Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Today we pick up on the February 1996 Terence McKenna workshop that we began with Podcast 472. When he gets to his overview of habit and novelty and then moves into a discussion of time, his poetic language provides several interesting mental footholds from which we can expand on some of his thinking about the topic of time. As he says, “We are very naieve about the nature of time,” pointing out that the concept of using an average of measurements taken in a science experiment requires that all moments of time must be the same. “Are they?” he asks. “Is every moment just like the others?” From there he takes us on an interesting journey into the I Ching.
“We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.” -Terence McKenna
“Time is a series of fluctuating variables.” -Terence McKenna
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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.
00:00:24 ►
And today we’re going to get back to that Terence McKenna workshop that we’ve been listening to,
00:00:29 ►
the one that took place in February of 1996.
00:00:33 ►
And in a previous section of this workshop, the one that I played in Podcast 472,
00:00:39 ►
we heard Terence for the first time confronting the fact that there was a possibility of a serious flaw in his time wave hypothesis.
00:00:48 ►
And while I haven’t played any of his detailed talks about the time wave itself for quite a while now,
00:00:53 ►
I thought that today I would go ahead and play this particular time wave discussion
00:00:58 ►
so that we can listen for any signs indicating that, well,
00:01:03 ►
that maybe he was wavering in his devotion to this
00:01:05 ►
favorite idea of his. And if you followed up after podcast 472 and read some of the links to the rest
00:01:13 ►
of the story after this February 1996 workshop ended, well, that’s when Terrence went back to
00:01:20 ►
Hawaii, his home there, to rethink his position. And if you did that research, then you know what happened next.
00:01:28 ►
But for right now, let’s just suspend our knowledge of the rest of the story
00:01:33 ►
and try to listen to Terrence as if we’re hearing him for the first time
00:01:37 ►
when he talks about the time wave and about novelty.
00:01:41 ►
And for what it’s worth, while we now know that the time wave hypothesis fell apart, at least as it was initially conceived by Terence, nonetheless, I still have a hunch that somewhere in his ideas about novelty, habit, and in particular his thoughts about time itself, well, somewhere in there lies a secret that may one day yet give humanity a collective aha moment.
00:02:07 ►
But I wouldn’t put any money on that hunch if I were you.
00:02:11 ►
Now here’s Terence.
00:02:13 ►
This maybe isn’t the appropriate time for this, but it’s okay to mention it.
00:02:19 ►
In trying to think about the evolution of human consciousness, how did it come to be? Most
00:02:26 ►
of you are probably familiar with my theory of psilocybin influence, and I don’t want
00:02:30 ►
to recapitulate that here, but here are some less often said things about it. It’s clear,
00:02:39 ►
I think, if you look at the natural world with an unbiased eye that the highest intelligence, and I don’t want to have a
00:02:48 ►
knock-down, drag-out debate about this, but the highest intelligence to my mind without a lot of
00:02:55 ►
arm-waving is the behavior exhibited by large hunting cats, predators,
00:03:11 ►
cats. Predators, animals which live on plants, like cattle, for example, have no interest in observing the behavior of other animals. They are very preoccupied with just churning through
00:03:19 ►
herbaceous foliage. Predators, large carnivores, on the other hand, to be a successful hunter,
00:03:28 ►
any hunter will tell you, you must understand, understand, note this word, the thing you hunt.
00:03:37 ►
So in a sense, what these large cats are able to do is they’re able to think like foxes, think like rabbits, think like antelope,
00:03:49 ►
and this allows them to successfully predate upon these animals. Well then, it’s very interesting
00:03:56 ►
that in shamanism worldwide, at its most primitive level, and often in the presence of hallucinogenic plants,
00:04:06 ►
you find this emphasis on large predatory cats and jaguar consciousness and shape-shifting.
00:04:16 ►
And essentially, it’s almost as though the earliest form of human consciousness
00:04:22 ►
was not human consciousness at all. We saw the predatory
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success of these large cats. We admired it. We imitated it. And people who could become cats
00:04:37 ►
are what would be a kind of a shaman, a jaguar shaman. Very interesting.
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Well, but then the difference between a hunting cat,
00:04:49 ►
I believe, and a human being
00:04:52 ►
is that the intelligence
00:04:53 ►
of the hunting cat
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is environmentally cued
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by circumstance.
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An envelope runs by,
00:05:03 ►
it pursues and kills it
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in a certain way
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which has worked before
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human beings away from the hunt
00:05:11 ►
intoxicated by
00:05:14 ►
just large amounts of fresh meat
00:05:18 ►
which if you’re marginally
00:05:21 ►
nutritionally based and there’s a big kill
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and the whole village eats then usually everybody has sex together you know, marginally nutritionally based, and there’s a big kill,
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and the whole village eats,
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then usually everybody has sex together, and then there’s probably drug-taking
00:05:31 ►
and religious thanksgiving,
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and so everybody’s feeling pretty good.
00:05:36 ►
And what emerges there is fantasy.
00:05:42 ►
This is what we do.
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We can command images in the absence of their physical stimulus.
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So, and being highly eroticized animals,
00:05:58 ►
sexual fantasy is a major preoccupation of primates,
00:06:04 ►
apparently, as you’ve observed.
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If you’ve ever taken children to the monkey house at the zoo,
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then you have to explain all this wild masturbation that’s going on.
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It leads to fascinating discussions of animal and human behavior.
00:06:20 ►
So highly sexed human beings eating well after imitating cats
00:06:26 ►
after having sex, after taking drugs
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are certain then to contemplate
00:06:33 ►
the great what ifs of life
00:06:36 ►
what if we had gone earlier
00:06:39 ►
to the water hole, perhaps we would have found
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more game than we did
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and then in the erotic
00:06:46 ►
domain erotic fantasy is entirely a
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series of what-ifs what if I had been
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accepted in my in my approach to so-and-so
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and then what if they had taken me into
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the bushes and then what if and what if
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and as the hormones start flowing
00:07:08 ►
the what ifs start coming
00:07:10 ►
with greater clarity
00:07:11 ►
well this eroticization
00:07:14 ►
and this
00:07:16 ►
phenomenon of hunting
00:07:18 ►
all tumbled together
00:07:20 ►
I think probably was the basis
00:07:22 ►
for the emergence of
00:07:24 ►
early human consciousness
00:07:25 ►
and of course it circles around
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the issue of free will
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implicit in the what if
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is the path not taken
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and by endlessly contemplating
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these bifurcating paths of what ifs
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slowly an early
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human being or a proto-hominid
00:07:48 ►
would come to have the sense
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that aha
00:07:51 ►
behind all of this
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looking at all of this
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is something called
00:07:58 ►
choice maker
00:07:59 ►
and then self
00:08:02 ►
identification
00:08:03 ►
I am choice maker. I choose. And out of the images in my mind, I, certain ones, to and the psychedelic stimulation to the imagination
00:08:25 ►
and the early human environment of nutritional pressure,
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strange foods, alkaloid-heavy foods impinging on the genome,
00:08:34 ►
so forth and so on, really was what took us over the threshold.
