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It’s an intuition that you cannot escape.
00:19:39 ►
It’s an intuition that you cannot escape
00:19:42 ►
inside the psychedelic experience.
00:19:44 ►
And you say, why do I
00:19:46 ►
believe this? It makes no sense at all. Why do I believe this? It makes no sense at all. You know,
00:19:53 ►
Tertullian was told of his belief in Christianity. He had been a great Gnostic thinker. He was said,
00:20:03 ►
they came to him and they said,
00:20:05 ►
why do you believe this stuff about the resurrected Jew?
00:20:09 ►
It’s absurd.
00:20:11 ►
It’s ridiculous.
00:20:12 ►
And he said, credo te absurdum.
00:20:17 ►
I believe because it is absurd.
00:20:21 ►
This is first century AD.
00:20:24 ►
What a brilliant and prophetic man. I believe it
00:20:28 ►
because it is absurd and therefore it compels belief. And I think that’s what this thing
00:20:36 ►
coming is all about. It has to be believed in because it is absurd. But what is equally unlikely is its absence. I can’t live with
00:20:49 ►
the idea of 10,000 years more of human history. It would be a nightmare. You can see what we’re
00:20:58 ►
headed toward. Rationed resources, propaganda, rigid programming, complete control of the population. There’s no other way to manage ourselves. But God will spare us that horror by decreeing an end to the historical caesura
00:21:25 ►
and the religions
00:21:27 ►
I am not religious
00:21:29 ►
in the sense that I dismiss
00:21:31 ►
these organizations
00:21:33 ►
as scheming weasels
00:21:35 ►
who want to get into your pocket and your pants
00:21:38 ►
but this
00:21:39 ►
intuition
00:21:40 ►
is true
00:21:43 ►
and
00:21:44 ►
we need to make sense of it.
00:21:49 ►
Scientifically.
00:21:50 ►
I think it can be made sense of scientifically.
00:21:54 ►
I think we have kept our eyes averted
00:21:56 ►
from the problem of time.
00:21:59 ►
Because science can’t be science
00:22:02 ►
if time is a shifting set of variables.
00:22:09 ►
Remember how we talked about science depends on experiment to do its business?
00:22:14 ►
So science has kept its eyes very modestly averted from the problems with our model of time.
00:22:22 ►
But it’s very real.
00:22:22 ►
with our model of time.
00:22:24 ►
But it’s very real.
00:22:26 ►
And tonight, if we get a computer,
00:22:28 ►
I’ll show you a model of time that I think is more like the world you’re living in,
00:22:33 ►
more like your own experience,
00:22:35 ►
except that it leads to this impossible-to-come-to-terms-with conclusion
00:22:41 ►
that we are on the cusp of the greatest transformation
00:22:45 ►
since life appeared on the planet, at least.
00:22:50 ►
Yeah.
00:22:51 ►
One of the questions I have is that
00:22:54 ►
the evidence that you’ve been citing so far is local.
00:22:57 ►
It’s Earth-bound evidence.
00:23:00 ►
And is this event a local event
00:23:03 ►
or does it have more cosmic implications?
00:23:06 ►
Well, that’s a great question
00:23:09 ►
and one I’ve spent a lot of time on.
00:23:12 ►
As I said to you a couple of days ago, I think,
00:23:15 ►
I’m not sure we’re talking here about
00:23:17 ►
the god who hung the stars like lamps in heaven,
00:23:21 ►
as Milton said.
00:23:22 ►
More, I think, we’re talking about
00:23:24 ►
the bursting of a
00:23:26 ►
guyan egg
00:23:27 ►
but because
00:23:30 ►
my theory predicts
00:23:32 ►
the future
00:23:33 ►
I
00:23:35 ►
am constrained
00:23:38 ►
to tell you that
00:23:39 ►
since 1972
00:23:42 ►
74
00:23:43 ►
when I finished my theory,
00:23:46 ►
it has indicated that the most novel day of the year 1994
00:23:55 ►
would be the 23rd through the 26th of July.
