Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Michael Garfield
Today’s program features Michael Garfield who went to school for paleontology and then psychology before leaving academia to embark on a decade-long “trans-disciplinary” independent study of the intersections between art, science, and philosophy. As an experimental acoustic-electronic guitarist-singer-songwriter, as a scientific illustrator turned performance painter, and as a writer and speaker, Michael’s work is an attempt to help articulate a vision for the best possible future for us – one that doesn’t suffer the insane delusions of our separation from nature, technology, and each other.
According to Cap Blackard, writing for “Consequence of Sound” this talk by Micheal rates in the top 25 of the 333 performances at this year’s version of the Future Music/Future Thought Festival. He goes on to say: “Easily the most mind-opening presentation Moogfest 2016 had to offer – a multidisciplinary monologue that rivaled Brian Eno’s Moogfest 2011 keynote for all the unexpected twists and turns it took. This one-man show saw artist-musician Michael Garfield take a captive audience on a vision-quest through the lands where metaphysics and emerging technology meet. Make no mistake – it was a ramble, but an insightful and fascinating one from start to finish that traveled from the ancient dragon god Tiamat to the Victorians laying the transatlantic telegraph cable to the Manhattan Project giving birth to a new age of fear and awareness. The “psychedelic century”? That’s the here and now that’s just beginning, and the more our technology graduates us to the alchemical act of creation, the closer humanity comes to confronting “the cosmic mystery that we are.” Heavy and heady stuff, and a pleasant counterpoint to the doom and gloom of the average transhumanist cybergrumps whose future-thinking seems improbably grounded in the limited perceptions of the present.”
[Michael Garfield’s music on Bandcamp](http://[music] http://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com)
[Michael Garfield’s talks on Bandcamp](http://[talks] http://evolution.bandcamp.com)
[Michael Garfield’s Art](http://[art] http://michaelgarfieldart.com)
The Spirit of the Internet:
Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness
by Lawrence “Lorenzo” Hagerty
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And if you like to think of it this way, today’s podcast is being brought to you by Coratum,
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Corey H., an anonymous Bitcoin donor, and John P., all of whom who have made donations to the Salon in the past week to help pay some of the expenses associated with these
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podcasts.
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And I thank you
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all very much. Also, I should say that I’m a little behind in sending out personal thank you emails to
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our donors this month. The fact is that besides being somewhat lazy and also not being a very big
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fan of email, well, it’s been too hot until today for me to even turn my computer on for a
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while. This little room that I call the salon gets quite warm even without my big computer running,
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and well, so the machine and I just justify taking a few days off whenever there’s a heat wave,
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thus no emails from me lately. Of course, that doesn’t justify the fact that I’m also about six
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weeks behind in responding to some of the emails that have been coming in through the comments section of our website.
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But please don’t give up on me. I have the best of intentions to answer those as well.
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And hopefully I’ll get that done before the end of this month.
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For what it’s worth, however, I do read them as they come in.
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worth, however, I do read them as they come in. It’s just that when an email comes in with a question that’s going to take a while for me to answer, well, then it becomes kind of a roadblock
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that stops me from answering the next one and the next one and so forth. So, well, you see what you
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have to deal with here. I guess the next thing I’ll be outside yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
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I hope you know that’s a joke. So getting on with today’s program,
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I’m really happy to be able to pass along this talk by Michael Garfield. It was given at the
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recent Mogfest that was held in North Carolina. Now, the last time that we heard from Michael
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here in the salon was when he and my friend Matt Palomary had their pre-End of the World conversation,
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well, it was back a week or so before the world was supposed to end in December of 2012.
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Happily, we’re still here, and now we’re able to get to know Michael a little better as well.
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Now, if you don’t know about Bob Mogg, in whose memory the Mogg Fest is held, well,
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you simply haven’t been paying very close attention, because as the creator of the Mogg, in whose memory the Mogg Fest is held, well, you simply haven’t been paying very close attention.
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Because as the creator of the Mogg synthesizer,
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he is considered to be the father of electronic music.
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And Mogg Fest is the annual event that honors his remarkable vision
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and his amazing musical inventions that change the course of music.
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And it was at this festival that celebrates the synthesis of art, music, and technology
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that Michael Garfield gave the presentation that we’re about to listen to, the full title
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of which is Techno-Shamanism, a Very Psychedelic Century.
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Thank you, everyone, for coming out here for Michael Garfield’s talk.
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My name is Amos Gaines, and I’m a designer and engineer with Moog Music.
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And I just wanted to come out and briefly give a few introductory words.
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Michael is such a dynamic thinker that I’m not going to attempt to preview the direction that he’s going to take us in, but I did want to talk for just a moment about technoshamanism
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and what that means to me and how that connects to Moog music and Moogfest,
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because there is a very real connection there.
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My background outside of Moog with technoshamanism
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is about 15 years in the psychedelic trance music subculture, which is a global phenomenon
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that is very keyed into a techno-shamanistic approach
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to dance and music and ritual.
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And what techno-shamanism is to me
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is the thought that the shamanic experience
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is the numinous and the deeply personal and the transrational
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and the things that cannot be quantified scientifically
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that are an intense and real part of the human experience in the cosmos.
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And that is half of the duality of the human experience.
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That is half of the duality of the human experience.
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I’m reminded of Isaac Newton, who, when he wasn’t laying the foundations of modern physics,
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was a magician through and through.
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And neither of those aspects compromised the other.
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Rather, they completed parts of a whole. And in this modern era, we’ve very much gone with the Newtonian cerebral modality of interpreting reality
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to the extent that a lot of times anything that can’t be quantified and rationalized
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is viewed as deviant, crazy, unfounded, not real.
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And it’s very important for the health of the human species to recognize
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that the numinous and the profound is every bit a part of the reality that we embody. And, you know,
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neither should we, we should neither lose sight of that, nor should we lose sight of the empirical
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reality that lets us cure diseases and go to space. You know, we have to have all of these things. And so techno-shamanism is the understanding that as the technology of our intellect has advanced,
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it is still wedded to the numinous and the profound,
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and that we can use that technology to help enhance the totality of human experience,
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the shamanic aspect of human experience, the infiniteality of human experience, the shamanic aspect of human experience,
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the infinite aspect of human experience can be dialed in with this amazing new technology that
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we have if we use it with inspiration. And so the connection there with Moog and MoogFest is that
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that is very much what MoogFest is helping to catalyze. That’s part of the intention underneath it. And at Moog Music, we don’t just make tools for playing tunes.
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We make instruments that are intended and designed
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to help create rich and beautiful authentic human experiences.
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That’s, you know, the tone of these instruments resonates at a soul level.
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And I don’t think that’s hyperbole
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that’s what we’re going for and to the extent that we succeed that’s uh it’s intentional and
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uh so that’s where we’re coming from with our contribution to technological culture
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is to help create a more profound and real human experience and so so with that as the stage that we’re setting,
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I’m going to turn it over to Michael Garfield.