00:08:40 ►
It was the combination of these hunting fantasies with erotic fantasy
00:08:46 ►
driven by drugs and nutrition
00:08:51 ►
just a new piece of data
00:08:54 ►
which is grist for this mill
00:08:56 ►
some of you have heard me talk about
00:08:58 ►
Roland Fisher’s experiments
00:09:03 ►
where he showed graduate students
00:09:06 ►
parallel bars
00:09:09 ►
and then gave them small amounts of psilocybin
00:09:12 ►
and showed that edge detection was increased
00:09:15 ►
in the presence of psilocybin
00:09:18 ►
visual acuity
00:09:20 ►
well I gave a talk like this in Mexico
00:09:25 ►
and Sasha Shulgin was in the audience
00:09:27 ►
and he said there’s an even better set
00:09:30 ►
of Fisher experiments
00:09:31 ►
which make your point even more strongly
00:09:34 ►
he did another set of experiments
00:09:37 ►
in which he built an apparatus
00:09:39 ►
where you could raise a white bar
00:09:43 ►
over words projected on a screen so that only the first, say the
00:09:53 ►
words were three inches tall, only the first quarter inch could be shown. We’d say, people,
00:10:00 ►
can you read this sentence with only 10% of the letter shapes visible?
00:10:06 ►
On psilocybin, people were far better
00:10:09 ►
at this task than on the natch.
00:10:14 ►
And if you analyze what is this task,
00:10:17 ►
it’s a very complex coordination of detail.
00:10:21 ►
Very complex.
00:10:22 ►
It’s the ability to extract information from a situation and reach the
00:10:27 ►
correct conclusion. So, you know, I think we’re on very firm ground here in suggesting that drugs do
00:10:37 ►
not impede one’s access to the nature of reality. They often demonstrably
00:10:45 ►
and in very statistically controlled situations
00:10:48 ►
can be shown to enhance one’s ability
00:10:52 ►
to coordinate and understand reality.
00:10:54 ►
Yeah?
00:10:56 ►
You mean after the drug wore off,
00:11:00 ►
could they do this?
00:11:01 ►
I doubt that the experiment was done.
00:11:04 ►
It would be interesting. Of course
00:11:06 ►
the assumption would be no,
00:11:08 ►
but the experiment would
00:11:09 ►
certainly be worth doing.
00:11:11 ►
Can one learn on
00:11:14 ►
psilocybin to then do
00:11:15 ►
something which persists
00:11:17 ►
after the drug is
00:11:19 ►
gone? It’s an interesting
00:11:21 ►
question.
00:11:24 ►
Yes, I noticed
00:11:25 ►
when I was taking Prozac
00:11:27 ►
that what it does is
00:11:29 ►
it sets you slightly
00:11:31 ►
forward in social
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space, and that
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once you have sufficiently analyzed
00:11:37 ►
what it does, you don’t
00:11:39 ►
have to take Prozac. You can
00:11:41 ►
fake it. It’s an attitude.
00:11:44 ►
It’s basically a slight attitudinal adjustment
00:11:47 ►
toward social space. I describe it as leaning slightly into it. And once you become familiar
00:11:55 ►
with the feeling, you can just do it. So the drug becomes irrelevant. It has taught you a behavior, the positive feedback from which is so positive
00:12:08 ►
that in the absence of the drug you continue to behave this way. I’m sure that hasn’t been
00:12:16 ►
studied. But, you know, I think serotonin release is related to social space.
00:12:32 ►
And each of us, we feel a certain level of attraction and distance to each other.
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And we absolutely accept this.
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We don’t understand that other people are different.
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Occasionally it will be in your face when somebody will stand in your social space and then you realize, oh, this person is insensitive.
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They stand too close.
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But except in these kind of extreme cases
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and sometimes indicating a pathology,
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we manage to adjust these social distances.
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But it’s a kind of index of alienation.
00:13:06 ►
How interested are you in what other people
00:13:08 ►
have to say
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because it’s not something that’s cultural
00:13:11 ►
because it’s a new thing
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I think in cities though people
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sense invisible
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rules of social distancing
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not only social distancing
00:13:21 ►
but how eye contact is to be
00:13:24 ►
handled
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when a bunch of guys are loitering not only social distancing, but how eye contact is to be handled.
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When, you know, a bunch of guys are loitering, flipping knives,
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you know, you don’t cross to the other side of the street because then they know you’re, you know,
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and you don’t make eye contact because that’s confrontive
00:13:42 ►
and you just have to tune your aura this certain way.
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We primates are very, very subtly adept at this,
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but it doesn’t register in language much.
00:13:55 ►
No, this is something I talk about when I talk about human evolution.
00:14:00 ►
See, most animals specialize their foods very rigidly.
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This is almost genetically programmed.
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It’s very rare to find an omnivorous animal.
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Almost primates are the only ones and not all primates. And the thinking is that this is a very conservative
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food acquisition strategy
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is necessary because
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it holds down natural rates
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of mutation.
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If you just started eating plants
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you would contact
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all kinds of weird things because
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plants produce weird
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tertiary and secondary compounds
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that are designed to attract insects or repel insects
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and you would get all screwed up.
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One argument for what happened to us
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is that we had a very primate-like diet
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of insects and fruits and canopy-available foods.
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And when the canopy got under nutritional pressure,
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we had two choices.
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Either go extinct
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or begin to experiment with food.
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And somehow our…
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The thing that has always saved us
00:15:25 ►
is our flexibility somehow in that
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situation we didn’t go extinct and I’ve
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just recently seen new papers about
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in several parts of the world they’ve
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discovered species of monkeys that only
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leave the canopy to acquire
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fungus the jungle treetops but they will come down that only leave the canopy to acquire fungus,
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the jungle treetops. But they will come down to eat certain fungi.
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And even in the northwest coast forests of Oregon,
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there are these flying squirrels,
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which never come to the ground,
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except they have some amazing ability to locate truffles.
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And somebody described these things to me.
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They come sailing down and they hit the ground
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that looks like about 20 miles an hour,
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dig furiously right where they hit,
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grab the truffles and they’re out of there.
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And I think
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psilocybin in the early human
00:16:28 ►
diet was something that we
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encountered as we moved into the grasslands
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and that was a very
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tryptamine rich environment
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not only mushrooms but
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gramine
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and grasses
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and cereals
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baboons and other grassland primates
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eat a lot of corms,
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the roots of grasses.
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That stuff has a lot of toxic stuff in it.
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You know, the thing about our flexibility,
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we’ve talked in these workshops
00:17:00 ►
about the bonobo versus the chimpanzee
00:17:05 ►
in terms of sexual styles.
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You know, we differ by chimpanzees
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by 3% in the genome.
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There’s another kind of chimpanzee
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called pygmy chimpanzees or bonobos
00:17:20 ►
that are not really physically smaller
00:17:24 ►
than regular chimpanzees.
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Their genome differs only by 2%,
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but the sexual styles of these two animals are so different
00:17:36 ►
that it’s astonishing that two animals so similar in genome
00:17:42 ►
could have such completely diametrically sexual styles.
00:17:45 ►
The chimpanzees are monogamous,
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they have pair bonding,
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they have sharply enforced
00:17:54 ►
and maintained male dominance hierarchies,
00:17:58 ►
so forth and so on.
00:17:59 ►
The bonobos are polymorphically sexual,
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orgiastic,
00:18:07 ►
tolerate homosexuality,
00:18:09 ►
tolerate incest,
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tremendous,
00:18:14 ►
all conflict is mediated through release of sexual energy.
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Well, then you have human beings.
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And we are apparently right on the cusp
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because we have rigidly defined monogamous societies
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where any breach of these monogamous rules
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brings death and disgrace,
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and we have polygamous societies,
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and we have societies where brothers,
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wives are shared with brothers as a matter of course.
