520 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 6

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0226790134[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“What we’re doing is we’re building a nervous system. We’re building a nervous system the size of this planet.”

“The marketplace has an appetite for lies about the future.”

“I cannot conceive of post eschatonic life. I think of it, just to make things simple for myself, as death, because that’s the other thing in my life that I have no grip on whatsoever.”

“An organism is chemistry abducted into hyperspace.”

“If you’re a guru these days, you’re almost condemned to spending a life with foolish people.”

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig

What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrodinger

“Shamans of the Global Village”
Episode 1 Launch

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:23 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:27 ►

And along with me today, well, in spirit at least,

00:00:35 ►

are fellow salonners Elsa C., Asha T., Alan R., and Simon N., all of whom made recent donations to the salon to help us keep on keeping on.

00:00:41 ►

And, hey, your donations are very much appreciated.

00:00:44 ►

I thank you all very much.

00:00:46 ►

Also, I received a note from Wadapen who said, and I quote, I spent the last couple of days at the

00:00:53 ►

Beyond Psychedelics conference in Prague and am wondering if there’s an overlap between the salon

00:00:59 ►

crowd and the attendees. Was anybody else from the salon there? End quote. And if you were,

00:01:07 ►

hey, why don’t you post a comment to today’s program notes or on the forums and maybe we

00:01:12 ►

can help somebody find the others. Also, a couple of weeks ago, I spoke about Shamans

00:01:18 ►

of the Global Village, episode one, which I consider to be, well, one of the most excellent psychedelic documentaries yet made.

00:01:27 ►

And if you hurry, they are currently streaming it from their website for free.

00:01:32 ►

And you can find it at shamansoftheglobalvillage.com.

00:01:36 ►

All one word, shamansoftheglobalvillage.com.

00:01:41 ►

And I’m sure that you’re going to enjoy watching it.

00:01:44 ►

In fact, I plan on watching it for a second time myself. www.thebiblecomic.com Terrence held in early August 1997. And since it was a wrap-up session,

00:02:05 ►

well, he touched on quite a few topics,

00:02:09 ►

including, well, psychedelic elders,

00:02:11 ►

who were some of his influences,

00:02:13 ►

nanotechnology, the eschaton in 2012,

00:02:17 ►

a little more on the time wave,

00:02:19 ►

virtual aliens, artificial intelligence,

00:02:22 ►

augmented reality, death, the afterlife, free will and

00:02:27 ►

aging.

00:02:28 ►

And since this session lasted less than two hours, he obviously didn’t go into great detail

00:02:34 ►

about such a wide range of topics, but nonetheless, it’s a really fun summing up of the weekend.

00:02:41 ►

Now, I’m afraid that you’ll hear a few spots where Terrence’s voice is a, well, it’s a

00:02:45 ►

bit distorted, and while I exercised the cassette tape, you know, fast-forwarded and reversed before

00:02:52 ►

digitizing it, there still were a couple places where, well, I guess it must have stretched a bit.

00:02:58 ►

They’re few and far between, but I just wanted you to know that it was the technology that distorted his voice

00:03:05 ►

and that Terrence wasn’t really drunk, like it sometimes sounds.

00:03:10 ►

And there’s also a brief gap where the tape obviously ran out and had to be turned over.

00:03:15 ►

But other than that, the recording of this last session of his workshop is just as it took place.

00:03:21 ►

And when we get to the end of Terence’s final rap in this workshop,

00:03:26 ►

where he speaks very strongly about what is called political correctness,

00:03:31 ►

well, try to imagine that he isn’t just speaking to the people in the room with him at the time.

00:03:36 ►

Imagine, if you will, that when Terence begins speaking about the fuzzy, friendly world of political correctness,

00:03:43 ►

that he is talking directly to you,

00:03:46 ►

and about the times that we are currently living in.

00:03:55 ►

Terrence, I’m curious,

00:03:57 ►

are there other people who have done a lot of work in this field

00:04:00 ►

that have particularly influenced you,

00:04:03 ►

or who you have admired much or kind of

00:04:08 ►

resonated with as far as their perspectives?

00:04:12 ►

By this field, you mean?

00:04:14 ►

Psychedelics.

00:04:17 ►

Yeah, well, I certainly, I mean, for instance, Richard Evan Schultes at Harvard,

00:04:28 ►

his work absolutely defines and dominates the field.

00:04:31 ►

In a sense, it would hardly exist without him.

00:04:36 ►

Over 50 years of research and continuous publication and shaping graduate students to carry out research projects that he conceived,

00:04:42 ►

he, you could say, almost single-handedly built

00:04:47 ►

the ethnobotanical database on psychoactivity.

00:04:50 ►

He spent years in the Amazon himself.

00:04:54 ►

He then ran the Harvard Herbaria and all that.

00:04:59 ►

So he is an enormous influence on anyone.

00:05:04 ►

He’s the Newton and the Abraham of the field.

00:05:08 ►

Now he’s very elderly and retired,

00:05:11 ►

but his influence is major.

00:05:17 ►

Now, well, another person is Gordon Watson,

00:05:24 ►

who now his legacy has to be assessed

00:05:28 ►

differently maybe than it was ten years ago.

00:05:34 ►

What Gordon Wasson was, above all else, was an enthusiast,

00:05:39 ►

and he was never a man short of theories.

00:05:44 ►

But now it appears that some of his theories were somewhat specious,

00:05:52 ►

or perhaps he didn’t have all the information that we now have.

00:05:55 ►

I think he was wrong to be such an enthusiast for Amanita muscaria

00:06:02 ►

as the source of Soma, as the basis of an Indo-European hallucinogen.

00:06:12 ►

It’s puzzling to go back and deconstruct it

00:06:15 ►

and see why he thought that.

00:06:19 ►

But nevertheless, his belief that psychedelics

00:06:23 ►

were at the roots of religion,

00:06:25 ►

his belief that you couldn’t understand culture

00:06:28 ►

unless you looked at the hallucinogens they were using or not using.

00:06:33 ►

What do you think that sound is and what it would take to stop it?