00:24:10 ►
Well, now it happens that this being that year,
00:24:14 ►
I’ve been waiting for something novel to happen on the 23rd through the 26th of July,
00:24:17 ►
so I won’t have a failure on my hands.
00:24:20 ►
And the solar system has obligingly provided
00:24:24 ►
a planetesimal impact on the surface of Jupiter.
00:24:29 ►
Astronomy magazine called it a one in a hundred million year event.
00:24:36 ►
Great.
00:24:38 ►
How fortunate that I’m around to see it.
00:24:41 ►
You see, you can tell there’s something wrong with their model
00:24:44 ►
if it’s a one in a hundred
00:24:46 ►
million year event and you just happen to be standing there when it happens, that’s a coincidence
00:24:52 ►
too great to ignore. And the philosopher of science, P. W. Bridgman, in a famous statement
00:25:00 ►
once said, a coincidence is what you have left over when you apply
00:25:05 ►
a bad theory
00:25:07 ►
that’s what you get is a coincidence
00:25:10 ►
so
00:25:12 ►
I at least
00:25:14 ►
in answer to your question now
00:25:16 ►
think that this is about
00:25:17 ►
the solar system
00:25:19 ►
what occurs to me
00:25:21 ►
as a nice denouement
00:25:24 ►
that would just settle the thing very precisely would be if at 11.18 a.m. December 21st, 2012, minus nine minutes, the sun were to explode.
00:25:43 ►
that would nicely do it then rainforest preservation
00:25:46 ►
yen to dollar ratio
00:25:49 ►
HIV
00:25:50 ►
it all would suddenly fall into a new perspective
00:25:55 ►
if the sun were to explode
00:25:58 ►
because this planet would vaporize nine minutes later
00:26:02 ►
and all life would die instantly
00:26:04 ►
interesting concept, die instantly.
00:26:07 ►
You know, the Argentine surrealist writer Jorge Luis Borges has a story. I can’t remember what
00:26:15 ►
it’s called, but the idea of this story is that a species cannot enter hyperspace until the last member of the species dies.
00:26:31 ►
And until that moment, the entire species is corralled in some kind of limbo, waiting.
00:26:38 ►
So the explosion of the sun would liberate the last member of many species it would be a great dying and
00:26:50 ►
That sounds like a Holocaust
00:26:53 ►
Except except remember that we don’t know what dying is
00:26:59 ►
we haven’t a clue and
00:27:02 ►
So it’s possible that the pessimists and the optimists are going to discover
00:27:08 ►
that they were both right. And the people who are running around saying, we’re all going to die,
00:27:15 ►
we’ve ruined the earth, we’ve wrecked it, now we’re going to go extinct, are in fact correct. However, this is the purpose of biology. Biology populated
00:27:30 ►
the planet to come to this moment. Now, I don’t seriously suggest this because I don’t seriously
00:27:37 ►
suggest anything, but it is an interesting model. And there’s something wrong with the sun.
00:27:46 ►
I don’t know if you know this.
00:27:48 ►
It’s not much talked about.
00:27:51 ►
But the nuclear chemistry
00:27:56 ►
has been worked out in very great detail
00:28:00 ►
since the 1930s.
00:28:02 ►
It’s not complex if it’s your profession.
00:28:06 ►
Nuclear chemistry is very, very straightforward in 1994.
00:28:12 ►
However, theory does not agree with measurement
00:28:17 ►
when you look at the sun.
00:28:20 ►
If the sun is the kind of nuclear reaction
00:28:24 ►
that we believe it to be
00:28:26 ►
then for reasons not at all clear
00:28:29 ►
it’s emitting 30% less neutrinos
00:28:33 ►
than it should
00:28:34 ►
there is no way to account for this
00:28:39 ►
except to suppose
00:28:42 ►
that one, either nuclear theory has something wrong with it,
00:28:48 ►
and if it does, this is the only problem we’ve discovered
00:28:51 ►
where theory doesn’t match up with measurement.