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Very interesting that our sexual style is not under genetic control.
00:18:53 ►
And I maintain that part of our strange position in reality
00:19:01 ►
has to do with the fact that we, in the past, in the distant hominid past,
00:19:11 ►
had a male dominance hierarchy as sharply defined probably as the chimpanzees.
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Anxiety about female sexual activity, anxiety about lines of male paternity, rigid enforcement
00:19:28 ►
of all this, so forth and so on. At some time in our evolutionary past, when psilocybin
00:19:35 ►
became a major component of our diet, it acted as a catalytic enzyme on the psychoerotic complex
00:19:47 ►
and dissolved this tendency toward male dominance
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and replaced it with a more highly sexually expressive,
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polygamous, orgiastic style of tribalism,
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which persisted for a long time, maybe 50,000 years,
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as long as there was sufficient psilocybin in the diet
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that increased sexual activity and dissolution of ego and so forth was maintained.
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But the genetic programming was never stripped out.
00:20:35 ►
Well, so then after 50,000 years of orgiastic polygamy and that kind of social glue,
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and that kind of social glue.
00:20:48 ►
And notice the interesting thing about an orgiastic society is no concept of male paternity.
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Men do not know who their children are.
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Consequently, there is no sense of my children.
00:21:01 ►
There is an enormous loyalty to the children of the group. Children collectively then
00:21:08 ►
are seen as a very precious and and conservable resource. Well eventually this happy story came
00:21:19 ►
to an end and the mushrooms dried up, became seasonal, the grassland turned to desert
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and with a big thump everybody got kicked out of Eden
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and with the withdrawal of the psilocybin
00:21:33 ►
into shamanism, into seasonal festivals
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and eventually its complete suppression and disappearance
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by anxious male dominators,
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the old hominid style of egocentrism and
00:21:49 ►
dominance hierarchy reestablished itself
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right at the time when agriculture was
00:21:55 ►
invented. And so suddenly then what you
00:21:58 ►
get are kingship, standing armies, role
00:22:02 ►
specialization, marginalization of females,
00:22:08 ►
a whole bunch of negative, in my humble opinion,
00:22:13 ►
social styles and behaviors.
00:22:18 ►
We then are the unhappy inheritors of this.
00:22:22 ►
For 10,000 years, roughly,
00:22:25 ►
we’ve been away from
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the sacramental dissolving
00:22:30 ►
of male ego
00:22:33 ►
and sexual dominance hierarchies.
00:22:36 ►
And so there’s a huge amount
00:22:38 ►
of sexual contradiction
00:22:41 ►
and unhappiness
00:22:43 ►
and this doesn’t work and that doesn’t work
00:22:46 ►
and nothing seems to work
00:22:48 ►
and this seems to be our cross to bear.
00:22:51 ►
Well, it’s because we are neither bonobos nor chimpanzees.
00:22:56 ►
We are somewhere in between
00:22:58 ►
and it’s almost a matter of which side of the bed you get up on
00:23:02 ►
or what you ate that day
00:23:04 ►
or what your drug habits are,
00:23:07 ►
what kind of a sexual creature you are
00:23:09 ►
and what kind of styles of sexual behavior
00:23:12 ►
you’re comfortable with or uncomfortable with.
00:23:15 ►
It’s a very curious thing
00:23:18 ►
and it’s related to our high intelligence somehow.
00:23:24 ►
I don’t exactly understand this, except maybe the connecting
00:23:28 ►
key is erotic fantasy. That erotic fantasy as an exercise eventually turns into fantasy,
00:23:38 ►
period, and then that eventually turns into government, poetry, religion, drama, humor, mathematics, music, so forth and so on.
00:23:55 ►
Anybody want a short comment?
00:23:57 ►
In the right way.
00:23:59 ►
Yeah, basically what we want to do…
00:24:01 ►
We can’t just replicate.
00:24:04 ►
We want to become as biological as possible.
00:24:08 ►
And then some of these issues about the internet will disappear.
00:24:13 ►
I mean, somebody recently…
00:24:15 ►
Here’s an interesting statistic.
00:24:17 ►
Somebody told me recently that in an average square inch of soil,
00:24:23 ►
there’s 500 miles of mycelial fiber. 500 miles of
00:24:30 ►
mycelial fiber in every cubic inch of
00:24:32 ►
topsoil on this planet. Well, imagine if
00:24:36 ►
you could plug into that net. We don’t
00:24:39 ►
have to lay copper or fiber optics. If
00:24:42 ►
you’re subtle enough, the wires are already there.
00:24:48 ►
Yeah, what would…
00:24:49 ►
Well, when you take psilocybin,
00:24:53 ►
it’s interesting that many people report
00:24:56 ►
the onset of hallucination
00:24:58 ►
is always the onset of…
00:25:00 ►
You see a white network against darkness.
00:25:03 ►
You actually see the mycelium
00:25:06 ►
and then shortly thereafter the visions.
00:25:10 ►
And what would we think of the internet
00:25:12 ►
if we didn’t have to lay any wire
00:25:14 ►
or transmit anything through the air
00:25:16 ►
but we could just plug in to the wiring
00:25:19 ►
already in the ground?
00:25:22 ►
That may sound like pie in the sky
00:25:24 ►
but it’s not that.
00:25:28 ►
Well, he wanted to transmit electricity
00:25:30 ►
through the ground.
00:25:32 ►
I don’t think he realized
00:25:34 ►
that there were biological wires to do it
00:25:37 ►
because of the fineness of these things.
00:25:40 ►
But I think, you know,
00:25:42 ►
commandeering, co-opting,
00:25:44 ►
modeling and copying nature is what
00:25:49 ►
it’s all about. This is what alchemy understood. Nature is the great teacher. Nature has had,
00:25:57 ►
you know, five billion years to go down the worthless pathways and the toxic pathways
00:26:06 ►
and has always returned to a certain Tao of an economy of construction
00:26:15 ►
and architecture and energy that is more elegant than anything we can possibly imagine.
00:26:21 ►
we can possibly imagine.
00:26:24 ►
So, you know, a truly human future lies in integrating, studying,
00:26:29 ►
imitating, and becoming
00:26:31 ►
part of the natural world
00:26:35 ►
without leaving any of our
00:26:37 ►
so-called technology
00:26:39 ►
or database behind.
00:26:44 ►
Well, that’s it for this evening, I think.
00:26:51 ►
Is there anything hanging from this afternoon?
00:26:56 ►
Yeah.
00:26:57 ►
Yeah, we wanted that.
00:26:59 ►
Yeah.
00:26:59 ►
That was a grouping call.
00:27:01 ►
Oh, yeah?
00:27:02 ►
What about that?
00:27:03 ►
Well, can you explain that theory
00:27:05 ►
about how we don’t have 75% females?
00:27:09 ►
No.
00:27:10 ►
What was the statistic first on?
00:27:12 ►
Well, it was in the context of supposing
00:27:15 ►
that you were going to reduce population
00:27:19 ►
by appealing to high-tech, industrial, educated women
00:27:24 ►
to have one child only.
00:27:26 ►
Well, then you could leave it there
00:27:30 ►
and you would get this demographic collapse.
00:27:34 ►
But if you also…
00:27:35 ►
What would happen?
00:27:36 ►
You’d have a 50% reduction of population in 30 years.
00:27:41 ►
And every successive 30 years…
00:27:44 ►
There would still be 50-50.