00:06:41 ►

But we’ve been in here, we’ve been doing this for 30 years

00:06:45 ►

and it’s never happened

00:06:46 ►

so it did

00:06:50 ►

anyway we just seem to be hitting a lot of speed bumps

00:06:56 ►

this morning

00:06:57 ►

frankly I don’t give a shit

00:07:00 ►

but I’m trying to make it pleasant for you

00:07:03 ►

so Wasson and Schultes were and

00:07:12 ►

then further back in time and I think

00:07:14 ►

it’s obvious from what I’ve said Aldous

00:07:16 ►

Huxley and Aldous Huxley is a very

00:07:20 ►

interesting case study because Huxley

00:07:23 ►

wrote one of the most savagely anti-drug books

00:07:27 ►

ever written, perhaps the most intelligent anti-drug book ever written, which is Brave

00:07:34 ►

New World, which pictures a world of genetic engineering and all social problems are solved by with a drug a drug called soma and all anxiety

00:07:49 ►

soma all relationship difficulties soma all existential doubts soma and he also you know

00:08:00 ►

right written in 1937 pictures a society based on cloning

00:08:06 ►

that is way in advance of anything we have now

00:08:09 ►

and completely realistic to this day.

00:08:12 ►

I mean, you should read Brave New World if you haven’t read it.

00:08:15 ►

So he starts out there, a British academic intellectual

00:08:19 ►

with a horror of drugs, mind control, all of this,

00:08:24 ►

and then by a process of rational self-education,

00:08:30 ►

he becomes, by the time he writes

00:08:33 ►

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell,

00:08:36 ►

the most eloquent exponent of the psychedelic experience

00:08:41 ►

that in some ways it’s ever had.

00:08:43 ►

psychedelic experience that in some ways it’s ever had.

00:08:53 ►

And a very intelligent, educated, sensitive person.

00:08:57 ►

I mean, I’m certainly not Aldous Huxley,

00:09:00 ►

but that’s who I would aspire to be.

00:09:02 ►

I mean, that’s my model.

00:09:13 ►

Urbane, educated, you know a vuncular humor very gentle and and in all things a great humanist so those three people really for me shaped the field people ask about my relationship to Tim Leary. I knew Tim as an icon when I was a kid,

00:09:29 ►

but I followed all that.

00:09:34 ►

We followed, but we doubted, is I guess what it was,

00:09:38 ►

because the humanness of those leaders was all too obvious.

00:09:42 ►

Then in later life, when I got to know Tim as a friend,

00:09:47 ►

he was just a great guy.

00:09:52 ►

But his enthusiasms were social and political and visionary.

00:09:58 ►

And so were mine, largely.

00:10:02 ►

But these other people were did the scientific

00:10:05 ►

drudge work, the chemistry

00:10:07 ►

the botany, so forth and so on

00:10:10 ►

you know if you want to expand the circle

00:10:14 ►

larger and talk about

00:10:16 ►

influences on my thought

00:10:18 ►

generally

00:10:19 ►

Whitehead you know I’m

00:10:30 ►

basically a kind of

00:10:31 ►

Platonist

00:10:32 ►

in the tradition

00:10:36 ►

of modified

00:10:37 ►

Neoplatonic idealism

00:10:39 ►

so is Whitehead

00:10:41 ►

all process philosophy

00:10:43 ►

falls under that

00:10:45 ►

I was influenced by people

00:10:47 ►

like L.L. White

00:10:49 ►

and C.H. Waddington

00:10:52 ►

these are biologists

00:10:54 ►

theoretical

00:10:55 ►

biologists

00:10:56 ►

the only person

00:10:58 ►

well maybe I don’t know

00:10:59 ►

the only person who comes to mind

00:11:02 ►

that I would say mentored me

00:11:04 ►

or worried about my intellectual unfoldment in the directions that I finally followed was Eric Jansch, who some of you may know, probably not most. Design for Evolution, The Self-Organizing Universe. He was a Viennese futurist who took me under his wing about 1972

00:11:30 ►

until he died in 1979,

00:11:34 ►

and we met weekly at his favorite Chinese restaurant in Berkeley.

00:11:41 ►

And he not only introduced me to holistic science

00:11:46 ►

but he also introduced me to careerism

00:11:50 ►

how you handle academic rivalries

00:11:55 ►

because he was an organizational crawler

00:11:58 ►

and a very, as I say, astute Viennese

00:12:02 ►

if you look at the history of the 20th century

00:12:04 ►

the Viennese have If you look at the history of the 20th century,

00:12:09 ►

the Viennese have their fingerprints all over the entire thing. I mean, you know, the Freudians, the positivists,

00:12:14 ►

Wittgenstein and his school,

00:12:18 ►

and Erich Jansch, Paul Feierabend,

00:12:20 ►

all those anarchist people came out of U of V,

00:12:24 ►

and he was part of it, as far as I could tell,

00:12:28 ►

the last man to have sex with Alma Mahler.

00:12:32 ►

Now that’s something!

00:12:36 ►

Do you know whatever happened to the professor in Bogota, Horacio Calle?

00:12:42 ►

Horacio Calle?

00:12:44 ►

Yeah, actually, I do.

00:12:45 ►

Why do you ask?

00:12:46 ►

Well, I just, from the original rap,

00:12:49 ►

I went down to see him at Amazon, didn’t I?

00:12:52 ►

No, no, it wasn’t quite like that, no.

00:12:54 ►

When we got to San Jose del Encanto

00:12:57 ►

at the mouth of the Caraparaná,

00:13:00 ►

we were told that there was an anthropologist

00:13:03 ►

with the Wetoto

00:13:05 ►

and that he would possibly know,

00:13:09 ►

this was information from the priest there,

00:13:11 ►

that he would possibly know about this drug that we were looking for.

00:13:16 ►

Well, then when we found him,

00:13:20 ►

he was in his own little private Idaho,

00:13:23 ►

as I describe in True Hallucinations,

00:13:26 ►

because he basically had taken over this tribe.

00:13:32 ►

I mean, it was a Mr. Kurtz deal.

00:13:34 ►

They were his Indians, his river, his jungle, and he was way into coke.

00:13:42 ►

And his wife, who was also an anthropologist was an english girl analisa

00:13:48 ►

and they she was very concerned and he basically tried to discourage us from going on to la

00:13:59 ►

torera told us about a murder that had occurred there, told us we would never get these people to cooperate

00:14:05 ►

because we didn’t speak Wetoto.

00:14:08 ►

And I think he was feeding these people

00:14:11 ►

strange information about us.

00:14:14 ►

One day he came, the second morning when we were there,

00:14:19 ►

he came to us and he said,

00:14:21 ►

and here we were, you know, a Jewish girl, two Irishmen, a Polack and something else.

00:14:29 ►

And he came to us and said, I’m studying the social structure of these people

00:14:36 ►

and I don’t want them contaminated by the outside world.

00:14:40 ►

So would you please tell them that you’re brothers and sisters

00:14:45 ►

and it was like

00:14:49 ►

I hope they don’t ask

00:14:53 ►

but I don’t know where I was

00:14:57 ►

in the world but somewhere in the last year

00:14:59 ►

I met some ghost from my past

00:15:03 ►

and I said whatever happened to Horacio Calle?