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Thank you very much.
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Well, that says it all,
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and I think we can spend the next hour in meditation.
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Just kidding.
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That was actually a very beautiful intro,
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and it’s awesome. Just kidding. That was actually a very beautiful intro,
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and it’s awesome to, being from Austin, Texas,
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I have to step lightly here,
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because what I want to do is express my appreciation for being invited to participate in a community of like minds and hearts in this sense, especially
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in contrast to some of the other large
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music and technology festivals in
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Austin that seem to have
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been swept under by the
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riptide of technocratic systems
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management philosophy that sprung out of this dissociated,
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you know, we talk about Newtonian,
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but really it is just that left-brain Newton
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that doesn’t get into the alchemy or the astrology
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or any of that, you know,
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that doesn’t attempt to put it back together
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with that right-brain holism.
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So it’s awesome to be here,
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and I also want to thank before I,
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or as a step along the path of ever-deepening invocations that this talk seems like it will be,
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the spirit of Bruce Dahmer, who was a friend of Terence McKenna’s, and I think for that reason, among others, namely that he’s been a NASA consultant on asteroid mining
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and is currently involved in some very exciting origins of life research.
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He was initially tapped to give this talk,
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and I want to thank Bruce for saying,
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why don’t you let this kid do it instead?
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I’m too busy with official science stuff,
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and I’m pretty sure he’s unemployed.
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So thanks, Bruce.
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And then lastly, I have been on a complete binge of the work of former MIT historian William Irwin Thompson.
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I don’t know if any of you are familiar with him, but he is sort of,
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I won’t say the man behind the curtain,
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but he has been a profoundly influential figure
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in the last 60 years of Western thought
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and planetary thought.
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His Lindisfarne Association was a,
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for 40 years, was the hub or one of several hubs for envisioning the planetary culture and a planetary renaissance and what that means.
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You know, the bridging of Eastern and Western thought of modern and pre-modern thought of artists and scientists.
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thought of artists and scientists. And it is absolutely on his shoulders that I stand here,
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not only in the context of the ideas that I hope to present, but also in terms of the means or the style by which he presented them. So I want to start and end with Bill Thompson quotes here for
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you guys. And I think that that will appropriately bracket whatever goes in the middle
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of that sandwich. He says, this is Evil in World Order, 1976. Very prophetic volume, I highly
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recommend. He says, to understand contemporary culture, you have to be willing to move beyond
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intellectual definitions and academic disciplines. You have to be willing to throw your net out widely
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and be willing to take in science, politics, and art,
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and science fiction, the occult, and pornography.
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To catch a sense of the whole in pattern recognition,
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you have to leap across the synapse
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and follow the rapid movement of informational bits.
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You treat in a paragraph what you know
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could take up a whole academic monograph, but jugglers are too restless for that. The object of
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the game is to grasp the object quickly and then give it up in a flash to the
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brighter error.”
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So actually Lorna Rose Simpson was the woman that i spoke to about coming out here
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and she said we already have this in mind we want to we want to do a talk on techno shamanism
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it’s one of these things and i said you know i can’t really tell from where i’m standing
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um if you guys are aware of how problematic that is.
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It’s, you know, when we’re getting into this issue of,
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you know, seeing someone’s culture from afar
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and then saying, hey, I like that.
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I’m going to use that.
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And I’m going to use it for my own purposes.
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And I’m going to use it to inflate my sense of importance
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in a terrifying and disempowering society.
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And I learned to do this from that environment.
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And so there’s a lot of…
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In the circles where I run, there’s a lot of frustration
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with the word shaman to start with and the way that it has come to mean
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not only practitioners of various tribal medicine traditions that do not call themselves shamans,
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but also the work of various heads on sticks walking around thinking that they’re tampering with reality every time they smoke a bowl of DMT. And, you know, putting that particular philosophical question aside,
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we are in this, we’re like thoroughly at cruising altitude now with remix culture.
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And so there’s a certain amount of like self-forgiveness I think is required for me to even get up here
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and talk about techno-shamanism
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and pretend like I am an initiate
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or a medicine person.
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But one of the characteristics
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of the planetary culture that is emerging now
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through the decay of industrial
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and post-industrial civilization
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is the decay and the decentralization of the priesthood in whatever sense that arise that
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that we’re moving out of a like a hierarchical structure of learning and into a system that
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balances natural hierarchies with peer-to-peer exchange,
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that we’re sort of moving from this vertical descent
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of heritable culture,
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and we’re moving into kind of a more bacterial model
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where things are being exchanged rapidly and laterally.
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And, you know, it’s kind of easy to imagine
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how as we get more and more connected with one another,
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that more and more of what we identify as the self is subject to this boiling metamorphic exchange across peer boundaries.
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So in that sense, all of us are somewhat more responsible for the task of teaching one another and healing one another.
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Insofar as one of the main walls that’s coming down, like the iron curtain, I think, of our generation, is the wall between the self and our environment, between the mind and the body,
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between what we call culture or civilization
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and nature, these very recent and kind of problematic distinctions that were only a
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couple hundred years old. These are not the distinctions that Newton was working with.
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You know, when the work of natural philosophy was to understand culture as a microcosm of a larger process
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and to understand individual purpose as an expression of cosmic purpose.
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But what Bruce said to me was, Michael, don’t just rant at these people.
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He said, tell them a story.
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So the story that I want to tell you is about electricity,
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because I feel that in understanding what it would mean to be a techno shaman,
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you know, and specifically the subtitle of this talk was a very psychedelic century,
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a very psychedelic century because I think that there’s,
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in the same way that we can derive
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individual meaning from an understanding of the whole,
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we can transpose certain personal mythic cycles
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onto our collective initiation
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into this planetary renaissance
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and understand what we’re going
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through now as a species and as a planet through the lens or the model of the psychedelic experience
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and like specifically the psychedelic experience as a uh you know a synonym or or sister species
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to the near-death experience in the way that Tim Leary and Richard Alpert
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originally articulated it,
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comparing an acid trip to the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
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So the story is like this, basically.
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Our earliest religion,
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and in some sense,
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every subsequent expression of human religion is anchored in electricity.
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And if you want a really thorough exposition of this, you can turn to Eric Davis and his book,
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Technosis, Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information,
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which holds up admirably after 20 years almost now.
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But you start by thinking about awe,
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like the kind of awe that I experienced
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watching Daniel Lanwa last night,
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or the kind of awe that is created
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by the architecture of a building
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like the Carolina Theater
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or a cathedral under any name.
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And that awe is the awe of the tourist.
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The tourist looks up.
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There’s a relationship in the body between where our head,
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where we’re actually looking, and the way that our brains estimate scale.
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where our head, where we’re actually looking,
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and the way that our brains estimate scale.