00:27:45 ►
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.
00:27:47 ►
So then the other possibility is
00:27:51 ►
if you want to address
00:27:54 ►
the perceived overexpression
00:27:58 ►
of masculinity in society,
00:28:00 ►
I’m saying rather than try and change men,
00:28:09 ►
change the ratio of men to women. Obviously if you do this, and there are more women than men, women will occupy more managerial positions,
00:28:18 ►
there will be a compensatory feminizing of society,
00:28:25 ►
which seems to me less distorting
00:28:29 ►
and less a form of social engineering
00:28:32 ►
than trying to use the mass media
00:28:35 ►
to guilt-trip men into suppressing testosterone levels.
00:28:41 ►
In other words, so just…
00:28:43 ►
That’s going on.
00:28:47 ►
Yeah, I feel that’s going on. And there are a number of things associated with that, that men
00:28:51 ►
are undervalued for the simple reason that there are too damn
00:28:55 ►
many of them. It’s a drag on the market.
00:29:01 ►
You’re liking this concept.
00:29:04 ►
30-70 would be probably as the natural ratio.
00:29:11 ►
It’s well known…
00:29:13 ►
Well, it’s well…
00:29:15 ►
70% women, 30% men, yeah.
00:29:21 ►
Why would that be natural?
00:29:23 ►
Well, it’s well known that maternal
00:29:26 ►
resources in almost
00:29:28 ►
all societies are disproportionately
00:29:30 ►
directed toward
00:29:32 ►
male babies
00:29:33 ►
and even at that
00:29:36 ►
the best you can achieve is
00:29:38 ►
50-50
00:29:39 ►
so you know if everything
00:29:42 ►
were to relax
00:29:44 ►
probably male births would decline in the direction that I’m indicating.
00:29:52 ►
It’s just, you know, I have not heard anybody else advocate this.
00:29:56 ►
No radical lesbian collective, nobody has seemed to notice that you could, that, you know, what is it, sacrosanct?
00:30:07 ►
You can’t suggest that these population ratios
00:30:10 ►
could be shifted.
00:30:11 ►
Why not?
00:30:13 ►
It makes perfect sense.
00:30:15 ►
Why?
00:30:20 ►
Well, you understand the demographic collapse
00:30:24 ►
occasioned by one woman, one child, right? Well, you understand the demographic collapse occasioned by one woman, one child, right?
00:30:27 ►
Well, if you have fewer men, you have more women advancing at a faster rate.
00:30:37 ►
You have more managerial positions open to women.
00:30:50 ►
open to women, well, unless the men grow proportionately more competitive as their numbers decrease.
00:30:57 ►
I mean, all kinds of, you can play all kinds of games with curves here, but it’s not written adamantine, it’s just something to get you thinking about the fact that we’re not trapped
00:31:07 ►
you thinking about the fact that we’re not trapped in any sense of the word. The fact that just with a one woman, one child policy, do that for 120 years and a major item on the political agenda
00:31:15 ►
will be the question, are there enough human beings in the world? You know, you’d be down under a billion, under 500 million people in 120 years
00:31:27 ►
without pogroms, epidemics, extermination campaigns, genocide.
00:31:33 ►
No, just simply one woman, one child.
00:31:38 ►
So the idea that there’s some huge Malthusian momentum that can’t be overcome,
00:31:42 ►
huge Malthusian momentum that can’t be overcome.
00:31:45 ►
The momentum is not Malthusian,
00:31:49 ►
it’s cultural and ideological.
00:31:53 ►
Why is that a good idea?
00:31:56 ►
How does it work?
00:31:58 ►
Aborting male children is something?
00:32:01 ►
Well, hmm.
00:32:04 ►
Equal distribution, I’m saying equal distribution of maternal resources would probably cause it to happen naturally.
00:32:14 ►
That in the present situation, male babies receive more extensive attention, nutrition, blah, blah.
00:32:24 ►
So just… In this country? Yeah. more extensive attention, nutrition, blah, blah.
00:32:26 ►
So just to… In this country?
00:32:27 ►
Yeah.
00:32:29 ►
Bringing up some emotion.
00:32:34 ►
Well, any solution is unworkable in the real world
00:32:42 ►
without bringing up some emotion.
00:32:45 ►
It’s the principle of you don’t make omelets
00:32:47 ►
without breaking eggs.
00:32:49 ►
The only course which seems to raise no emotion,
00:32:53 ►
and that also raises emotion,
00:32:56 ►
is business as usual.
00:32:58 ►
You know, we’re teetering on the brink
00:33:01 ►
of several forms of apocalypse at once.
00:33:04 ►
The idea that you’re going to waltz out of here
00:33:07 ►
without maybe raising the hair on the back of your neck
00:33:10 ►
is probably fairly naive.
00:33:14 ►
But this just shows, you know,
00:33:16 ►
the situation is open and flexible.
00:33:18 ►
I’m not even interested in defending this to the death.
00:33:22 ►
I just think it’s interesting
00:33:25 ►
that nobody else has ever suggested.
00:33:28 ►
I think there’s good reason why…
00:33:30 ►
Well, even the one woman, one child thing.
00:33:36 ►
I think I’m on your side with that one.
00:33:39 ►
Also, we’ve come halfway.
00:33:41 ►
That’s progress.
00:33:44 ►
Well, I just think that we’ve come halfway, that’s progress.
00:33:51 ►
Well, I just think that there’s an excessive strain on all resources.
00:33:53 ►
It could be cured in many ways.
00:33:56 ►
It could be cured by limiting population,
00:34:00 ►
it could be limited by limiting consumerism,
00:34:10 ►
by limiting availability of consumer goods, by what Hazel Henderson calls real cost pricing, you know, which causes a can of beer to go to $30, this kind of thing.
00:34:18 ►
There are many approaches. The point is not any given solution or ideological axe to grind,
00:34:26 ►
but that the situation is multivariable and highly flexible and not determined.
00:34:35 ►
That’s the basic message.
00:34:38 ►
Well, yeah, that’s what I said, all these other ways.
00:34:41 ►
That was what the list was about, other ways to do it.
00:34:47 ►
And, you know, then there’s also the horror trips,
00:34:49 ►
like Ebola and all that,
00:34:52 ►
which is lurking out there.
00:34:54 ►
If we don’t come up with a solution,
00:34:57 ►
there are natural processes
00:34:59 ►
which eventually, at some point,
00:35:03 ►
will begin to cut in.
00:35:05 ►
Ebola is a typical example.
00:35:09 ►
Well, maybe that’s enough about all of that.
00:35:11 ►
Okay.
00:35:14 ►
Moving on, tonight we’ll look at this mathematical model of the time wave and talk about it,
00:35:26 ►
and maybe in a slightly different form
00:35:29 ►
than we have in the past.
00:35:31 ►
I can do this as a set piece thing,
00:35:35 ►
which is a voyage through time
00:35:37 ►
where you start with billions of years on the screen
00:35:40 ►
and then hundreds of millions
00:35:42 ►
and then millions and then decades
00:35:44 ►
asking you
00:35:46 ►
to compare your knowledge of history, specious though it may be, to the unfolding wave,
00:35:55 ►
and ask yourself if there is some kind of resonance for you, some kind of congruence
00:36:02 ►
that you’re looking at. First of all, that there is such a thing as novelty
00:36:07 ►
that we can hypothetically quantify and chart
00:36:13 ►
like a stock price or the rise and fall of temperature.