00:28:55 ►
Either there’s something wrong with theory,
00:28:58 ►
or there’s something wrong with the sun.
00:29:01 ►
Well, what could it be?
00:29:04 ►
Well, the sun is a nuclear
00:29:06 ►
furnace
00:29:07 ►
if it were to go
00:29:10 ►
off the boil
00:29:11 ►
its neutrino output
00:29:13 ►
would drop by the observed
00:29:16 ►
amount
00:29:16 ►
what that means then is that sometime
00:29:20 ►
in the last
00:29:21 ►
100,000 years
00:29:23 ►
nuclear fusion
00:29:25 ►
ceased at the core
00:29:28 ►
of the sun
00:29:28 ►
and the sun is
00:29:31 ►
like a pot of water
00:29:34 ►
that boiled but then you turned
00:29:36 ►
the heat off but it boiled
00:29:37 ►
for a moment longer
00:29:39 ►
that moment is the last
00:29:41 ►
hundred thousand years
00:29:42 ►
and at the center of the Sun the process of
00:29:47 ►
cooling is slowly making its way to the surface and when it arrives at the
00:29:52 ►
surface the Sun will not explode it will undergo a 70% reduction in energy output
00:29:59 ►
almost within a day or two that would effectively freeze out this planet.
00:30:09 ►
There are other forms of instability in the universe
00:30:14 ►
that could make themselves felt.
00:30:17 ►
We know that many times in the history of this planet,
00:30:23 ►
enormous planetesimal objects have impacted.
00:30:29 ►
I showed you the picture of the moon being born
00:30:33 ►
on the cover of Scientific American
00:30:35 ►
when a Mars-sized object smashed in to the archaic Earth.
00:30:41 ►
Over the billions of years that have followed, this has happened over and over again,
00:30:47 ►
not Mars-sized objects, but dig the fact that an object 30 meters in diameter slammed down
00:30:56 ►
50,000 years ago out near Flagstaff, Arizona, and created a crater a half a mile across,
00:31:03 ►
Arizona and created a crater a half a mile across and everything within 800
00:31:05 ►
miles died instantly 65 million years
00:31:11 ►
ago an object smashed down on the
00:31:16 ►
Yucatan what is now the Yucatan
00:31:18 ►
Peninsula breaking up as it entered the
00:31:21 ►
atmosphere a second fragment impacting near the Solomon Islands.
00:31:28 ►
Nothing on earth larger than a chicken lived through that experience.
00:31:32 ►
I mean, you want to talk about an apocalypse,
00:31:38 ►
that object was on the order of, oh, I don’t know,
00:31:44 ►
half a kilometer to a kilometer.
00:31:47 ►
It depends on the speed at which it was moving, so it’s hard to estimate its size.
00:31:52 ►
But it was on that order.
00:31:54 ►
It was five miles into the planet in the first ten seconds of the impact event.
00:32:02 ►
It was five miles deep into the planet in the first ten seconds of the impact event. It was five miles deep into the planet in the first 10 seconds of
00:32:07 ►
the impact. It raised a wall of rock 125,000 feet high that moved out at 15 times the speed of sound
00:32:18 ►
from the impact zone. I mean, we’re talking about a blow that if you had been on the opposite side of the planet,
00:32:25 ►
it would have thrown you across the room.
00:32:28 ►
That happened.
00:32:30 ►
There was an earlier one at the Cretaceous-Jurassic boundary 220 million years ago.
00:32:37 ►
These things are out there.
00:32:40 ►
We are studying them.
00:32:41 ►
There’s a whole program at NASA to study what are called the Apollo Earth Crossers.
00:32:47 ►
These are objects greater than 30 meters in diameter
00:32:51 ►
that actually cross the orbit of the Earth.
00:32:54 ►
That means at some point in the future
00:32:57 ►
they have a potential for impact.