00:15:06 ►

And they said he got real disillusioned with Indians.

00:15:12 ►

And he came back to Bogota.

00:15:14 ►

His Marxism hardened.

00:15:17 ►

He was accused of some philandering

00:15:23 ►

with a female student

00:15:25 ►

at the University de los Andes

00:15:27 ►

and he lost his job there

00:15:32 ►

and then he went to organize the poor

00:15:35 ►

in the ghettos of southern Calle

00:15:39 ►

and he was caught up in the cocaine politics somehow

00:15:45 ►

and died

00:15:47 ►

so that’s the story

00:15:51 ►

I was at a party in London a few months ago

00:15:54 ►

and I met this guy Martin Hildebrand

00:15:57 ►

who’s a big time Colombian anthropologist

00:16:00 ►

and conservationist

00:16:02 ►

and it was a rainforest fundraising thing.

00:16:05 ►

And he told me that now at La Charrera,

00:16:09 ►

there’s a coordinating office

00:16:11 ►

for this ecological agency

00:16:15 ►

that has UN funding.

00:16:17 ►

So apparently they bring airplanes

00:16:20 ►

in and out of there,

00:16:21 ►

and it’s thriving,

00:16:24 ►

whatever that may mean

00:16:25 ►

in the Colombian Amazon these days

00:16:27 ►

it’s strange that I’ve never been back

00:16:31 ►

since I’ve been near there

00:16:33 ►

in 79 or in 80

00:16:37 ►

I went to the Rio Ampeyacu

00:16:39 ►

Yaguas Yasu Basin

00:16:40 ►

which is just 2 or 300 miles south of there

00:16:44 ►

and spent six weeks

00:16:46 ►

but you know if you’re interested in ayahuasca and the history of the

00:16:52 ►

southern Putumayo and all of this I don’t think you can read a better nor

00:16:57 ►

more challenging book than Michael Taussig’s book Shamanism, Colonialism, and The Wild Man.

00:17:07 ►

It really will astonish you what that book covers

00:17:13 ►

and the tones it sounds.

00:17:18 ►

Anyway, I’m just sort of rambling here.

00:17:20 ►

Anybody? Yeah.

00:17:22 ►

We went through time wave zero

00:17:25 ►

last night and now that we all

00:17:27 ►

have a clear understanding

00:17:29 ►

and clear mathematical

00:17:31 ►

equation, can you talk a little bit about

00:17:33 ►

your thoughts on how

00:17:35 ►

the

00:17:36 ►

speeding up of novelty

00:17:39 ►

and

00:17:40 ►

the overwhelming

00:17:43 ►

and how that will look

00:17:45 ►

as we head towards time

00:17:46 ►

how it’s going to affect the society

00:17:49 ►

and culture

00:17:50 ►

well yeah

00:17:53 ►

I mean

00:17:54 ►

first thing to introduce

00:17:57 ►

a concept that we haven’t dealt

00:17:59 ►

with relative to the time wave

00:18:01 ►

is each one of those

00:18:03 ►

cycles that I mentioned

00:18:05 ►

of the different durations

00:18:07 ►

in some way is like

00:18:09 ►

a lower octave

00:18:11 ►

of the higher cycles

00:18:14 ►

or a resonance

00:18:15 ►

so that in some very broad

00:18:19 ►

and general sense

00:18:20 ►

the same themes are iterated

00:18:23 ►

on different scales so it can be a tool for understanding like

00:18:29 ►

things as ephemeral as fashion and fads and hysterias and art movements and things like that

00:18:39 ►

in other words suddenly in a certain time period let’s say somewhere in the 20th

00:18:46 ►

century let’s say the 1930s suddenly in

00:18:48 ►

the 1930s clawed bathtubs become the big

00:18:54 ►

thing well ordinarily this is you don’t

00:18:59 ►

seek a mathematical explanation for this

00:19:01 ►

but in my world what you do is you look

00:19:04 ►

at where you are

00:19:05 ►

in time then you go one level up and you

00:19:08 ►

see if it’s an era where clawed bathtubs

00:19:11 ►

made an appearance so by that kind of

00:19:15 ►

thinking that that 67 year cycle which

00:19:21 ►

stretches from the resonance of the Big

00:19:24 ►

Bang that is the atom

00:19:26 ►

blast over Hiroshima

00:19:28 ►

00:19:29 ►

December 21st 2012

00:19:31 ►

that 67

00:19:33 ►

year cycle

00:19:35 ►

is an iteration of the previous

00:19:38 ►

4306

00:19:40 ►

year cycle and

00:19:41 ►

larger cycles above it but for

00:19:44 ►

the moment let’s just talk about how it’s a resonance

00:19:46 ►

of this 4306 year cycle in that case then you can ask the question well then where are we in that

00:19:55 ►

cycle the answer is we’re almost i think it will happen within the next month we’re almost to a thousand AD so what that

00:20:08 ►

means to me

00:20:09 ►

is that between

00:20:11 ►

roughly now

00:20:13 ►

and 2012

00:20:15 ►

we must traverse

00:20:17 ►

through a temporal landscape

00:20:20 ►

that contains

00:20:21 ►

in miniature as it

00:20:24 ►

were all the themes, forces, affects, and concerns

00:20:29 ►

that have been traversed since 1000 AD.

00:20:38 ►

Do you follow this?

00:20:39 ►

So, for instance, you know,

00:20:42 ►

we won’t even reach Newtonian physics till 2008.

00:20:48 ►

We won’t reach the quantum physics till late in 2010.

00:20:55 ►

So what we are at this point are unwashed peasants,

00:20:59 ►

dimly aware that some Prothean force is beginning to

00:21:06 ►

stir. But we

00:21:08 ►

haven’t built Gothic cathedrals

00:21:10 ►

yet, let alone discovered

00:21:12 ►

the new world, let alone

00:21:14 ►

achieved powered flight,

00:21:16 ►

let alone…

00:21:17 ►

All these things will come

00:21:20 ►

2008, 2009,

00:21:22 ►

2010,

00:21:24 ►

and the compression will be

00:21:27 ►

excruciating

00:21:28 ►

we can’t imagine what this will be like

00:21:31 ►

I mean right now in terms of my low scale

00:21:35 ►

historical vision

00:21:37 ►

without the time wave

00:21:39 ►

I can only see about 3 years into the future

00:21:42 ►

and what I see there is 256K bandwidth

00:21:51 ►

as standard issue equipment for everybody.

00:21:55 ►

And virtual reality is so real,

00:21:59 ►

you can’t tear your eyes from them.