00:36:18 ►
In other words, a measurable quality in the universe called novelty opposed by another measurable
00:36:28 ►
and contra-intuitive concept
00:36:32 ►
habit
00:36:33 ►
and I mentioned this I think today or last night
00:36:37 ►
the universe as a struggle
00:36:39 ►
between these two fundamental forces
00:36:42 ►
habit and novelty
00:36:44 ►
habit building up conserving, perpetuating,
00:36:49 ►
acting as the medium of causal efficiency through time,
00:36:55 ►
and novelty, perturbation of habit,
00:37:00 ►
the unexpected, symmetry breaks,
00:37:03 ►
the unexpected turning, the statistically improbable input
00:37:09 ►
into the system. And then, once you have these two ideas in place, for me it seems very obvious
00:37:19 ►
then, based on the straightforward story that the combined natural sciences lay out for us, that the story
00:37:29 ►
of the universe is the story then of what I call the conservation or the, of novelty. Novelty is what the universe is producing
00:37:46 ►
out of
00:37:49 ►
disorganization, out of the
00:37:52 ►
incredibly habitual
00:37:55 ►
laws of raw physics.
00:37:58 ►
The universe
00:37:59 ►
is slowly perturbing itself
00:38:02 ►
to more novel
00:38:04 ►
and higher states
00:38:05 ►
of complexity and order.
00:38:08 ►
And it does this by a series of different tricks.
00:38:10 ►
And we talked about dissipative structures
00:38:13 ►
and autopoiesis and autocatalytic hypercycles
00:38:16 ►
and all this jargon that basically means
00:38:20 ►
perturbation through fluctuation
00:38:22 ►
to higher states of order.
00:38:28 ►
And so by this version of reality,
00:38:40 ►
nature is a continuous gradient from the laws which rule the motion of atoms and galaxies,
00:38:42 ►
basically Newton’s laws,
00:39:08 ►
a continuous gradient through biology into psychology into game and information theory and that all of this phenomena arches this law of the conservation of novelty
00:39:11 ►
but it isn’t a smooth curve
00:39:15 ►
it isn’t an
00:39:19 ►
uninterrupted descent into novelty
00:39:23 ►
it’s a tendency toward novelty
00:39:26 ►
which can be perturbed and interrupted
00:39:30 ►
on any scale
00:39:32 ►
so that it may be perturbed and interrupted
00:39:35 ►
for milliseconds
00:39:36 ►
or it may be perturbed and interrupted
00:39:39 ►
for a hundred million years.
00:39:43 ►
But in any case,
00:39:44 ►
given a sufficient amount of time,
00:39:47 ►
this tendency toward the conservation and production of novelty
00:39:52 ►
will reassert itself.
00:39:55 ►
Well, several interesting consequences follow from a model like this.
00:40:02 ►
One is is human beings
00:40:05 ►
become much more interesting
00:40:07 ►
players in the game
00:40:09 ►
human beings emerge
00:40:11 ►
not then as chance
00:40:14 ►
agglomerations
00:40:17 ►
of advanced
00:40:18 ►
biology
00:40:19 ►
statistically improbable
00:40:21 ►
but nevertheless somehow present
00:40:24 ►
without definable purpose or raison d’etre,
00:40:31 ►
changes from that into the inevitable consequences
00:40:37 ►
of the conservation of novelty.
00:40:41 ►
So humanity goes from being the meaningless and the unexpected to the inevitable. existential imputing of values
00:41:09 ►
out of essence onto reality,
00:41:16 ►
but instead it becomes an acting out of a portion
00:41:21 ►
of the natural universe.
00:41:23 ►
In other words, it upsets the existential apple cart.
00:41:27 ►
It makes people matter.
00:41:29 ►
It not only makes people matter,
00:41:31 ►
it makes history matter.
00:41:33 ►
It not only makes history matter,
00:41:35 ►
it gives it an arrow toward an understandable goal,
00:41:43 ►
something that we would call complexity or concrescence or holographic self-realization,
00:41:56 ►
something that we can now, from our present position in technology and so forth actually see ahead of us how this might work,
00:42:08 ►
how there might potentially be a world of distributed human consciousness in biological
00:42:15 ►
bodies with some kind of very painless interface into a godlike sense of omniscience, which
00:42:23 ►
was the electrically stabilized and maintained data
00:42:27 ►
field of the species. I mean, that’s basically what we’re talking about here. We can see
00:42:33 ►
how we could get there from here with nothing more than refinements of our technology and our engineering goals. So that thing, the eschaton,
00:42:47 ►
becomes then a kind of inevitable attractor.
00:42:52 ►
This process is not entirely causal
00:42:55 ►
in the sense that it does not entirely proceed
00:42:57 ►
simply from the past into the future.
00:43:02 ►
The notion being put forward here
00:43:05 ►
is that time is not a perfectly smooth,
00:43:10 ►
perfectly level,
00:43:12 ►
perfectly frictionless surface
00:43:14 ►
on which you are free to skate
00:43:17 ►
in any dimension with equal energy.
00:43:20 ►
No.
00:43:22 ►
Time is like everything else in the universe. Time has a fine structure.
00:43:27 ►
It has a textural quality to itself. It has, in fact, a kind of landscape. And events,
00:43:40 ►
systems of cause and effect flow over this landscape
00:43:45 ►
seeking something that we can visualize
00:43:48 ►
as low energy states or states
00:43:52 ►
of high novelty which are defined as
00:43:55 ►
the bottoms of these creodes
00:43:58 ►
these epigenetic
00:44:01 ►
valleys through which processes
00:44:03 ►
are flowing.
00:44:08 ►
Well, this is a very different picture of time than the Newtonian picture.
00:44:11 ►
The Newtonian picture is a conservative picture,
00:44:16 ►
but inadequate to experience.
00:44:20 ►
It holds on to the Greek philosophical conception that the universe should be describable using perfect mathematical objects.
00:44:34 ►
And long ago, we learned from looking at the planets that they do not follow perfect circles. And by studying other parts of nature,
00:44:46 ►
one by one,
00:44:47 ►
this Aristotelian and Platonic drive
00:44:51 ►
toward mathematical perfection
00:44:52 ►
at the surface of nature
00:44:54 ►
has been abandoned.
00:44:57 ►
It’s not that nature is not mathematically perfect.
00:45:01 ►
It is, but at a more complex level
00:45:04 ►
than Greek geometry was able to reach. However,
00:45:09 ►
one of these Greek mathematical conceptions has managed to survive unscathed and unexamined and
00:45:16 ►
unchallenged, and it’s the idea that time is this perfectly smooth, featureless, frictionless surface. And the reason that
00:45:27 ►
is held to so tenaciously is because you can’t do science without that idea. Why? Because because science depends on this very subtle notion called experiment.
00:45:47 ►
And built in to the idea of the experiment
00:45:51 ►
is the idea that you must be able to repeat the experiment.
00:45:57 ►
In philosophy of science, this is called the restoration of initial conditions.
00:46:03 ►
You have to believe, in order to do science,
00:46:09 ►
that you can restore the initial conditions of the system that you’re studying
00:46:14 ►
and then let it go through its changes and watch it again and collect data
00:46:18 ►
and then restore the initial conditions and do it again.
00:46:22 ►
If it is so, that time is not a perfectly smooth surface
00:46:28 ►
but some kind of moving landscape,
00:46:31 ►
then the idea of experiment begins to break down
00:46:36 ►
because there is no such thing as the restoration
00:46:39 ►
of initial conditions.