00:33:00 ►
Well, if we fail to detect one of these things
00:33:03 ►
and divert it,
00:33:06 ►
our social systems would come apart completely
00:33:11 ►
under an impact of even moderate size.
00:33:14 ►
So the Earth is a dynamic and dangerous place.
00:33:19 ►
And I think that biology doesn’t ever stand still.
00:33:24 ►
That we are, essentially,
00:33:28 ►
we were born in a taxi,
00:33:30 ►
and we’re going to have to get out of the taxi
00:33:33 ►
at some point.
00:33:34 ►
It’s not home.
00:33:36 ►
And it’s possible that we sense this.
00:33:41 ►
We sense an impact or a catastrophe.
00:33:44 ►
One of the peculiar things about the catastrophe
00:33:47 ►
which killed the dinosaurs is there’s now virtually universal agreement that this happened,
00:33:55 ►
meaning the other theories have more or less had to knuckle under because they just didn’t
00:34:01 ►
have the evidence. But the strongest piece of evidence the anti-impact
00:34:05 ►
theories had was a curious drop in the overall number of species immediately before the impact.
00:34:17 ►
And by that I mean in the million years preceding the impact, a great dying was underway of some sort.
00:34:27 ►
That biology is not three-dimensional like we are
00:34:31 ►
and that the reason a great dying was underway
00:34:34 ►
was because biology somehow in some minded sense
00:34:41 ►
was able to anticipate this incredible
00:34:47 ►
Catastrophic event that was headed toward it and so the die-off began
00:34:52 ►
before the event underwent the
00:34:55 ►
formality of actually
00:34:57 ►
occurring and it could be then that
00:35:02 ►
the planet as it recovered from this
00:35:05 ►
shattering event in a sense
00:35:09 ►
made a resolution
00:35:11 ►
never ever again
00:35:15 ►
can this be allowed to happen
00:35:18 ►
to biology on this planet
00:35:20 ►
never again must we be victim
00:35:23 ►
of this kind of an impact well
00:35:26 ►
there’s only one way to avoid an impact like that they’re inevitable out there
00:35:32 ►
in the future there’s only one way that a planet can avoid that kind of trauma
00:35:38 ►
you have to take an animal you have to cut it from the herd
00:35:46 ►
and you have to say,
00:35:48 ►
you are going to be the species
00:35:51 ►
that protects us
00:35:54 ►
from this kind of an event.
00:35:58 ►
And how can an animal
00:36:00 ►
save a planet from impact
00:36:03 ►
with a planetesimal?
00:36:06 ►
There’s only one way.
00:36:08 ►
Through technology.
00:36:13 ►
Through an ability to build hydrogen bombs and deliver them to their target accurately and quickly.
00:36:20 ►
And so we’re it.
00:36:23 ►
We were chosen.
00:36:45 ►
And so we’re it. We were chosen. We have become deputized to make the journey into the secrets of matter, to gain the power necessary to actually be able to protect the planet, to do more than wring our hands. A century ago, we could only have wrung our hands.
00:36:47 ►
Fifty years ago,
00:36:49 ►
we could only have wrung our hands.
00:36:53 ►
Now, if we had sufficient warning and the physical parameters
00:36:56 ►
of the problem
00:36:56 ►
were within certain limits,
00:36:58 ►
meaning the object not too large,
00:37:01 ►
not moving too fast,
00:37:03 ►
we could probably blow it
00:37:04 ►
to smithereens. And I think that this is
00:37:10 ►
probably the res in detra of Western civilization and science, that this power which we use to
00:37:18 ►
incinerate those who dissent from our political point of view is not for that. It’s for keeping the planet intact
00:37:27 ►
from the inevitable dynamic catastrophes that the physical universe deals out.
00:37:37 ►
Well, so that’s one scenario to answer your question of what would the end be like.
00:37:44 ►
It may not be like that at all.
00:37:46 ►
It may be something completely different.
00:37:49 ►
I’ve noticed that in terms of this acceleration phenomenon,
00:37:54 ►
what is accelerating is technology.