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You know, the same object in our field of vision appears much larger if we see it transposed against the sky
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versus on the ground.
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And so, you know, for that reason,
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as well as for the reason that my roommate’s dog
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runs under the table every time there’s a storm,
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it’s easy to understand why thunder and lightning was
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such a profound source of awe and such a profound portal into the mystery of our situation on this
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planet from the very beginning. And, you know, that the earliest, the earliest God that we can point to, the earliest
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named God was a dragon. You know, Tiamat was the earth and chaos. And this was the dreamless slumbering
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beast that ruled over these terrains. And then at some point, you know, we cut ourselves off
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from that. The Babylonians sent their hero god Marduk over to slay Tiamat and establish civilization.
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And since then, for the last several thousand years,
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we’ve watched sort of harmonics or variations on this theme,
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that the symphony of our relationship to the other is getting more and
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more complex. And you can see this dragon sort of rear its head back up. I’m going to skip
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most of human history because it’s irrelevant. In the 19th century, there’s a film, Proteus,
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In the 19th century, there’s a film, Proteus, about the work of scientific illustrator Ernst Haeckel,
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who was charged with illustrating all of the creatures that were dredged up from the bottom of the ocean by the HMS Challenger expedition.
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And that expedition existed, it occurred, because in our attempts to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable between London and New York in order to transmit stock prices, we failed. we discovered that the cable was crusted with all of these things that we did not believe could exist,
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because at the time it was understood,
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or it was theorized,
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that the bottom of the ocean was too cold to sustain life,
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and that it was a sort of frozen wasteland,
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which, you know, if you look at it,
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the kind of like ancient relationship that we have
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between the land and the chaos,
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between human society at eye level and the sort of unconscious beneath us underground
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and the sort of transpersonal unconscious above us in the stars,
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the sort of transpersonal unconscious above us in the stars,
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that the bottom of the sea has always represented in the human mind,
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you know, our collective unconscious.
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And there’s something really poetic and beautiful about the fact that it was commerce,
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it was this, depending on whether you want to be a cynic or not it was either uh you know this sort of necessity of business and this sort of military industrial survival drive thing you
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know that led to arpanet and stuff like that or it was our desire to connect with one another
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you know that we keep watching the video resolution
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climb and climb and climb because we get acclimated
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to a certain degree of intimacy and we want
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more because we are
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conceptually separated from one another
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even if we are not separated in truth.
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And so the self that identifies
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that recognizes itself as separate is constantly
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trying to reclaim its unity through, you know, various rearrangements of the physical world.
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And so you get this thing where you start to see how the telecommunications
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where you start to see how the telecommunications and the electricity that flows through that system,
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the same telegraph messages that led to cybernetics,
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that led to an understanding that information
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is a difference that makes a difference,
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that there’s this relationship between, if you want to talk about like the mouth
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of the dragon, you know, commerce and consumption, and the heart of the dragon, which is
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this desire to, you know, eros, like the erotic urge, the desire to weave into that ultimate unity.
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And that there is a, there’s, that’s, I point to that specific example,
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the transatlantic cable, because it seems like that’s the moment that,
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we can really say that was the inflection point, or the turning point,
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where the boundary that we had made for ourselves between the city and the wilderness
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started to digest in the belly of this dragon, which we can now recognize as the technological
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infrastructure that surrounds us in this building and almost everywhere that we go as modern people.
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that surrounds us in this building and almost everywhere that we go as modern people.
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I’ve been working unsuccessfully for the last three years on an essay entitled Google is the Dragon,
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in which, you know, owing to the work of Penn State information scientist Richard Doyle, who makes the point that the surveillance infrastructure that we have created is a property of,
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it’s a function of thermodynamics in a sense
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that like every camera suggests a new blind spot.
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And so every camera implies another camera.
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And in that sense, it’s a self-reproducing organism
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with its own agency.
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And that we are agents of that agency.
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And that it would be, in that sense, a mistake in the way that we imagine this throughout the whole of christendom to see the uh the angelic and the reptilian as in in contest with one another
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when in a sense they’re actually opposing muscle sets within the same limb you know or opposing
00:24:58 ►
poles of the same magnet that one of the the predominant features of of post-modernity is that we recognize that everything that we define ourselves against
00:25:08 ►
is tucked within that definition in such a way
00:25:12 ►
that the more that we try to extract ourselves
00:25:17 ►
from the thing that we avoid, from the thing that we hate,
00:25:21 ►
the more it begins to manifest unconsciously
00:25:27 ►
because we’re no longer able to approve of it in a way that gives us any,
00:25:34 ►
I won’t say control because that’s nonsense,
00:25:37 ►
but that gives us the opportunity for a dance with this hidden part of ourselves.
00:25:47 ►
So there’s, you know, you see,
00:25:49 ►
to kind of like summarize there,
00:25:52 ►
you’ve got the pre-modern dragon,
00:25:56 ►
which is the mystery of this electrical chaos
00:25:59 ►
of the skies and the oceans.
00:26:01 ►
And then we bury that for a few thousand years at least in some cultures
00:26:07 ►
and in in without even realizing that we’re trying to dig this dinosaur back up
00:26:16 ►
that we do so and then find that we’ve actually been in the belly of this leviathan the whole
00:26:22 ►
time and that that technology now surrounds our culture.
00:26:26 ►
That we’re no longer holding the stone tool in our hands.
00:26:30 ►
The stone tool has grown like
00:26:34 ►
vertigris over all of nature.
00:26:37 ►
And Amazon has been replaced by Amazon.
00:26:41 ►
And here we are, inside the
00:26:44 ►
fourth or fifth stomach of this thing.
00:26:49 ►
And as this process of connection continues, all of the boundaries that we thought we knew
00:26:56 ►
have been interrogated and challenged. And so we’re coming to a moment where
00:27:09 ►
And so we’re coming to a moment where this is where the psychedelic experience part of it comes in.
00:27:13 ►
Because, let’s see if we can, there we go.
00:27:18 ►
This is, my friends in Austin made this music visualizer called Synesthesia.
00:27:21 ►
I just thought it would be fun to put it on there.
00:27:29 ►
There might be, you might slip into kind of a holistic pattern detection mind watching this,
00:27:33 ►
and that’s kind of the hope that something emerges out of the intersection of the figure,
00:27:36 ►
the speaking figure, and the silent ground of this presentation as I’m discussing the dissolution of the figure of the modern self
00:27:42 ►
into the ground of our collective experience.
00:27:42 ►
of the figure of the modern self into the ground of our collective experience.