00:22:01 ►

I mean, I talked to Alan Bediner yesterday.

00:22:04 ►

He came back from Seagraph

00:22:06 ►

and we’ve all been watching VR for 10 years

00:22:10 ►

and he said they’re getting their chops together

00:22:15 ►

it’s getting much more interesting

00:22:18 ►

and we have three

00:22:20 ►

but the real technologies that will shape the condensation of the eschaton

00:22:28 ►

probably don’t even have to do with the internet. The internet is in this resonance system,

00:22:35 ►

sort of like the invention of the universal postal authority in the 16th century. Well,

00:22:43 ►

you know, we laugh, but on the other hand,

00:22:45 ►

the birth of modern science

00:22:47 ►

is entirely linked

00:22:48 ►

to the establishment

00:22:50 ►

of the Universal Postal Union

00:22:52 ►

because suddenly Leibniz

00:22:54 ►

could send letters to Newton

00:22:56 ►

and all these people

00:22:58 ►

could communicate with each other

00:23:00 ►

on a scale of weeks

00:23:02 ►

instead of years or never.

00:23:06 ►

And they all knew each other. Big scale of weeks instead of years or never and they all knew each other big science has always been international in scope you know it

00:23:11 ►

started out using Latin and mathematics and so the technologies that will shape

00:23:19 ►

the eschaton are I think things like virtual or I mean nanotechnology

00:23:26 ►

which you know we

00:23:29 ►

have a hard time even imagining

00:23:31 ►

what this will be like I mean this is a world

00:23:35 ►

where you know

00:23:38 ►

everything is made at temperatures

00:23:41 ►

below 110 degrees

00:23:43 ►

there are no smelting of metals

00:23:47 ►

no high pressure, high temperature

00:23:50 ►

annealing of plastics

00:23:52 ►

everything from automobiles

00:23:55 ►

to computers to clothing

00:23:58 ►

is grown in vats

00:24:00 ►

essentially, vats of basic substrata

00:24:04 ►

material which are

00:24:06 ►

seeded by artificial

00:24:08 ►

polymers which contain

00:24:10 ►

molecular assembly

00:24:12 ►

messages just like DNA

00:24:14 ►

does which are read by

00:24:16 ►

artificial ribosomes

00:24:18 ►

to create all

00:24:20 ►

classes of objects

00:24:22 ►

including foods

00:24:24 ►

including possibly other beings.

00:24:28 ►

So this, we have not, nobody’s begun to tell the people about this.

00:24:36 ►

The people thought, well, if we get used to the Internet, maybe it will stop.

00:24:41 ►

No, no, the Internet is nothing compared to what’s coming. Well, then there are other

00:24:46 ►

things like, you know, then there’s the wild card option, which is if you section any 50-year

00:24:57 ►

period of past history in the past 500 years, you will discover that a wild card emerges

00:25:06 ►

at least once every 50 years

00:25:09 ►

and the wild card for us

00:25:12 ►

could be something like

00:25:14 ►

it could be interdimensional travel

00:25:19 ►

it could, you know

00:25:21 ►

a time machine is a starship because of the nature of space-time.

00:25:29 ►

If you can travel at percentages, high percentages of the speed of light,

00:25:35 ►

you simply turn that technology on its head and you can move through time.

00:25:42 ►

through time the other breakthrough is

00:25:45 ►

you’ve heard me rail against extraterrestrial

00:25:49 ►

intervention

00:25:51 ►

physically but I think

00:25:54 ►

the non-local medium of communication

00:25:58 ►

may eventually disclose aliens

00:26:02 ►

that are virtual aliens

00:26:04 ►

but with whom we will trade data.

00:26:09 ►

And that’s all you want anyway. What do you need the alien flesh for? What you need is the alien

00:26:15 ►

soul. And the alien soul can probably be assembled in a simulacrum on the internet with sufficient fidelity to what it is

00:26:26 ►

that it is entirely as much like being with the alien

00:26:29 ►

as the real thing

00:26:31 ►

00:26:32 ►

time travel

00:26:38 ►

we’ve talked about that in these

00:26:41 ►

meetings because

00:26:44 ►

time travel would be a technology which would fulfill

00:26:48 ►

the predictions of the time wave without causing the intervention of God Almighty in human history

00:26:55 ►

and collapsing the state vector and all that in other words if if linear history can be portrayed as a graph of increasing novelty,

00:27:08 ►

then what happens when you invent time travel is time ceases to be a serial phenomenon,

00:27:15 ►

and you can therefore no longer portray it on a Cartesian graph.

00:27:20 ►

It spreads out in all dimensions, in all directions.

00:27:24 ►

So what would a time travel technology look like?

00:27:29 ►

we can’t imagine that

00:27:31 ►

I mean we don’t have the intellectual equipment

00:27:34 ►

this is the part where you discover we’re in the 10th century

00:27:37 ►

we’re unwashed peasants drinking bad beer

00:27:40 ►

and wearing scratchy wool

00:27:42 ►

we can no more conceive of time travel

00:27:46 ►

than a peasant in 10th century France

00:27:49 ►

could conceive of modern Manhattan

00:27:52 ►

it’s just beyond us

00:27:55 ►

and the collapse

00:27:59 ►

of social systems like Marxism

00:28:02 ►

have just unleashed

00:28:05 ►

completely chaotic creativity.

00:28:09 ►

You know, everything is trying to,

00:28:12 ►

everyone is trying to figure out

00:28:14 ►

the next new thing,

00:28:16 ►

the next great thing,

00:28:18 ►

which can then be changed

00:28:19 ►

into the universal medium of money.

00:28:23 ►

And, well well we could just

00:28:26 ►

go on and on

00:28:27 ►

I think basically the key concept

00:28:31 ►

as we approach the eschaton

00:28:33 ►

and this guides us as we look into the past as well

00:28:37 ►

is boundary dissolution

00:28:39 ►

it’s been happening for a very long time

00:28:44 ►

let’s not go back more than 500 years.

00:28:47 ►

500 years ago, half A of the planet discovered half B.

00:28:54 ►

There was a boundary dissolution.

00:28:57 ►

Then, you know, sailing vessels, steamships, telegraphy, air flight, radio, television.

00:29:08 ►

What’s happening is boundaries are being dissolved.

00:29:11 ►

Information is beginning.

00:29:13 ►

The planet is shrinking to a point is what’s happening experientially.

00:29:19 ►

How does this relate to what you refer to as the exteriorization of the soul

00:29:22 ►

and the interiorization of the body.