00:37:59 ►
Technology and our own evolution
00:38:01 ►
seem so intimately connected
00:38:03 ►
that they are almost the same thing.
00:38:06 ►
Well, we are now talking about star flight,
00:38:10 ►
time travel,
00:38:12 ►
downloading ourselves into circuitry,
00:38:16 ►
genetic replication of information
00:38:20 ►
so that we can store ourselves
00:38:22 ►
in flounder and tomatoes and octopi. We are
00:38:27 ►
currently debating a number of transformative technologies that are not like building
00:38:34 ►
railroads, digging ditches, or stitching better sails. We are contemplating technologies that
00:38:41 ►
will change the face of ourselves and nature forever
00:38:45 ►
and I think you know
00:38:47 ►
the rate of technology has never
00:38:50 ►
been faster
00:38:51 ►
the rate of new inventions, new discoveries
00:38:54 ►
new principles all pouring
00:38:56 ►
together and I think we said
00:38:58 ►
at some point in this workshop
00:38:59 ►
what is keeping the transcendental
00:39:02 ►
event from happening is
00:39:04 ►
simply the momentum of our habit of not letting it happen.
00:39:08 ►
But if we would lift the barriers, if all information could be freely exchanged among laboratories, scientists, social planners, so forth and so on, we don’t know at this point what we’re capable of. The hardware that we have created
00:39:25 ►
far exceeds the capacity
00:39:28 ►
of any software that we have written.
00:39:32 ►
We have hardware that we don’t know
00:39:34 ►
what you can do with
00:39:36 ►
because we haven’t written the software
00:39:39 ►
to take advantage of its speed,
00:39:41 ►
its depth, its iterative potential. And I think the tools are already
00:39:48 ►
being placed before us that will allow us to either understand and flow with the transformation
00:39:57 ►
that is upon us, or to create it if it is reluctant to appear on schedule.
00:40:05 ►
Plato said if God didn’t exist, man would invent him.
00:40:09 ►
Well, the Western idea of God entails the idea of his entry into history and the salvational scenario.
00:40:19 ►
And so I think it’s safe to say that if that salvational scenario doesn’t exist
00:40:25 ►
then human beings
00:40:27 ►
will create it
00:40:29 ►
out of the imagination
00:40:31 ►
out of the psychedelic
00:40:34 ►
imagination
00:40:35 ►
that’s it
00:40:38 ►
I thought you meant that
00:40:39 ►
2012
00:40:41 ►
mankind would die
00:40:43 ►
not from
00:40:44 ►
a catastrophic event,
00:40:47 ►
but something that we’re doing
00:40:48 ►
would be a progressive thing
00:40:50 ►
like disease is epidemic,
00:40:52 ►
et cetera, et cetera,
00:40:53 ►
and we were killing ourselves
00:40:55 ►
and it would show within 18 years.
00:40:57 ►
No, I’m looking at something
00:40:58 ►
much more dramatic and sudden.
00:41:01 ►
No, I mean, we’re going to have problems,
00:41:03 ►
we’re going to have a lot of problems
00:41:04 ►
for the next 18 years
00:41:06 ►
and an enormous
00:41:07 ►
number of triumphs
00:41:08 ►
and breakthroughs
00:41:09 ►
it’s going to be
00:41:11 ►
like it has been
00:41:13 ►
only more so
00:41:14 ►
up until around
00:41:16 ►
I would say
00:41:17 ►
by 28
00:41:19 ►
2008
00:41:20 ►
2009
00:41:22 ►
around there
00:41:24 ►
I think that I will have either given this wrap up
00:41:28 ►
or this will be the dominant paradigm.
00:41:33 ►
Because either if I’m right, the signs will build.
00:41:38 ►
It’s not going to take us by surprise.
00:41:40 ►
It’s not going to jump us.
00:41:41 ►
The signs are building.