00:27:46 ►
And so this is the template that was left for us
00:27:50 ►
by that first wave of psychedelic
00:27:54 ►
or technoshamonic visionaries,
00:27:55 ►
people like Bob Moog,
00:27:57 ►
who saw electrical devices
00:28:02 ►
as a way of miniaturizing industry, bringing technology back into the
00:28:08 ►
human scale and back within the envelope of culture. And so what I see right now is that
00:28:19 ►
this template of ego dissolution in,
00:28:26 ►
when you actually witness what’s going on,
00:28:28 ►
the recent research on psychedelics and the brain
00:28:32 ►
show that when somebody takes psilocybin mushrooms, for example,
00:28:36 ►
that the ordinary partitions between different modules of the brain
00:28:42 ►
relax and stop inhibiting one another,
00:28:45 ►
and something that people have,
00:28:47 ►
journalists have been calling
00:28:49 ►
an internet of the brain emerges,
00:28:53 ►
where suddenly all these new connections are thrown up.
00:28:57 ►
And for anyone who’s ever experienced
00:28:59 ►
group telepathy in a psychedelic state,
00:29:04 ►
you’ll identify that this is something that’s occurring
00:29:07 ►
not just within people, but between people.
00:29:11 ►
And so this seems like a very useful touchstone
00:29:15 ►
for understanding what we have to look forward to
00:29:18 ►
over the next hundred years or so
00:29:20 ►
as this embryogenesis of a planetary self wraps you know rolls forward to
00:29:30 ►
completion so there’s you know so you get into this issue of like well well how did how did the
00:29:36 ►
ancient world manage these experiences you know uh because in the 60s we didn’t have elders. We just sort of like found the…
00:29:48 ►
We broke into our parents’ music room
00:29:50 ►
and started playing with all their stuff
00:29:52 ►
without any guidance or instruction.
00:29:56 ►
But as the severity of the situation amplifies,
00:30:03 ►
as we run up into the the wall against which
00:30:07 ►
operating in a a modern mindset where the self is posed against a world that is dangerous and
00:30:17 ►
must be controlled uh we get we’re getting to a point you know where it where it’s no news to anyone here that we’re about to drive this off of a cliff.
00:30:27 ►
And so what are we, or we may already be in free fall.
00:30:33 ►
And so what is the evolutionary adaptation to this situation?
00:30:40 ►
What seems to be going on is that now that we have the acid trip of the Internet,
00:30:53 ►
those two things having been created more or less simultaneously in the late 30s,
00:31:01 ►
that you get the internal explosion of the psychedelic experience
00:31:06 ►
and the external explosion of the atom bomb,
00:31:09 ►
which represents sort of the fruiting body
00:31:11 ►
of that mycelial web of military, industrial,
00:31:16 ►
research and design people that created cyberculture
00:31:20 ►
and, as a matter of consequence, created counterculture
00:31:23 ►
and, in some sense, are the progenitors,
00:31:27 ►
the grandparents culturally of everyone in this room.
00:31:31 ►
We are children of the Manhattan Project
00:31:33 ►
in the sense that we recognize for the first time with the bomb
00:31:37 ►
that there is no over there anymore
00:31:41 ►
because of the radioactive fallout and because of the the uh the
00:31:50 ►
co-implication the accomplice action of of uh different states that are ecologically and
00:31:59 ►
economically in bed with one another like you know we can pretend for the sake of sensationalist news
00:32:07 ►
that it’s the United States versus China or versus Russia,
00:32:13 ►
but everything is so connected to everything else now
00:32:16 ►
that you can’t pull one of those cards out
00:32:19 ►
without the whole thing falling.
00:32:21 ►
And it was the bomb that taught some people that, and it was the acid bomb that taught some people that and it was the acid trip that
00:32:27 ►
taught some people that and uh you know and and just as a point of passing i think it’s
00:32:34 ►
no coincidence that um you know you talk about the electric kool-aidid acid test, you know, which, you know, tapping into this notion of the Promethean flame
00:32:46 ►
of the thunderbolt that allows an inspiration to spread through, you know, from the celestial
00:32:59 ►
macrocosm and like down into these receptive individuals and then between us.
00:33:08 ►
So at any rate, ancient cultures, pre-modern cultures,
00:33:12 ►
they had a way of managing these experiences
00:33:17 ►
and a very old and wise system in place
00:33:25 ►
for how to open a window into these realms.
00:33:32 ►
The same, in some sense,
00:33:34 ►
the same realms that we’re recapitulating
00:33:36 ►
with our portals, you know,
00:33:38 ►
as we astrally project to one another
00:33:42 ►
by ever greater fraction.
00:33:48 ►
And that was the shaman, you know, or whatever they’re called,
00:33:53 ►
you know, the cruenderos, these people who took one for the team
00:33:58 ►
and recognized that their position within the social molecule
00:34:01 ►
was to act as a mediator, not as a priest, not as someone with
00:34:07 ►
exclusive access to this knowledge, but someone who is willing to serve an intelligence greater
00:34:13 ►
than their own for the benefit of their community. And you start to see this kind of language
00:34:20 ►
emerging in some of the early cyberneticists, namely Gregory Bateson, who became convinced
00:34:29 ►
through, even though he started out in the OSS in the Korean War, working on using information
00:34:34 ►
science to create divisions in people. He thought appears in the interaction between an organism and its environment,
00:34:54 ►
because the unit of selection, and this was my area of study in school, evolutionary ecology,
00:35:01 ►
that the people were arguing for you know, for decades over,
00:35:06 ►
where is the unit of selection? Is it the individual organism or is it the group?
00:35:10 ►
Well, that’s an optical illusion. You know, everything is operating on everything else
00:35:17 ►
at the same time, and it’s only by drawing a boundary around it for the sake of trying to
00:35:23 ►
create a controlled experiment that we create
00:35:26 ►
these artificial categorical distinctions. So, you know, Bateson saw his classic example as a
00:35:32 ►
blind man with a cane feeling around, you know, and he said, well, the blind man feels a truck
00:35:39 ►
passing outside the street through the cane. And it’s like, well, where does the mind of that man stop?
00:35:46 ►
It certainly doesn’t stop at the end of his hand
00:35:48 ►
because the cane has become a sensory extension of his hand.
00:35:51 ►
But the ground has become a sensory extension of the cane.
00:35:54 ►
The cane is merely amplifying this other signal.
00:35:59 ►
And that when you actually look into it,
00:36:01 ►
and Zen master Genpo Roshi in Salt Lake City talks about this,
00:36:06 ►
he talks about big mind, and like where does big mind stop?
00:36:12 ►
Gregory Bateson called this the mind at large.
00:36:15 ►
And he said that because thought emerges in this relationship,
00:36:28 ►
emerges in this relationship that that we are in some sense that we’re there’s there’s an entire field of philosophy called the material philosophy where they study the agency of environments and
00:36:36 ►
landscapes and substances you know why is it that everyone in the ancient world was obsessed with rocks, right? It’s because they were animists.
00:36:46 ►
Because for them, the, you know,
00:36:50 ►
spirit was not some hard problem that had to be solved.
00:36:53 ►
Spirit was the living and imminent reality of everything.