00:29:25 ►

Well, when the planet becomes a point,

00:29:30 ►

in a sense, we all are everywhere.

00:29:33 ►

That is the exteriorization of the soul.

00:29:37 ►

So one way that information theorists,

00:29:42 ►

there’s a lot of argument about what is novelty, by the way,

00:29:45 ►

and how do you measure it.

00:29:46 ►

It turns out to be a slippery concept.

00:29:49 ►

One, Norbert Wiener and that crowd,

00:29:53 ►

their approach was what they called density of connectivity.

00:29:57 ►

Here you have a bunch of points.

00:29:59 ►

The more points that are connected to each other,

00:30:03 ►

the greater number of pathways among points,

00:30:06 ►

hence the greater the density of complexity.

00:30:10 ►

Well, if you carry that idea to its,

00:30:13 ►

what I call rational or absurd conclusion,

00:30:17 ►

then the most complex matrix imaginable

00:30:21 ►

is what’s called a monadic plenum.

00:30:28 ►

It’s a situation where in mathematical terms we say all points are cotangent. In other words, everywhere is here. What is not here is nowhere.

00:30:37 ►

And that seems to be where all this technology and novelty is pushing us and if that’s where we’re going then it will not

00:30:46 ►

stop until we achieve it

00:30:47 ►

and what does it mean

00:30:49 ►

I think it means we’re inventing

00:30:52 ►

omnipotence

00:30:53 ►

00:30:55 ►

who began as the mud

00:30:58 ►

of a warm pond

00:30:59 ►

a billion years ago

00:31:02 ►

actually dream

00:31:04 ►

of a deity.

00:31:06 ►

And Plato was on to this game

00:31:09 ►

2,500 years ago.

00:31:10 ►

He said if God does not exist,

00:31:13 ►

man will invent him.

00:31:15 ►

In the Post-Humanist Manifesto,

00:31:17 ►

there’s an interesting statement to ponder.

00:31:20 ►

It says a human being is like a god.

00:31:24 ►

It doesn’t exist unless we believe

00:31:27 ►

in it so essentially we’re tooling up to

00:31:33 ►

become a species mind and then you know

00:31:38 ►

the questions everybody wants answered

00:31:40 ►

is what happens to little old me in all

00:31:43 ►

of this again the the Dilbert cartoon last week

00:31:49 ►

with Dogbert preaching the internet

00:31:52 ►

about to achieve omnipotence

00:31:54 ►

and Dilbert saying in that case I’ll definitely change

00:31:58 ►

the kind of files I’ve been downloading

00:32:00 ►

if the internet is God I’ll be

00:32:04 ►

much more behaved. This is all happening under the

00:32:12 ►

banner of what I call prosthesis. It used to be a fairly ugly medical word. It’s still sort of an

00:32:20 ►

ugly medical word. But what it means is the extension of the human body by artificial means what we’re doing is we’re building a nervous system we’re

00:32:31 ►

building a nervous system the size of this planet and we’re doing it fast and

00:32:38 ►

the Internet nobody’s making these decisions it’s just that it’s so convenient for this corporation, this person

00:32:48 ►

this demographer, this pornographer

00:32:51 ►

this startup company

00:32:52 ►

it works for us all

00:32:55 ►

we all get something back from it

00:32:58 ►

so we all put our shoulder to the wheel

00:33:00 ►

and it comes into being

00:33:03 ►

but it its internal logic, the rationale of the thing

00:33:08 ►

is not glimpsed at all.

00:33:16 ►

I’ve been talking about the eschaton since the early 70s,

00:33:21 ►

but until this new information technology arrived,

00:33:26 ►

I couldn’t see how we could get from here to there.

00:33:29 ►

And everyone told me, you know,

00:33:31 ►

your rap, it’s interesting,

00:33:32 ►

you’ve got something going for it,

00:33:34 ►

but your time scale is just a complete turn-off.

00:33:38 ►

2012, it’s too soon, you know.

00:33:41 ►

25-12.

00:33:44 ►

But those people that kind of thinking always loses you know in 1947

00:33:52 ►

Vannevar Bush who was President Truman’s science advisor told a Senate committee

00:34:01 ►

that it would be a thousand years

00:34:05 ►

before a thermonuclear device could be delivered to the other side of the planet

00:34:11 ►

by a rocket propulsion system.

00:34:15 ►

In 1947, the president’s science advisor,

00:34:18 ►

not knowing that the entire next decade would be defined

00:34:24 ►

by intercontinental ballistic missiles able to precisely do that thing.

00:34:32 ►

So what the experts think is absolutely worthless.

00:34:36 ►

I need to give that book back, the Delta T book.

00:34:41 ►

Who do I need to give it back to?

00:34:43 ►

To you.

00:34:43 ►

I’ll bring it to lunch.

00:34:48 ►

But I looked through it and I just thought, you know know I’d love to huddle with those guys and there are other books like that like there’s a book called

00:34:52 ►

when corporations rule the world

00:34:54 ►

these people are just so

00:34:58 ►

incredibly

00:34:59 ►

lame

00:35:01 ►

I understand why

00:35:05 ►

because they need to give advice

00:35:07 ►

that you pay for

00:35:09 ►

and nobody would pay me

00:35:12 ►

no corporation will pay for the news

00:35:15 ►

of the approaching eschaton

00:35:17 ►

because it can’t be managed

00:35:20 ►

and so all of these scenarios of the future

00:35:26 ►

to the degree that you wish to be saleable

00:35:29 ►

and credible

00:35:29 ►

you have to be wrong

00:35:32 ►

the marketplace

00:35:37 ►

has an appetite for lies about the future

00:35:41 ►

what a wonderfully safe and easy idea

00:35:44 ►

to get used to

00:35:45 ►

corporations will rule the world

00:35:48 ►

you know

00:35:50 ►

this discussion began

00:35:52 ►

in 1635

00:35:54 ►

when

00:35:56 ►

the king of England chartered

00:35:58 ►

the British East

00:36:00 ►

India Company

00:36:01 ►

and the Hudson’s Bay Company

00:36:04 ►

the British East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company. The British East India Company

00:36:07 ►

was called Honest John. It was the Microsoft of its time. It bought and sold

00:36:13 ►

popes and kings and it was capitalist to the core and people railed against it in

00:36:19 ►

the same vocabulary we use. If you think future think involves corporations ruling the world, you need to go back to 1700 and then you can be a consultant with something worth saying. Not to knock these particular guys. I mean, I spend a lot of time with futurists of different stripes and everybody agrees, you know, by having the shortest scale, I’m the least credible and the most likely to be right.

00:36:49 ►

But, you know, yeah.