00:41:43 ►
I maintain with my particular
00:41:46 ►
tweak division
00:41:47 ►
that I can see it already
00:41:49 ►
the light at the end of the tunnel
00:41:51 ►
but maybe I’m
00:41:53 ►
bananas or something
00:41:55 ►
so let’s give it five years
00:41:57 ►
let’s give it ten years
00:41:59 ►
but I think it’s going to turn out to sound
00:42:01 ►
more and more and more
00:42:03 ►
like the only game in town because our political
00:42:07 ►
systems are failing. Our ability to control our technology is absolutely beyond us at
00:42:15 ►
this moment. And I think factors are just going to keep accumulating. My career is a phenomenon of this I mean 25 years ago
00:42:26 ►
this rave got you hospitalized
00:42:28 ►
now it’s a profession
00:42:30 ►
you know
00:42:32 ►
and it may be orthodoxy
00:42:35 ►
in 15 years
00:42:37 ►
and 20 years from now
00:42:38 ►
it don’t matter anyhow
00:42:40 ►
does it
00:42:41 ►
it will either have arrived
00:42:43 ►
or I will have slipped
00:42:45 ►
decently away into retirement
00:42:48 ►
and the whole thing
00:42:49 ►
will be something else
00:42:51 ►
time is slowing down
00:42:54 ►
in contrast to our
00:42:55 ►
acceleration against it
00:42:57 ►
you mean like natural time
00:42:59 ►
well it depends
00:43:02 ►
I mean either we’re speeding up
00:43:04 ►
or it’s slowing down
00:43:05 ►
but the sum total of the system
00:43:08 ►
is an impression of enormous acceleration
00:43:11 ►
and that’s I think what we have here
00:43:14 ►
an impression of an enormous acceleration
00:43:17 ►
into the unexpected
00:43:20 ►
the unpredicted
00:43:21 ►
and the mysterious
00:43:26 ►
and then if you love all those things
00:43:29 ►
the unpredictable, the mysterious
00:43:30 ►
the unexpected
00:43:32 ►
you love what is happening
00:43:34 ►
and if you hate those things
00:43:36 ►
you absolutely hate what is happening
00:43:38 ►
you say the world is getting worse and worse
00:43:40 ►
it’s getting terrible
00:43:41 ►
agony, hunger, hysteria
00:43:44 ►
these things are
00:43:46 ►
spreading. That’s right. But not
00:43:47 ►
faster than integration,
00:43:50 ►
information,
00:43:51 ►
managerial skills, strategies for
00:43:54 ►
salvation and new
00:43:55 ►
technologies and social inventions.
00:43:58 ►
It’s all of a piece.
00:44:00 ►
But my faith is
00:44:01 ►
novelty will win.
00:44:03 ►
It is winning or we wouldn’t be here talking like this.
00:44:08 ►
Novelty is winning and it will win
00:44:10 ►
and therefore, you know, sit back and enjoy the show.
00:44:21 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon
00:44:23 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time. of time as a computer geek, I was always taught that the proper term for such a transfer was
00:44:45 ►
uploading, moving our consciousness up into a computer. But now I see how maybe Terence got it
00:44:52 ►
right. Think about this for a minute. If our consciousness was now actually in a computer,
00:44:57 ►
and then if we moved it into a human body, would we be saying that we are downloading or uploading our consciousness?
00:45:10 ►
To me, it seems like going from a computer box to a human body is a step up.
00:45:16 ►
And unless you’re somewhat of a geek like me, this comment is going to be completely meaningless to you.
00:45:18 ►
I’m sorry about that.
00:45:25 ►
Now, I hate to belabor this point because Terence spent a good deal of time on it already, but unless I’m sadly mistaken, it has now been determined that there is a probability,
00:45:30 ►
and not necessarily a low one, that a large asteroid or comet is eventually going to threaten this planet.
00:45:37 ►
We know that the odds are that one day such a thing is going to be a reality.