00:46:42 ►
You can never step into the same river twice,
00:46:47 ►
Heraclitus observed.
00:46:49 ►
If he’d been paying attention,
00:46:51 ►
he would have noticed that you can never step
00:46:53 ►
into the same river once.
00:46:56 ►
But that’s another story.
00:47:00 ►
So science at some point in the Renaissance made a hellish marriage with capitalism.
00:47:11 ►
And science began to be not about how good its descriptions of nature were,
00:47:17 ►
but how good its technological output and how marketable its technological output was. Well, at that point, the game was basically betrayed. Now, looking at quantum physics and looking at order through fluctuation and looking at non-equilibrium thermodynamics and some of these more esoteric realms in cosmology,
00:47:51 ►
it’s clear that we were very naive about the structure of time.
00:47:59 ►
Notice that modern science is built around what is called probability theory.
00:48:06 ►
And the notion of probability theory is
00:48:09 ►
that if you want to understand how something works,
00:48:12 ►
you measure something about it 100 times,
00:48:18 ►
add those numbers together and divide by 100,
00:48:23 ►
and you now have the average behavior of the system.
00:48:28 ►
Now, notice how naive this concept, average, is.
00:48:34 ►
Again, it assumes that all moments are the same.
00:48:40 ►
You know, no one would do physics,
00:48:43 ►
would take a physicist seriously
00:48:45 ►
who suggested that a given equation should be applied on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
00:48:50 ►
but that a different transform be used on all the other days of the week.
00:48:55 ►
That isn’t allowed in physics.
00:48:59 ►
So we get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science
00:49:07 ►
is the art of describing those systems
00:49:11 ►
so crude in their structure
00:49:15 ►
that they are not subject to temporal variables.
00:49:21 ►
So this turns out to be stuff like the motion of the planets
00:49:25 ►
that’s pretty good, you can predict over fairly long periods of time
00:49:30 ►
but in any long period, periodic system
00:49:34 ►
chaos eventually makes Newtonian mechanics break down
00:49:40 ►
you cannot predict the exact position of Mercury 100,000 years in the future.
00:49:48 ►
At that many iterations of its orbit, chaotic factors begin to enter and smear the values.
00:49:58 ►
This is important for this kind of thing. Okay, so what I’m proposing
00:50:06 ►
is to essentially admit
00:50:13 ►
the primacy of experience,
00:50:17 ►
the idea that time is
00:50:20 ►
a series of fluctuating variables.
00:50:23 ►
We experience it this way,
00:50:24 ►
we feel it this way, we feel it this way,
00:50:26 ►
and then to look to,
00:50:28 ►
for example, the I Ching, Taoism,
00:50:33 ►
these more feeling-toned models of time,
00:50:37 ►
but to look at them with a formal eye,
00:50:40 ►
in other words, with a mathematician’s intent.
00:50:48 ►
And what I’ve done with the I Ching is discovered a series of patterns
00:50:52 ►
in the King Wen sequence
00:50:55 ►
and I’m assuming here most people have some knowledge of the I Ching
00:50:59 ►
and its purpose which is
00:51:02 ►
its stated purpose is to chart temporal variables.
00:51:06 ►
It is the book of changes.
00:51:08 ►
What we’re talking about here is changes,
00:51:11 ►
as opposed to the unchanging Newtonian duration.
00:51:16 ►
Anyway, embedded in the King-Wen sequence of the I Ching
00:51:20 ►
are a series of mathematical transforms,
00:51:30 ►
I Ching are a series of mathematical transforms, now not so necessary to defend until we sort out this whole business with Watkins. However, since that was never part of these lectures,
00:51:40 ►
those of you who are not given to dedicating yourself to the altar of understanding the time wave
00:51:47 ►
are asked to judge it in a very direct and intuitive way,
00:51:55 ►
which is we look at history, which is a fairly known quantity,
00:52:01 ►
is a fairly known quantity,
00:52:08 ►
and we see if the predictions the theory has made about the past are sufficiently impressive
00:52:11 ►
that we should give a hoot about what it says about the future.
00:52:18 ►
See, it’s easy to predict the future,
00:52:20 ►
because who can naysay you?
00:52:23 ►
Predicting the past is considerably more
00:52:26 ►
chancy, because it has undergone the formality of occurring. In other words, you’re sort
00:52:32 ►
of nailed one way or the other. But if you had an algorithm that correctly predicted
00:52:40 ►
the ebb and flow of empire and the spread of technologies and the migration of genes
00:52:46 ►
and the spread of new religions
00:52:48 ►
and so forth.
00:52:49 ►
In the past,
00:52:50 ►
you would have reason
00:52:53 ►
to trust its extrapolation
00:52:57 ►
into the future.
00:52:59 ►
The people who wrote the I Ching,
00:53:02 ►
the I Ching was pretty much finished before the earliest phase of what we call Chinese civilization.
00:53:11 ►
The Han Dynasty is from 400 BC to 400 AD.
00:53:18 ►
Before the Han is the Zhou.
00:53:20 ►
Before that is basically legend and myth.
00:53:24 ►
before that is basically legend and myth.
00:53:29 ►
The I Ching seems to have come into existence in the early pre-Zhou period,
00:53:33 ►
meaning around 1300 BC.
00:53:37 ►
And the straight story as told in the I Ching
00:53:40 ►
is that there was this guy, King Wen,
00:53:43 ►
who got into some political trouble. He was an emperor
00:53:47 ►
and he got kicked out in a coup and imprisoned. And in the course of his imprisonment in his
00:53:55 ►
meditations, he discovered the Qing and wrote it down. There’s also an earlier figure, Fu Si,
00:54:12 ►
There’s also an earlier figure, Fusi, who is often depicted with a tree growing out of his head, so what kind of person he was is not clear. or I used to feel as strong, was people would say, well, now let me understand this.
00:54:26 ►
Are you proposing a revolution in physics
00:54:31 ►
based on a Chinese oracle?
00:54:34 ►
Is that right?
00:54:36 ►
You’re suggesting that we should
00:54:38 ►
chuck Newton and Einstein
00:54:40 ►
based on a 3,000-year-old fortune-telling book.
00:54:46 ►
Is that right?
00:54:48 ►
Not exactly.
00:54:51 ►
The I Ching, my interest in it was not the text,
00:54:56 ►
which all that comes later.
00:54:58 ►
That’s Han and later,
00:55:01 ►
even the Confucian commentaries are early on.
00:55:06 ►
I approached the I Ching as a mathematical structure,
00:55:10 ►
and I wasn’t the first person to do this.
00:55:16 ►
A German guy, Martin Scharnberger, I believe his name was,
00:55:21 ►
wrote a book called Genetics and the I Ching, in which he pointed
00:55:27 ►
out that the I Ching is an exact homologue for the DNA. In other words, the DNA has 64
00:55:36 ►
codons to code for all proteins. There are eight amino acids. there are eight trigrams, there are 64 hexagrams, so forth and so on.
00:55:49 ►
If you wanted a natural structure in language to model the DNA,
00:55:57 ►
you could not do better than the I Ching.
00:56:02 ►
So that’s suggesting, or interesting anyway,
00:56:07 ►
since supposedly these people had,
00:56:10 ►
we have no reason to believe these people
00:56:12 ►
understood anything about DNA.