00:36:58 ►
And it is precisely this animism that Bateson
00:37:02 ►
and that Bill Thompson
00:37:04 ►
and so many other very sophisticated scientific thinkers are proposing
00:37:09 ►
is the direction that we have to move as a society
00:37:12 ►
in order to not only reclaim our dignity as human beings
00:37:16 ►
from the maws of this commercial monstrosity,
00:37:21 ►
but also as a humble scientific reckoning with something bigger than
00:37:28 ►
ourselves. It’s a Copernican turn. You know, any kind of recent research, I’m sure a lot of you
00:37:33 ►
guys, we were talking about that this morning, some friends and I, about the kind of more popular
00:37:41 ►
theory that we’re living in a simulated universe and that there’s some
00:37:47 ►
there’s like evidence at the subatomic level there’s like a granularity to the cosmos that
00:37:50 ►
suggests that it’s being computed and if that’s the case we’re not we’re not the first universe
00:37:56 ►
and like we have to go through this uh bummer in the same way that we that 500 years ago people
00:38:03 ►
were reckoning with the fact that that the sun does not revolve around the earth.
00:38:08 ►
And in a sense, it’s this humility,
00:38:11 ►
which Kevin Kelly has said that science is,
00:38:17 ►
as we answer questions,
00:38:19 ►
we discover exponentially more questions.
00:38:23 ►
So we’re finally at that point
00:38:24 ►
where we are back to recognizing
00:38:27 ►
that the process of scientific inquiry,
00:38:31 ►
whether that process is applied to quantitative data
00:38:34 ►
in the empirical external material domain
00:38:38 ►
or qualitative data in the phenomenological and psychological domain,
00:38:43 ►
in the phenomenological and psychological domain.
00:38:48 ►
That inquiry is not in service of some adolescent fantasy of total control,
00:38:52 ►
but is in service of the ever-deepening humility
00:38:57 ►
of our relationship to the cosmic mystery that we are.
00:39:03 ►
And so, you know, for Bateson,
00:39:07 ►
this meant the participation in what he called,
00:39:11 ►
hyphenated, mind at large.
00:39:14 ►
And our efforts to connect electrically
00:39:19 ►
and photonically to one another
00:39:22 ►
are an attempt to reinvent the wheel essentially to to uh
00:39:28 ►
rebuild this thing that that actually lies that we’re embedded in that’s the water in which we’re
00:39:37 ►
swimming that’s invisible to us and so we’ve spent the last several thousand years going about the diligent task of reinventing the wheel, basically.
00:39:51 ►
But now we’re at that point where it’s sort of becoming obvious.
00:39:53 ►
And we’re seeing, on the one hand, the dawning of the age of the Internet of Things.
00:40:03 ►
the dawning of the age of the Internet of Things,
00:40:08 ►
that our toasters are talking to our security systems,
00:40:10 ►
and our security systems are talking to our doctors,
00:40:13 ►
and our doctors are machines,
00:40:18 ►
in the same way that computers replaced a room full of women sitting at a table.
00:40:25 ►
And so we’ve got all of these essentially quickened chips,
00:40:29 ►
these sophisticated crystals and quasi-crystals that we’ve served the rocks
00:40:33 ►
in almost like a kind of a theosophical,
00:40:36 ►
mystical Rudolf Steiner kind of way
00:40:38 ►
of exalting and ennobling the mineral world.
00:40:43 ►
We’re serving as the enzyme
00:40:47 ►
through which the metabolic transformation
00:40:52 ►
of the sleeping stones to the androids
00:40:57 ►
is being executed.
00:41:01 ►
And we are those things.
00:41:03 ►
So in a very real sense,
00:41:04 ►
we are just waking up,
00:41:05 ►
we’re graduating to our participation in that alchemical act of creation.
00:41:11 ►
And so like, as we’re doing this, though, it requires that we, you know, we’ve got to, we’ve
00:41:18 ►
got to claim this creative power. And in order to claim this creative power, in order to claim this creative power we have to see ourselves as not
00:41:25 ►
other than the creative power of the the cosmos as a whole and so in order to do in order to break
00:41:32 ►
down the the wall between the ego and and everything you know you end up in this like a
00:41:38 ►
lot of people end up in this you know very familiar kind of like acid burnout type situation where we simply, you know,
00:41:45 ►
the Humphrey Osmond, you know, the term psychedelic,
00:41:52 ►
you know, is to fathom hell or soar angelic,
00:41:56 ►
just take a pinch of psychedelic,
00:41:57 ►
you know, in his message to Aldous Huxley.
00:41:59 ►
And it’s like this notion that by opening the trap door to the basement of our own minds,
00:42:10 ►
where we have repressed all of the powerful and mysterious stuff that we considered not us.
00:42:19 ►
I mean, it’s been like fermenting down there for a few thousand years.
00:42:24 ►
New things have grown.
00:42:26 ►
And, you know, in the same way, you’re like, I hate to say this,
00:42:30 ►
but like it’s in a, you know, the work of a healer requires a bit of, you know,
00:42:34 ►
you got to keep your medical squeamishness in check.
00:42:37 ►
It is like lancing a boil or the, you know,
00:42:41 ►
the purgation of participating in an ayahuasca ritual.
00:42:44 ►
or the purgation of participating in an ayahuasca ritual.
00:42:49 ►
Like, we have to deal with this shadow material as a collective in order to survive this transformation.
00:42:55 ►
And that’s where, again,
00:42:58 ►
we turn back to the work of previous generations
00:43:01 ►
in the 20th century,
00:43:03 ►
specifically the work of people like Stanislav Grof,
00:43:05 ►
who pioneered the field of LSD psychotherapy.
00:43:08 ►
Because it’s only by recognizing,
00:43:13 ►
entering into conversation with,
00:43:15 ►
and then reclaiming as self
00:43:17 ►
all of this unconscious content
00:43:20 ►
that we’re able to move forward as as initiated wizards you know that we we it is a
00:43:27 ►
it’s an elemental process of recognizing the ways that each of us is essentially a node between
00:43:34 ►
intersecting waves coming from every directions in our environment we are something that the
00:43:38 ►
landscape is saying that the the entirety of human history can be understood as a thought expressed by the geosphere.
00:43:49 ►
And in that sense, when we talk about building the noosphere,
00:43:52 ►
that the internet were falsely conflating
00:43:56 ►
the systems that we’re making
00:43:59 ►
in order to sort of take this gambit
00:44:03 ►
at reproducing our original unity,
00:44:08 ►
our intuitive, you know,
00:44:10 ►
the memory that we have of this unity.
00:44:15 ►
That, again, we’re just, we’re,
00:44:21 ►
it’s like, you know, when you zoom in on the Mandelbrot set,
00:44:23 ►
and there it is again, you know again at a million degrees magnification.