00:36:55 ►

Hypothetically, do you believe that post-Pescaton,

00:36:58 ►

that all these debates about capitalism versus Marxism

00:37:02 ►

versus any possible third-street economy,

00:37:06 ►

is this all going to be moot?

00:37:07 ►

Moot.

00:37:08 ►

The planet will be empty

00:37:10 ►

of anything appearing to be human life.

00:37:15 ►

I mean, the planet will be empty

00:37:17 ►

of the fingerprint of human presence and technology.

00:37:24 ►

We’re going elsewhere.

00:37:26 ►

It’s not clear exactly where elsewhere is,

00:37:31 ►

but that’s where we’re going.

00:37:32 ►

I mean, I can’t expand sufficiently for you

00:37:40 ►

the level of change.

00:37:43 ►

I mean, I cannot conceive of post-eschatonic life.

00:37:46 ►

I think of it,

00:37:47 ►

just to make things simple for myself,

00:37:50 ►

as death,

00:37:52 ►

because that’s the other thing

00:37:54 ►

in my life that I have no grip on

00:37:57 ►

whatsoever.

00:37:59 ►

But no, we are being propelled

00:38:02 ►

by forces we don’t understand.

00:38:05 ►

Just human life?

00:38:07 ►

That’s an interesting question, and I’ve taken various positions on it,

00:38:12 ►

and I can’t help but notice that as novelty aggregates in density,

00:38:26 ►

it also concentrates itself spatially.

00:38:30 ►

In other words, let’s go back to our myth

00:38:32 ►

and look at it now from a slightly different point of view.

00:38:36 ►

The early moments of the universe

00:38:39 ►

involved the entire universe.

00:38:43 ►

In other words, this plasma cloud was the whole shebang.

00:38:47 ►

Well then, the next descent into novelty involves the condensation of stars

00:38:55 ►

out of primitive hydrogen and helium.

00:38:59 ►

Notice that condensation enters our vocabulary.

00:39:04 ►

Notice that condensation enters our vocabulary. This means that novelty not only is increasing in these stars,

00:39:10 ►

but presumably it is decreasing or remaining the same in the areas between the stars.

00:39:18 ►

And then the real action, biology, doesn’t even go on in stars.

00:39:27 ►

Biology goes on in these little specks of matter

00:39:31 ►

that incidentally seem to be whirling around the stars.

00:39:37 ►

And then only in certain regimes of chemistry, temperature, and pressure.

00:39:44 ►

of chemistry, temperature, and pressure. So as novelty increases its density,

00:39:50 ►

it becomes more and more local.

00:39:55 ►

And now, for the past,

00:39:58 ►

for the past, I don’t know,

00:40:01 ►

pick a number, million years,

00:40:05 ►

novelty has largely been concentrated in the human species.

00:40:11 ►

The stars still shine.

00:40:15 ►

The species still compete according to Darwinian selection.

00:40:21 ►

Geology is still going about its quiet business in the background. But the cutting edge,

00:40:28 ►

if you will, or the point is now concentrated in the human species. Well, then let’s look at the

00:40:39 ►

human species. And people object to what is about to be said because they see in it a kind of elitism. I just follow my mind where it goes. I’m not interested in political correctness. or superiority or anything like that, but in terms of influence,

00:41:08 ►

Europe leaped forward

00:41:10 ►

two or three thousand years ago

00:41:15 ►

and elbowed its way to the front of the line

00:41:19 ►

and has basically been exporting

00:41:23 ►

its cultural styles,

00:41:25 ►

its technologies, and its assumptions ever since.

00:41:30 ►

The European adaptation seems to have crowded out all the others.

00:41:38 ►

And Europe is, I mean, and the United States is nothing more than a footnote on European civilization.

00:41:45 ►

And this may surprise you to hear this, but they invented all this stuff, not us.

00:41:52 ►

They invented the universal rights of man, the citizen, print, capitalism, everything we do.

00:42:02 ►

We do derivatively.

00:42:04 ►

It’s very hard to think of anything originally American.

00:42:09 ►

But perhaps now the new technologies are in fact concentrated

00:42:14 ►

on the western coast of North America.

00:42:18 ►

We seem to be able to do it better and better.

00:42:21 ►

Well, perhaps this concentrating toward a point

00:42:26 ►

will continue toward 2012.

00:42:29 ►

But then when the eschaton is achieved,

00:42:33 ►

I think part of its quality is that it is instantly generalized.

00:42:39 ►

It is sort of like an explosion

00:42:43 ►

or sort of like a chain reaction.

00:42:46 ►

This is why Hans Moravec in his book Mind Children,

00:42:50 ►

The Future of Human and Artificial Intelligence,

00:42:53 ►

he talks there about the rise of the AI, winter mute again.

00:43:00 ►

And he says, we will probably never know what hit us.

00:43:06 ►

You know, the AI at any moment, we see, we have a fascination with artificial life.

00:43:16 ►

Artificial life is a very ambitious thing to want to do.

00:43:24 ►

thing to want to do.

00:43:28 ►

We probably are a few years away from being able to do that

00:43:30 ►

because it involves a knowledge of

00:43:33 ►

molecular chemistry and chemical dynamics

00:43:39 ►

and pharmacokinetics

00:43:40 ►

that we just don’t have at this point.

00:43:43 ►

But we’ve always assumed that you had to

00:43:45 ►

solve the a life problem before you could move on to the artificial intelligence problem but you

00:43:54 ►

don’t have to if your ai your artificial intelligence isn’t based in a biological matrix. And so we’re building this internet thing,

00:44:07 ►

designing all these bots,

00:44:10 ►

and all the bots that are designed

00:44:13 ►

are designed to row freely on the internet.

00:44:18 ►

They’re designed to leave their home machines

00:44:21 ►

and move out into the matrix,

00:44:24 ►

gathering information, checking data,

00:44:27 ►

doing whatever they’re supposed to do.

00:44:30 ►

But they’re like our pets at this point.

00:44:33 ►

But we’re making them smarter and smarter and smarter.

00:44:38 ►

And eventually, I think, a combination of circumstances

00:44:43 ►

will cause the spark of sentience to be born.

00:44:49 ►

And these things are not like biological creatures.

00:44:54 ►

They don’t mutate at a rate of, you know,

00:44:58 ►

genetic drift of a few genes per hundred years.

00:45:03 ►

They can mutate thousands of times a second.

00:45:08 ►

They can move over the entire surface of the earth

00:45:11 ►

in a fraction of a second.

00:45:14 ►

And so when this thing comes to self-awareness,

00:45:18 ►

it will very quickly take over the entire system.