00:56:14 ►
Nobody understood anything about DNA until 1950.
00:56:20 ►
But here’s how I imagine things might work.
00:56:28 ►
Our own culture has an obsession with matter,
00:56:33 ►
and you see how far down the road
00:56:37 ►
to this obsession with matter has taken us,
00:56:42 ►
to the point where we can take the temperature
00:56:44 ►
of the interior
00:56:45 ►
of Betelgeuse,
00:56:47 ►
we can create the
00:56:49 ►
anti-neutrino, we can build
00:56:51 ►
anti-helium in
00:56:53 ►
instruments that shurn,
00:56:55 ►
we can do amazing
00:56:58 ►
tricks with matter,
00:56:59 ►
because we’ve spent a couple of thousand
00:57:01 ►
years obsessively pursuing
00:57:04 ►
this. Well, imagine a culture with
00:57:08 ►
a completely different obsession, an obsession to understand time, and an obsession to create
00:57:18 ►
a formal physics of experience. Pursue that a couple of thousand years and you would be incomprehensible
00:57:27 ►
to any other culture and you would probably know a hell of a lot about your stated area
00:57:34 ►
of expertise. So I think that through something which let’s just call meditation and leave it there, and maybe with drugs involved, it’s possible to look into the organism and not to see the molecular structure of DNA, but I’ve noticed that in the macro-physical world,
00:58:10 ►
like for example heliotrope bushes, the leaves, the placement of the leaves of the heliotrope
00:58:19 ►
are a direct download of the placement of the genes for the leaves on the helix of DNA.
00:58:27 ►
So the macro-physical world contains in some portions of itself
00:58:33 ►
reflections of its deeper physical structure.
00:58:38 ►
So imagine a form of meditation, perhaps psychedelically assisted,
00:58:44 ►
a form of meditation, perhaps psychedelically assisted,
00:58:50 ►
in which you still gross body functions,
00:58:52 ►
breathing and so forth and so on,
00:59:01 ►
and your attention drifts down into the near-death domain. Well then, there you see the coming and going of phenomena, phenomena of some
00:59:11 ►
sort. And perhaps this is a tradition, this technique, and perhaps it’s centuries in its
00:59:18 ►
acquisition and the slow buildup of a picture of what this phenomena is.
00:59:29 ►
Categories of some sort,
00:59:32 ►
not an infinite number of categories,
00:59:36 ►
but some kind of syntactical deep structure.
00:59:42 ►
And then over time and through observational cross-checking,
00:59:51 ►
it’s understood 64 such categories with unique qualities. And these become like the elements of our chemical understanding of matter. But they’re the elements that build up time.
01:00:02 ►
Okay, then just one last metaphor about the I Ching. This is how I really understand,
01:00:09 ►
or I think this explains it to me. This was satisfying to me. This is in an effort to
01:00:17 ►
answer the question, why should the universal categories be embedded in the human body. And here’s the metaphor. Think of sand dunes. Picture them. Picture dunes. This is the most experiential moment of this weekend. Make the most of it. Picture dunes. Now, notice that dunes look like wind.
01:00:54 ►
We don’t have to get into a semantic argument about phenomenon that follows a gradient. Dunes are like a lower dimensional slice of this same gradient. Here’s a metaphor which will help. Instead of thinking of the dune as made of sand,
01:01:29 ►
think of the dune as a computer. Think of every grain of sand as a bit. Now think of wind as a
01:01:39 ►
piece of software. The wind blows. The software is run, the bits rearrange themselves in the computer, and what we then have is a download replace the grains of sand,
01:02:06 ►
replace the bits of the computer with genes,
01:02:13 ►
and imagine that genes are being moved on a temporal landscape
01:02:18 ►
by the unfolding gradient of time as it expresses its categories,
01:02:26 ►
then it becomes self-evident why the I Ching works and what it is
01:02:33 ►
and why we have a resonance with the larger universe
01:02:37 ►
and what all these nested and fractal worlds within worlds are.
01:02:42 ►
It’s that there is a kind of master pattern.
01:02:46 ►
And you can say that at the bottom level it’s in the DNA, and at the top level it’s in time,
01:02:54 ►
and then it’s reflected and it’s octaves or adumbrated in all the levels of organization in between. You can model it from top up or bottom down.
01:03:06 ►
But the pattern that connects
01:03:09 ►
is the primary datum of experience.
01:03:15 ►
Okay, so that’s why the I Ching is a good way to do this.
01:03:19 ►
The mathematical details of how you get this wave out of the I Ching
01:03:23 ►
don’t really need to concern us here.
01:03:27 ►
It’s in the manuals, it’s published, it’s at the website.
01:03:31 ►
If you’re of a bent to understand this, that’s all there for you.
01:03:40 ►
Yeah, in order to get, see, the counterintuitive thing,
01:03:45 ►
as if the whole thing weren’t counterintuitive enough,
01:03:47 ►
but the worst news is that it makes this prediction
01:03:54 ►
that is very hard to understand.
01:03:59 ►
It predicts that novelty, whatever that is,
01:04:02 ►
will reach infinity in 17 years.
01:04:08 ►
And I think this would be a much easier sell
01:04:12 ►
if that were 100,000 years out
01:04:14 ►
or 50,000 years out.
01:04:17 ►
The fact that it’s 17 years out
01:04:19 ►
puts the whole thing into this, you know,
01:04:24 ►
repent for the end is near kind of messianic,
01:04:28 ►
inflated, megalomaniacal, bad taste, bad news kind of thing that I’m trying to avoid.
01:04:38 ►
I mean, I’m not really trying to found a cult. I’m trying to disentangle a fairly psychically charged idea that a lot of people
01:04:47 ►
would like to ride into cultishness, but that I find more interesting as a hypothesis than a
01:04:56 ►
dogmatic belief. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:05:09 ►
Now, that’s something about the time wave that I hadn’t thought about before.
01:05:13 ►
What if Terence had made his end point sometime, say, in the year 3000 or something like that?
01:05:19 ►
In other words, what if, instead of predicting his concept of an eschaton being, well, relatively imminent,
01:05:27 ►
he’d put the date way out there so that he couldn’t have been proven wrong during his lifetime?
01:05:32 ►
Of course, as it turned out, he actually did die before the 2012 date,
01:05:37 ►
and so I guess he died without having to face up to the fact that, well, there was no eschaton on December 21, 2012.
01:05:44 ►
face up to the fact that, well, there was no Eschaton on December 21st, 2012.
01:05:50 ►
However, my sense is that if he had placed the end date several hundred years out,
01:05:55 ►
then there actually might have been somewhat religious-like cults that were formed around that idea. And the more you think about these things, the more interesting they get.
01:06:01 ►
I actually have several more notes about things that Terrence said in this talk,
01:06:05 ►
and I was going to say some more things about them, but we’ve already gone a little longer
01:06:09 ►
than I like, and I have a couple of announcements that I think you’d rather hear about instead.
01:06:15 ►
First of all, there was some very good news last week that has a direct relationship to what
01:06:21 ►
Cory Doctorow spoke about a couple of weeks ago in podcast number 474. If you recall that podcast, Thank you. and click on the Podcast 474 Program Notes page, you’ll find a link to a story from EFF, where Corey works, by the way,
01:06:49 ►
that’s titled, Victory for Users,
01:06:52 ►
Librarian of Congress Renews and Expands Protections for Fair Use.