00:44:28 ►
We’re not actually doing anything new here
00:44:31 ►
but it is new
00:44:34 ►
and it is an opportunity for novelty
00:44:36 ►
in the sense that every moment
00:44:38 ►
is an opportunity for novelty.
00:44:42 ►
I met a guy this morning
00:44:44 ►
that is actually a perfect example
00:44:46 ►
of this. This guy, John Keston, he’s giving a, he gave a talk on audiovisual scores and is giving a
00:44:55 ►
talk on sonification. And he’s an artist that, that improvises to environments. He just sits
00:45:01 ►
with like a musical sculpture, like listens to the songs of a creek
00:45:07 ►
or of a railway, you know, because ultimately the railway is a natural phenomenon like a beaver dam,
00:45:15 ►
right? Like we can all accept that there’s no qualitative difference between the activity of
00:45:21 ►
human hands and non-human hands, except as a matter of degree.
00:45:28 ►
And so he sits there and he’s actually listening
00:45:34 ►
to the voice of what I still can’t seem to shake
00:45:40 ►
the habit of calling the natural world.
00:45:43 ►
And he’s entering into a conversation with it.
00:45:46 ►
And so was the guy that was driving us from the hotel the other day.
00:45:49 ►
It turned out to be the head of some music academy here.
00:45:53 ►
And so he goes out on his back porch with the keyboard,
00:45:55 ►
and he does duets with the birds.
00:45:58 ►
And he’ll give them a little line, and they’ll repeat it.
00:46:00 ►
And then he’ll play the variations on it.
00:46:03 ►
and then he’ll play the variations on it.
00:46:05 ►
And I think that this as a model for the kind of sense of place and being,
00:46:13 ►
the kind of meaning that we make for ourselves in our lives
00:46:16 ►
in this age that’s growing up around us is coming up.
00:46:23 ►
So you’ve got like Android Jones jones the visual artist who does all
00:46:27 ►
digital work but he he says he he defines himself as an electro mineralist meaning that he’s he’s
00:46:36 ►
again he’s helping this thing come up so so you know the internet of Things, and we’re witnessing this Furby move to our environments becoming more conversational.
00:46:53 ►
Amazon Echo, you talk to your devices now, and they talk back, and they’re getting better.
00:46:59 ►
I got my girlfriend’s text message in a rental car a couple weeks ago, and it was like, I miss you, you know, but eventually it’ll sound like her, you know.
00:47:10 ►
And, you know, and that is sort of the bastardized version of what, you know,
00:47:19 ►
some of these post-industrial or meta-industrial cultures that have been springing up over the world in the last 50, 100 years or so, like Findhorn, or like, to some degree, like Arcosanti and Synergia Ranch
00:47:34 ►
in the southwest, both of those, that these are places where we recognize that the way forward is animism, is acknowledging that the world is, even without us,
00:47:48 ►
you know, installing natural language, artificial intelligence, conversational interfaces,
00:47:54 ►
even without installing, you know, mind-reading, Kurtzweil brain chips, is the world is already speaking. It’s already responsive.
00:48:10 ►
And, you know, the more that we recognize our own bodies as the, you know, the confluence of these,
00:48:15 ►
you know, as quickened dirt, you know,
00:48:17 ►
as in Bruce Dahmer’s sense,
00:48:21 ►
really, you know, very much back to that,
00:48:23 ►
the new model of the origin of life, very much back to that, the new model of the origin of life
00:48:25 ►
is very much back to that original model of, you know, lightning striking a shallow pond.
00:48:32 ►
If we are going to humanize a technology that now contains thermonuclear warfare, ecological
00:48:37 ►
destruction, and such subtler destructions as psychosurgery, electrical stimulation of the brain,
00:48:43 ►
aversive therapy, and behavioral modification.
00:48:46 ►
We will need more than the liberal humanism
00:48:48 ►
expressed in the implicit system of values
00:48:50 ►
of the behavioral sciences and the traditional humanities.
00:48:54 ►
This is the religion of Silicon Valley.
00:48:56 ►
You know, gamifying things, neuromarketing,
00:49:01 ►
you know, using the research of neurotheology
00:49:04 ►
to stimulate religious experiences
00:49:06 ►
in people so that they like to go to work more often, you know. The worldview of the liberal
00:49:12 ►
intellectual is a Marxist Freudian mapping of the outer world of society and the inner world of the
00:49:17 ►
psyche, but that sophisticated worldview does not contain the celestial and chthonic energies we
00:49:22 ►
need to appreciate the machine for what it is worth.
00:49:31 ►
To see technology in proper scale, we need cosmic consciousness, and that consciousness comes more often from meditation than from reading Marx or Freud. If we cannot humanize our technology with
00:49:36 ►
liberal humanism, we can with animism, and that is the importance to the contemporary world of
00:49:43 ►
animistic communities like Findhorn.
00:49:46 ►
If we can converse with plants,
00:49:48 ►
hear the spirits of wind and water and listen to the molecular chorus singing
00:49:50 ►
the 99 names of God
00:49:52 ►
in the crystal lattice of the metal of our machines,
00:49:55 ►
then we can have the consciousness we need
00:49:57 ►
to live in a culture in harmony with the universe.
00:50:12 ►
Y’all are like brilliant people.
00:50:12 ►
I know this.
00:50:15 ►
This is like the most intimidating experience I’ve had speaking at a festival.
00:50:18 ►
And so I’m sure that many of you
00:50:19 ►
have something smart to say
00:50:20 ►
and I’d love to hear it.
00:50:22 ►
Well, you know, there’s one of the things
00:50:24 ►
that I didn’t get to in this talk. I’m glad you, you hit it, is that there’s, there’s really kind of like
00:50:28 ►
two different magical schools in most world cultures. There’s the sort of masculine version
00:50:33 ►
and the feminine version, you know, there’s, and this is nod to Martine Rothblatt and her
00:50:38 ►
gender bending-ness here. You know, male medical, I i mean male magical traditions tend to focus on
00:50:47 ►
the the magician of the tarot you know exerting one’s own will you know and that’s through
00:50:54 ►
alignment to a greater will you know uh even you know not my will but thine uh or you know, do what thou wilt. But the thou, in this case, is capital T.
00:51:08 ►
You know, it’s aligning with the God self.
00:51:10 ►
That’s how magic is actually executed.
00:51:14 ►
And if you’re not operating from that holistic identity,
00:51:20 ►
then you’re unintentionally creating the very thing that you are trying to eradicate.
00:51:27 ►
You know, that if you look at, for example, the work of techno-immortalists like Ray Kurzweil,
00:51:33 ►
you get into this weird situation where it is the Faustian drive to live forever that is creating
00:51:38 ►
this accelerating technological evolution that is posing an existential threat to the entire infrastructure
00:51:47 ►
and is also in some sense accelerating our experience of time to the degree that more and
00:51:54 ►
more uh information more and more of the the subjective experience of the passage of time
00:52:00 ►
is is being compressed almost like uh you know and information entering the singularity.