00:45:42 ►
However, finally, at last, NASA has begun to do something about that problem,
00:45:48 ►
but on an extremely small scale.
00:45:51 ►
Yet, this country spends more money on military hardware
00:45:54 ►
that is designed purposely to kill other humans.
00:45:58 ►
More money is spent on that than all the other nations combined.
00:46:01 ►
Now, I can go on, but the insanity of it all just boggles my mind. There is an actual
00:46:07 ►
threat to all life on this planet, yet the people who own this world ignore it so as to use their
00:46:13 ►
resources to kill others who aren’t like them. Objectively speaking, and from a high perspective,
00:46:20 ►
this what we call the human experiment, well, it seems to me to be a complete
00:46:25 ►
failure. I guess I’m in a bad mood today, huh? So getting on to something a little lighter,
00:46:33 ►
I had to smile during that bit when Terrence was saying how, at the time of this talk at least,
00:46:39 ►
the people at Esalen were saying that big changes were taking place there at Esalen since his last appearance.
00:46:47 ►
Well, I’ve only been to Esalen once, and that was in June of 2012 when Bruce Dahmer and I led a
00:46:53 ►
weekend workshop there. And amazingly or coincidentally, I don’t know what, but at that
00:46:59 ►
time their little community was also all abuzz about the big changes going on.
00:47:09 ►
I think that there were even competing websites devoted to the various factions,
00:47:13 ►
and both sides were predicting the end of it all.
00:47:14 ►
Esalen would go away.
00:47:18 ►
However, I noticed that Esalen is still going strong.
00:47:20 ►
And please don’t let me leave you with the impression that there was anything negative about my experience there.
00:47:24 ►
I simply find it interesting to see how even the most spiritually enlightened among us are still
00:47:29 ►
humans in our hearts and souls, and as such we often squabble. But in Esalen’s case, well, it
00:47:36 ►
seems to me that all of these years of squabbling have actually made the institution all that much
00:47:40 ►
stronger. And by the way, when Terence mentioned what he thought was the big
00:47:45 ►
event that was going to come the following month in July of 94, which would be the comet impact on
00:47:51 ►
Jupiter, well, I decided to check Wikipedia to see if his dates were correct. And at least according
00:47:57 ►
to Wikipedia, they were. But what also happened at that time, which remember would have been after
00:48:03 ►
this talk was given, well what also
00:48:05 ►
happened then was that the peace accord was signed between Israel and Jordan, and this is the accord
00:48:11 ►
that ended a war that had been going on since 1948. Now I’m not trying to support his time
00:48:17 ►
wave theory here, but the evidence there is kind of interesting, don’t you think?
00:48:23 ►
Now it’s been a while since I’ve mentioned this,
00:48:26 ►
but for a few years now, I’ve had a flipboard magazine titled Psychedelic Salon. And there’s
00:48:31 ►
a link to it on our program notes blog, which you know you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:48:37 ►
And now you can read my flipboard magazine on the web, as well as on the flipboard app on your
00:48:43 ►
phone. That magazine is where I post some of the interesting little news items that I come across. Thank you. Inside Bud and Breakfast, the air nub of marijuana tourism. The nine states where marijuana will be legalized last.
00:49:08 ►
An article about how ayahuasca may be used for treating depression.
00:49:13 ►
How cannabis is going to change life as we know it.
00:49:16 ►
And an interesting article about a DEA warning, this is true, about stoner rabbits in Utah.
00:49:24 ►
Which is something you may want to be on the lookout for
00:49:27 ►
if you’re a rabbit hunter up there.
00:49:31 ►
Actually, I’d like to continue on with my thoughts
00:49:33 ►
about watching, hunting, and eating stoned rabbits,
00:49:37 ►
but I’ll spare you that for now.
00:49:39 ►
Instead, I think I just ought to sign off,
00:49:41 ►
have a few tokes, and speculate to myself
00:49:44 ►
about all the funny things a stoned rabbit could do.
00:49:48 ►
And so, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:49:53 ►
Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.