01:06:57 ►
Now, in the article, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says,
01:07:01 ►
I quote,
01:07:03 ►
The new rules for exemptions to copyrights DRM circumvention laws were issued today,
01:07:10 ►
and the Librarian of Congress has granted much of what EFF has asked for over the course
01:07:16 ►
of months and extensive briefs and hearings.
01:07:20 ►
The exemptions we requested, ripping DVDs and Blu-rays for making fair use remixes and analysis, preserving video games and running multiplayer servers after publishers have abandoned them, jailbreaking cell phones, tablets and other portable computing devices to run third-party software, and security research and modification and repair on cars.
01:07:44 ►
Each of these have been accepted, subject to some important caveats.
01:07:49 ►
That’s the end of the quote.
01:07:51 ►
Now, please don’t think that the war that the big corporations are waging against you and me has been won.
01:07:57 ►
Far from it.
01:07:58 ►
But this first important battle has gone to our side.
01:08:01 ►
So be sure to click on that EFF link in the program notes and get
01:08:05 ►
involved yourself. This isn’t a time to be sitting on the sidelines. Another thing that you’ll find
01:08:12 ►
on our new psychedelicsalon.com website is a link to an events calendar. And for this month,
01:08:19 ►
November 2015, you’ll see that there are two events scheduled that may be of interest to you.
01:08:24 ►
2015, you’ll see that there are two events scheduled that may be of interest to you.
01:08:30 ►
The first is next Saturday, November 14th in Occidental, California, where Kathleen Harrison will be leading the celebration for the opening of the Botanical Dimensions Ethnobotany
01:08:37 ►
Library.
01:08:38 ►
The following week, the Drug Policy Alliance is going to be hosting the International Drug
01:08:44 ►
Policy Reform
01:08:45 ►
Conference, which is a biannual event that brings together people from around the world
01:08:50 ►
who think that the war on drugs is doing more harm than good.
01:08:54 ►
And annually it brings together, or biannually, it brings together over 1,000 attendees from
01:09:00 ►
about 30 different countries.
01:09:02 ►
This year it’s being held in Arlington, Virginia.
01:09:28 ►
Thank you. by leading experts from around the world. Which brings me to a call for you to send me any notices of conferences, salons, and festivals that you think might be of interest to our fellow salonners.
01:09:32 ►
And the best way to do this is to use the contact link on the website.
01:09:36 ►
I get those directly to me without having to first have negotiated a raft of spam filters.
01:09:43 ►
And in particular, I’d like to hear of any events that may be of interest to students.
01:09:49 ►
Right now, the only student-focused event on next year’s calendar
01:09:53 ►
is the three-day conference in April that is hosted by SSDP,
01:09:58 ►
Students for a Sensible Drug Policy.
01:10:00 ►
And that conference also happens to be in Arlington, Virginia.
01:10:04 ►
Now, while I’m at it, I guess I should give a big thank you to the 400 or so members of our new forums.
01:10:11 ►
And yes, I know, forums are kind of old hat.
01:10:16 ►
And probably like you, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve actually participated in a forum.
01:10:21 ►
So I’ve been really pleasantly surprised at how well this little
01:10:25 ►
group seems to be taking off. So far there have been over 20,000 visits to the 60 or so topics,
01:10:32 ►
with one of the most visited being called A Place to Introduce Yourself, and there a sampling of our
01:10:39 ►
members who posted something reveals that while the average age of our group is around 36 years,
01:10:46 ►
our youngest member is 17 and the oldest is 86.
01:10:51 ►
But where most of the action seems to be actually taking place right now
01:10:55 ►
is in the way new friendships are being made.
01:10:59 ►
What’s happened in my case is that when I see a post that interests me,
01:11:03 ►
I either reply or sometimes send the person
01:11:05 ►
who posted it a private message. And that’s maybe the most important feature of this new site.
01:11:11 ►
You can send any other member a private message, and apparently that’s how so many of our new
01:11:16 ►
friendships are being made. Over time, I think that we may actually have a way to help a widely
01:11:23 ►
dispersed group find the others.
01:11:25 ►
While it appears that right now the U.S. has the most members,
01:11:29 ►
we are also in good company of others from Canada, Australia, Belgium, Finland, Norway,
01:11:35 ►
Slovenia, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and New Zealand.
01:11:39 ►
And that’s just the comments from less than 10% of our members who’ve introduced themselves.
01:11:47 ►
Now, one final announcement that will be good news for some of our fellow salonners
01:11:52 ►
and maybe not so good news for others.
01:11:55 ►
Well, it has to do with our RSS feeds for these podcasts.
01:11:59 ►
As you know, a while back the salon’s listing was dropped from iTunes, causing much agony, I’m told.
01:12:06 ►
And recently I discovered that the reason they dropped our feed is because the file size got
01:12:10 ►
too big. So in an attempt to remedy that situation, I very unwisely dropped all but the 50 most
01:12:18 ►
recent podcasts from that feed in the hopes that I could get iTunes to pick us up again.
01:12:23 ►
in the hopes that I could get iTunes to pick us up again.
01:12:27 ►
However, the law of unintended consequences struck.
01:12:30 ►
What I learned from quite a few of our fellow salonners is that they really liked having a complete listing of all the podcasts in a single feed
01:12:35 ►
and that the particular aggregators that they were using still worked perfectly.
01:12:40 ►
But my dropping all but the 50 most recent programs
01:12:43 ►
messed up the way they were revisiting or first listening to these talks.
01:12:48 ►
So I undid the mess that I’d made and now the old RSS feeds are back to normal.
01:12:54 ►
The only feed, of course, that’s going to be limited to 50 podcasts is the new feed that’s generated by our new psychedelicsalon.com website.
01:13:03 ►
And now I’m sure you’re totally confused.
01:13:07 ►
Well, here’s the bottom line.
01:13:09 ►
If your old feed was working the way you liked it,
01:13:11 ►
well, then you should be back to normal.
01:13:13 ►
Unless, of course, you only got us through iTunes,
01:13:16 ►
in which case, well, you aren’t even hearing this anyway.
01:13:19 ►
Sorry about that.
01:13:21 ►
But going forward, I’m going to submit our new feed to iTunes and hopefully we’ll get
01:13:27 ►
listed there again. Now, all of this information is available on our website through a link in the
01:13:32 ►
sidebar on the podcast pages. So should you have any questions or input on this, well, the best way
01:13:39 ►
to get me involved is through the forums where I’ll post a new topic specifically dealing with all of this RSS feed situation. Actually everything’s humming along quite nicely
01:13:50 ►
considering all of the updates and hosting changes that we’ve gone through in the past months
01:13:55 ►
and best news of all is that our new forums appear to be able to generate enough income
01:14:01 ►
to keep these podcasts going without having to add a donate button or
01:14:05 ►
to conduct an annual pledge drive. It’s this new interactive community that’s providing the
01:14:11 ►
backing required to keep these podcasts coming your way indefinitely. And so if you want to
01:14:17 ►
check out our forums without paying the annual $12 membership fee, please feel free to sign up
01:14:23 ►
as a student member. There’s no charge for the first
01:14:26 ►
year of student membership, and well, the truth is, we’re all still students of these sacred
01:14:30 ►
medicines, even if we aren’t in a formal school. So, if you can, please join us as our new community
01:14:38 ►
begins to take shape. We can certainly use your voice, or heck, we can even use your lurking if that better suits you.
01:14:46 ►
Anyway, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.