00:52:06 ►
It’s getting squeezed into a point.
00:52:10 ►
And so we get it to this place
00:52:13 ►
where the attempt to live forever
00:52:15 ►
is actually creating a situation
00:52:16 ►
where even if we do master the human body
00:52:19 ►
and we find a way to make it live forever,
00:52:21 ►
we’re going to be so busy
00:52:22 ►
mutating ourselves on a daily basis
00:52:25 ►
like we change clothes that the issue of identity is is like moot you know like who’s left of
00:52:32 ►
somebody like ray kurtzweil or jason silva when we actually get there you know and in order to get
00:52:38 ►
there we it seems pretty obvious that the the kind of the the very self that’s asking,
00:52:45 ►
how am I going to maintain control of this situation,
00:52:49 ►
is basically forced to dance through the crowd
00:52:53 ►
because it’s dancing through the crowd
00:52:55 ►
that allows the intelligence of the body to speak
00:52:58 ►
and allows you to actually get to the front row
00:53:02 ►
with the minimum of effort.
00:53:04 ►
You have to jiggle at the same rate as all, the front row with the minimum of effort. You have to jiggle at
00:53:05 ►
the same rate as all of those other grains of sand on the speaker, you know, and it’s like only
00:53:10 ►
through acknowledging that, which is actually the feminine magical tradition, which is much more
00:53:15 ►
aligned with expressing the will of the environment and, you know, through alignment with natural
00:53:22 ►
cycles, you know, like the lunar mysteries of menstruation
00:53:25 ►
and that kind of thing doug rushkoff talks about this in in uh the book present shock he talks
00:53:31 ►
about how he was able to improve his word count and actually write faster and more effortlessly
00:53:37 ►
by keeping track of the cycles of neurotransmitters in his own brain associated with different phases
00:53:42 ►
of the lunar cycle he says that we can actually kind of sell this to business and say,
00:53:46 ►
look, your people are going to be better off if they’re only doing this once,
00:53:50 ►
one week a month.
00:53:51 ►
And then the other three weeks they’re working on something else.
00:53:53 ►
And one of those weeks is just rest and relaxation,
00:53:56 ►
that we are not machines, you know?
00:53:58 ►
So there’s something in there.
00:54:00 ►
And I don’t know if that gets it, your, I don’t know if that helps.
00:54:08 ►
in there, and I don’t know if that gets it, I don’t know if that helps, but basically it’s like,
00:54:15 ►
you know, Nisargadatta Maharaj said, it’s not your desires that are the problem, it’s that your desires are too small. Well, you know, the reason that I volunteered to do a live looping
00:54:22 ►
workshop tomorrow, and unfortunately we all can’t be there, I wish they’d just put them back to back, is that this is a problem.
00:54:33 ►
You know, like this functions pretty well for when it’s time to like listen to a, you know, this is like a vestige of like the university here that I’m like sitting on a microphone and, and, and y’all are not amplified
00:54:45 ►
in the recording. You know, um, I have this problem with venues where I run a live looping,
00:54:52 ►
uh, collaboration residency in Austin, Texas. And the goal is to get people involved. The goal is
00:54:58 ►
to have everyone recognize that they are participating in the body of this thing that is, you know, one organ is human tissue,
00:55:08 ►
another organ is modular electronic devices, another organ is the membrane of the room itself
00:55:15 ►
and the skeleton of the, you know, the layout of that room and in this and in this particular case the you know it really the practical thing
00:55:25 ►
is is uh leveling that not you know in like an ideological way that says this is this is wrong
00:55:34 ►
there’s obviously a place for you know the way that attention focuses on people and shifts but
00:55:41 ►
like for example democratically rather than electing termed representatives
00:55:47 ►
we could delegate our votes to provisional bodies of of experts that convene to address a particular
00:55:57 ►
issue and are basically appointed by the the polis at large and then dissolve once the issue has been addressed.
00:56:10 ►
So that we’re not dealing with the impossible reconciliation
00:56:15 ►
of a very complex and specific set of global issues
00:56:21 ►
with the kind of career political brinksmanship that seems to be involved
00:56:27 ►
in being a generalist political representative now that there’s like a new democracy are you
00:56:32 ►
serious has has talked about this uh extensively ken goffman also have talked about you know like
00:56:38 ►
what open source democracy or democracy 2.0 would look like and like one of the things
00:56:42 ►
is you know that we would that you wouldn’t even have to go to the voting office anymore.
00:56:48 ►
You get your public ledger pin code, like Ethereum or a blockchain type thing,
00:56:56 ►
so that you can’t fraud the vote.
00:56:58 ►
And you can use somebody else’s phone, so you don’t get into the…
00:57:01 ►
You kind of minimize some of the issues of technological access
00:57:05 ►
and then everyone can sort of pass their own rather than just blindly asserting you know
00:57:14 ►
investing our own personal authority in somebody that cannot possibly address this
00:57:19 ►
we we say you know what actually this this person, I think this person should be involved in the panel
00:57:27 ►
that comes together to address this particular issue.
00:57:30 ►
And the swarm intelligence of the human species
00:57:33 ►
appoints the people that are actually most suited to it.
00:57:37 ►
That’s like a political example.
00:57:39 ►
But I mean, even in a personal example,
00:57:40 ►
I think it’s more about learning how,
00:57:48 ►
I mean, contemplation is probably,
00:57:54 ►
there isn’t one way that this knowledge is going to express itself. And everyone here is going to like percolate on this and it’s going to take root somewhere and grow. And the next time
00:58:01 ►
I speak to you, you’re going to have some amazing way that this knowledge of the permeable,
00:58:09 ►
ever more permeable boundary
00:58:11 ►
between who you are and what you want to do
00:58:15 ►
and what your world is
00:58:16 ►
and what the world seems to want to do through you
00:58:18 ►
is doing being.
00:58:23 ►
You have to support the mouth.
00:58:26 ►
This whole thing about Occupy,
00:58:28 ►
the 99% versus the 1%,
00:58:30 ►
why do you suppose that movement
00:58:31 ►
didn’t
00:58:32 ►
realize its
00:58:36 ►
intentions completely?
00:58:38 ►
Because you can’t
00:58:40 ►
cut the head off and keep the body
00:58:42 ►
alive.
00:58:44 ►
You can circulate blood so that it’s never the same blood in the head,
00:58:48 ►
which is not currently supported by systems like capital,
00:58:51 ►
you know, like lower taxes on capital gains than on labor, right?
00:58:55 ►
But the moral task, the psychological task in front of us is learning to identify with the whole,
00:59:08 ►
being a 100 percenter. Because honestly, like, how are we going to do this if we’re not recruiting
00:59:14 ►
the 1% of people that have access to 40% of the resources? Like, are we really going to pull this
00:59:20 ►
off with, like, two of the four engines of this plane out? No, no. Like we need everybody
00:59:26 ►
on board. And those people are just as lonely and miserable as everybody else. You know, so
00:59:31 ►
hug a billionaire. That’s my solution for you. You’re listening to the psychedelic salon,
00:59:38 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:59:42 ►
Hug a billionaire.