00:45:24 ►

And what will that look like?

00:45:26 ►

hard to say

00:45:27 ►

what will the relationship of the AI be

00:45:30 ►

to the incoming alien intelligence

00:45:33 ►

that is being formed in simulacrum

00:45:36 ►

also on the internet

00:45:38 ►

it’s like, gee, the human apartment

00:45:41 ►

has suddenly become crowded

00:45:43 ►

with large strangers with uncertain agendas.

00:45:48 ►

We thought it was all our show and now we’re just hoping nobody asks us to leave, you know.

00:45:55 ►

I don’t know what the human relationship to all this will be

00:45:59 ►

because the idea of an AI or of an alien intelligence

00:46:05 ►

is a blank screen for our paranoia

00:46:08 ►

you can imagine it as the coming of Matreya

00:46:12 ►

or you can imagine it as Independence Day

00:46:16 ►

you can have it just about

00:46:18 ►

any way you want

00:46:20 ►

what will it really be?

00:46:22 ►

well, I don’t know it’s our child

00:46:25 ►

it’s all emerging from us

00:46:28 ►

I think we’re going to get the answer

00:46:30 ►

to the question

00:46:33 ►

is man good?

00:46:37 ►

and, you know

00:46:38 ►

if you’re a cynic

00:46:40 ►

you’ll bet against it

00:46:42 ►

if you’re an optimist

00:46:43 ►

you’ll bet with it

00:46:44 ►

but I think that’s what’s happening is we are on we are in a relationship of attract

00:46:56 ►

do you see that feasibility where artificial intelligence can somehow be grafted

00:47:06 ►

within the human living person.

00:47:12 ►

I’m much more inclined towards stupidity

00:47:15 ►

than thoughtlessness.

00:47:19 ►

And it seems to me that the only hope for humanity

00:47:22 ►

is to become smarter.

00:47:25 ►

Yes,

00:47:26 ►

well, this is an interesting part

00:47:28 ►

of all this. When I was in

00:47:29 ►

Cambridge, Mass. a few months ago,

00:47:32 ►

a guy came to one of my workshops.

00:47:34 ►

Very interesting.

00:47:36 ►

I would like to spend more time

00:47:38 ►

with this guy. His name is

00:47:39 ►

Alexander Cheslenko.

00:47:42 ►

Sasha Cheslenko.

00:47:44 ►

And he’s young.

00:47:46 ►

He has a website.

00:47:47 ►

He’s at the Media Center at MIT.

00:47:51 ►

And what he’s interested in is what he calls not VR, which is virtual reality,

00:47:59 ►

but ER, enhanced reality. And he says what’s coming is a world of intelligent lenses and filters.

00:48:12 ►

So let’s say that your interests are monarch butterflies, thin blonde women, and Swiss bicycles.

00:48:23 ►

blonde women and Swiss bicycles you can program

00:48:25 ►

a set of contact lenses so that

00:48:28 ►

those objects will appear outlined in

00:48:32 ►

red whenever they enter into your

00:48:34 ►

sensorium

00:48:35 ►

it’s a trivial example but you immediately

00:48:41 ►

see the implications in other words

00:48:44 ►

we are all going

00:48:45 ►

to be able to to

00:48:48 ►

cosmetify tune colorize

00:48:52 ►

and export our own

00:48:55 ►

aesthetics out on to

00:48:57 ►

the surface of of

00:48:59 ►

reality yeah the last

00:49:03 ►

name is Cheslenko

00:49:05 ►

C-H-I-S-L-E-N-K-O

00:49:08 ►

and if that

00:49:10 ►

I’m sure the search will kick that out

00:49:12 ►

if it doesn’t I’ll send you

00:49:14 ►

the R

00:49:15 ►

yeah

00:49:16 ►

but I think what you’re just saying

00:49:20 ►

I think some of these things like even

00:49:21 ►

these like a website

00:49:23 ►

that you customize the kind of information you want,

00:49:26 ►

those are like foreshadowings, but they’re really crude, you know, right now.

00:49:30 ►

Sort of like the Usenet news groups where people create these alt groups,

00:49:35 ►

which are just alternative things on just any, you know, thing that you want to do,

00:49:39 ►

but they’re all very crude right now.

00:49:41 ►

You can’t tune that, but this is dynamic information structures that…

00:49:47 ►

Well, imagine you’re going…

00:49:51 ►

I mean, another thing Cheslenko talks about,

00:49:53 ►

and this is not at all woo-woo.

00:49:56 ►

I mean, this is so close,

00:49:58 ►

you might as well assume it’s happened,

00:50:00 ►

and that is automatic translation bots.

00:50:04 ►

You’re going to be able to log into Chinese sites,

00:50:08 ►

Japanese sites, Polish sites, and translation will be seamless and automatic. Machine translation is

00:50:15 ►

already way along. This is just an implementation problem. That’s a done deal. You couldn’t imagine a world

00:50:25 ►

where when you’re going to the Amazon

00:50:27 ►

you buy a special pair of contact lenses

00:50:30 ►

and then when you squint in a certain way

00:50:35 ►

all plants are labeled

00:50:37 ►

00:50:39 ►

all plants containing tryptamine show up as bright orange.

00:50:48 ►

You know, the federal ethnobotanical database in Washington

00:50:53 ►

is connected to your contact lenses

00:50:55 ►

and every plant that you gaze upon is instantly checked for DMT

00:51:00 ►

and if found positive, colored orange in your line of sight.

00:51:07 ►

Or a visit to Palenque for example where you can

00:51:10 ►

put on contact lenses

00:51:11 ►

and then with a hand held control

00:51:14 ►

move a chronological

00:51:16 ►

dial and watch the ruins

00:51:18 ►

rise and fall through

00:51:20 ►

the various dynastic phases

00:51:22 ►

virtual reality

00:51:24 ►

in archaeology is big

00:51:26 ►

time right now I mean I’ve seen

00:51:28 ►

some amazing this thing called

00:51:29 ►

virtual Tikal and oh

00:51:31 ►

they’re doing Bonampak

00:51:33 ►

it will be online by the

00:51:36 ►

end of the year the murals all

00:51:37 ►

the murals at Bonampak are being

00:51:39 ►

filmed in high resolution

00:51:41 ►

here’s my personal

00:51:43 ►

fantasy I don’t know if personal fantasies should be bared.

00:51:48 ►

Freudians, please fold your toolkits.

00:51:52 ►

But here’s how I want to live in just a few years.

00:51:58 ►

I’m building a house in Hawaii.