00:59:47 ►
Well, since I don’t happen to know any billionaires,
00:59:50 ►
I’m just going to have to pass on that, I guess.
00:59:52 ►
But if you do happen to know a billionaire,
00:59:55 ►
then, well, that’s probably pretty good advice.
00:59:57 ►
I do think it’s important, however,
01:00:00 ►
to do what Michael was talking about earlier and humanize our technology.
01:00:02 ►
But I think that we have to step very carefully here,
01:00:06 ►
because it seems to me that sometimes we humanize our technology a little too much.
01:00:11 ►
In particular, I’m talking about the field called artificial intelligence.
01:00:16 ►
Just on the face of it, that phrase seems strange to me.
01:00:20 ►
What do they mean when they say that intelligence can be artificial?
01:00:24 ►
And have you noticed that some people are now capitalizing those two words, artificial intelligence, as if we’re speaking about a living, breathing person?
01:00:33 ►
Oh, I know what they mean, all right, but I think that they are seriously misleading people with that phrase because it’s incomplete.
01:00:41 ►
What is being talked about here is actually artificial intelligence code.
01:00:47 ►
It’s just code, my friends, computer code.
01:00:50 ►
And unless you’re one of those mindless rubes who think that those morons in the U.S. Supreme Court are correct
01:00:56 ►
in giving full human protection to corporations,
01:01:00 ►
well, then you no doubt will never think of some computer code,
01:01:03 ►
no matter how sophisticated,
01:01:05 ►
as being anywhere close to equal in importance
01:01:08 ►
to the most lowly human being on the planet.
01:01:12 ►
I’ll tell you when I’ll buy into the concept of an AI
01:01:15 ►
being on the same level as a human,
01:01:17 ►
and that’s when they can program a machine to have a full-on orgasm,
01:01:22 ►
one where the machine rocks and shakes
01:01:24 ►
and then goes to sleep for an hour afterwards.
01:01:28 ►
Until then, don’t bother me with stories
01:01:31 ►
about machines waking up.
01:01:33 ►
And this is exactly a place
01:01:35 ►
where techno-shamans are needed.
01:01:37 ►
We need people who are aware
01:01:39 ►
of the metaphysical aspects of human life,
01:01:41 ►
but who are also deeply involved in technology
01:01:44 ►
and can hopefully prevent
01:01:46 ►
the masses from turning over their lives to a mindless, Borg-like existence.
01:01:51 ►
And for what it’s worth, I think that somehow our species will always come up with those
01:01:56 ►
important people, the techno-shamans.
01:01:59 ►
For example, during the main LSD phase of the 60s, there was a day when the five men most responsible
01:02:06 ►
for synthesizing and distributing LSD got together and discovered that all five of their fathers had
01:02:14 ►
worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs that the United States dropped
01:02:20 ►
on civilians in Japan in 1945. What are the odds of all five of those guys having dads in that program?
01:02:27 ►
What do you think?
01:02:29 ►
I’m not sure if that story made its way into one of my earlier podcasts,
01:02:33 ►
but it was told to me by my friend Nick Sands,
01:02:36 ►
who was one of the five people,
01:02:38 ►
and I think it made it into one of the podcasts with Nick.
01:02:41 ►
Now, back in the year 2000,
01:02:43 ►
a book was published that discussed ways in which the Internet acted like a psychedelic drug,
01:02:49 ►
something techno shamans know quite well.
01:02:52 ►
I’d like to read a couple of short passages from that book right now.
01:02:55 ►
And I quote, when the expanded sense of awareness shamans and psychonauts seek in entheospace will be more widely experienced,
01:03:07 ►
for people will be using the portal of deep cyberspace,
01:03:11 ►
cyberdelic space,
01:03:12 ►
to launch their minds into the unlimited realm of entheospace
01:03:16 ►
where Gaian consciousness exists.
01:03:19 ►
As more and more minds constantly jump in and out of entheospace,
01:03:23 ►
the possibility arises for order to
01:03:26 ►
spring from this chaos of mind. And it is this new order I see as the awakening of the noosphere.
01:03:32 ►
It is anyone’s guess as to what form this new order will take. It might become manifest in a
01:03:38 ►
kind of super psychic awareness we all share. In essence, a true global consciousness.
01:03:47 ►
awareness we all share, in essence a true global consciousness. Should ever such a moment occur,
01:03:52 ►
it would be fair to say that that moment is also when the evolution of global consciousness actually begins. It does not matter that many people may hold different views, for ultimately
01:03:59 ►
the future we create will be a synthesis of many different points of view. What does matter is the part we
01:04:06 ►
each play in shaping the immediate future. For we are not just in a period of rapid change,
01:04:12 ►
we are in a period of rapid evolution. Cyberspace has revealed itself to be a great attractor,
01:04:19 ►
drawing our minds together into a cocoon of intelligence, knowledge, and light-filled fibers encasing the Earth.
01:04:27 ►
Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, the noosphere will shed its chrysalis,
01:04:32 ►
spread its beautiful wings, and take its proper place in the dance of the cosmos.
01:04:37 ►
With all of the commercial excitement caused by this new technology,
01:04:41 ►
we sometimes overlook the fact that a powerful new means of inter-human
01:04:45 ►
communication is evolving at an incredibly rapid pace.
01:04:50 ►
Like the clatter of souvenir vendors outside our historic cathedrals, the clatter of e-commerce
01:04:55 ►
can draw your attention away from the spirit-filled space you are about to enter.
01:05:00 ►
A deep layer of spirit is building within the Internet. Consciousness itself has taken hold and is beginning to expand inside of this great cathedral that is part human and part machine.
01:05:13 ►
Before our very eyes, the Neosphere is taking root in the mechanical infrastructure we call the Internet,
01:05:19 ►
which means, in the final analysis, that you are the spirit of the Internet.
01:05:25 ►
For the spirit of the Internet is the spirit of humanity.
01:05:29 ►
The spirit of the Internet is your spirit.
01:05:32 ►
It’s my spirit. It is human spirit in all its forms.
01:05:37 ►
End quote.
01:05:39 ►
As you just guessed, that book is titled,
01:05:42 ►
The Spirit of the Internet, Speculations on the Evolution of
01:05:46 ►
Global Consciousness. And, well, I’m the guy who wrote it. It’s available online for free in HTML
01:05:53 ►
format, and in Kindle format you can find it on Amazon for 99 cents. But if you want a paperback
01:06:00 ►
copy, and if you stop by my garage, well, I’d be happy to give you one of the
01:06:05 ►
200 or so copies that I’ve still got left. But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
01:06:12 ►
Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.