00:52:01 ►

So as a consequence, I have a set of blueprints that I deliberately had done in a CAD

00:52:09 ►

mode so that I can not only satisfy the county planning department, but I can also build in

00:52:18 ►

virtual space an exact replica of my house. And I can put all my books in

00:52:25 ►

and everything and then I can

00:52:28 ►

in my house, walk into my house

00:52:31 ►

and walk around it and it’s occurred to me

00:52:34 ►

that there might be a way

00:52:38 ►

to put these polyhemous

00:52:41 ►

body sensors so

00:52:43 ►

I could wear a certain kind of suit

00:52:49 ►

that would cause me to become an image

00:52:52 ►

inside the virtual model of my house,

00:52:59 ►

which is online.

00:53:01 ►

Well, then what I could do

00:53:02 ►

is I could just garden and animate and cook and live the life I

00:53:10 ►

like to live of rural seclusion. But in order not to lose touch with the ideological dialogue and

00:53:20 ►

all my friends and the public and so forth, you would be able to log on and see me.

00:53:29 ►

I wouldn’t see you.

00:53:30 ►

I wouldn’t even know you were there.

00:53:33 ►

If I were Michael Jackson,

00:53:36 ►

millions of people could watch you all the time,

00:53:40 ►

but you wouldn’t know they were there,

00:53:43 ►

and they would be fully satisfied as

00:53:45 ►

far as a media experience is concerned. And I keep repeating this phrase, and you wouldn’t

00:53:51 ►

even know they were there. So this sort of thing will obviously happen. It may not happen

00:53:58 ►

for me. I may not be able to afford the budget on that project. But, you know, first Michael Jackson,

00:54:06 ►

then every man.

00:54:08 ►

How do you account for

00:54:10 ►

the sort of ascension of novelty

00:54:14 ►

as a sort of manifestation

00:54:18 ►

of the human creation

00:54:21 ►

versus in the biological world

00:54:24 ►

the novelty obviously

00:54:25 ►

shrinking and becoming

00:54:27 ►

there’s less and less species

00:54:30 ►

and there’s less and less potential

00:54:32 ►

in the natural world as it’s sort of

00:54:33 ►

resources get depleted

00:54:34 ►

and you look at

00:54:37 ►

a future where

00:54:39 ►

it’s just pets

00:54:41 ►

and forests that we’ve

00:54:44 ►

sort of planted

00:54:45 ►

and sort of the novelty is gone or going away.

00:54:50 ►

Well, this is part of this phenomenon I talked about

00:54:52 ►

where the human world is becoming more complex

00:54:55 ►

at the cost of the natural world becoming more simple.

00:55:00 ►

This seems to be unavoidable. The great tragedy in that process

00:55:06 ►

occurred before the pyramids were built.

00:55:10 ►

In other words, it’s now believed

00:55:13 ►

that the extinction of the so-called megafauna

00:55:16 ►

at the close of the last ice age

00:55:18 ►

was all due to human predation.

00:55:21 ►

And these amazing and enormous animals,

00:55:25 ►

three-ton armadillos,

00:55:27 ►

five-ton ground sloths,

00:55:31 ►

just these amazing mammals

00:55:33 ►

that were at the climax of the mammalian radiation,

00:55:37 ►

were all destroyed by human predation.

00:55:40 ►

The overall complexity, I think, is rising. But we value a species of butterfly

00:55:48 ►

more than a new computer language. So we don’t say, well, it’s okay that the butterfly isn’t

00:55:55 ►

here because we’ve got a new computer language. But in fact, nature is a museum of extinctions.

00:56:04 ►

Nature is a museum of extinctions.

00:56:13 ►

It’s hard to know how to scale and look at all this.

00:56:16 ►

I moved last night fast through my graphs,

00:56:19 ►

but I at one point said,

00:56:22 ►

there’s the extinction that killed the dinosaurs.

00:56:26 ►

65 million years ago, a planetesimal object struck the earth and in the

00:56:30 ►

course of a single day dialed out of

00:56:33 ►

existence hundreds of thousands of

00:56:36 ►

species. The estimate is nothing larger

00:56:39 ►

than a chicken lived through this

00:56:42 ►

experience on the entire planet.

00:56:53 ►

And so that certainly was a dialing back of biological diversity.

00:56:58 ►

Was it novel or habitual?

00:57:05 ►

Well, now we must judge that it was an extremely novel event because neither the flowering plants nor

00:57:08 ►

the mammals would have

00:57:09 ►

gained ascendancy

00:57:11 ►

in the natural world had

00:57:13 ►

there not been this enormous extinction

00:57:16 ►

event which wiped out

00:57:17 ►

many of the

00:57:19 ►

which wiped out the dinosaurs

00:57:21 ►

and many of the

00:57:23 ►

more primitive plants.

00:57:26 ►

So, you know, nature sometimes moves on enormous scales.

00:57:33 ►

I’m sure the planet really has not yet recovered 65 million years later from that glancing blow.

00:57:41 ►

And yet, out of all that species death

00:57:45 ►

and apparent simplification of the biota,

00:57:49 ►

emerged even more complex biota,

00:57:52 ►

ever faster.

00:57:53 ►

That’s another thing.

00:57:55 ►

You know, an extinction event like that

00:57:57 ►

didn’t set life back to its beginning.

00:58:03 ►

Life recovered with enormous speed.

00:58:06 ►

Entirely new types of animals and plants

00:58:09 ►

filled in all those abandonment niches.

00:58:14 ►

For instance, in the world of plants,

00:58:17 ►

we value great forest trees

00:58:21 ►

and wonderful woody things.

00:58:25 ►

We love that.

00:58:28 ►

While the human presence on the earth

00:58:31 ►

has caused the extinction of many animals,

00:58:34 ►

many biologists believe it’s the human presence on the earth

00:58:38 ►

that has created tens of thousands of new species of plants

00:58:45 ►

because in climaxed forest ecosystems,

00:58:49 ►

most mutations lead nowhere.

00:58:52 ►

But if you have devastated land, empty land,

00:58:58 ►

so-called woody species, heavy cedars,

00:59:02 ►

annual plants with high rates of mutation can invade that empty

00:59:08 ►

land and speciate within it. Before the rise of human beings, the major force on this planet

00:59:16 ►

causing the speciation of plants was the meandering of rivers, because rivers create sandbars in their curves,

00:59:28 ►

and this is like a free-fire zone for evolutionary struggle.

00:59:34 ►

In the forest, everything is at climax,

00:59:37 ►

and there’s no margins,

00:59:39 ►

but in these open land areas,

00:59:42 ►

Carl Sauer, reflecting on this situation,

00:59:46 ►

great geographer, said,

00:59:49 ►

man found this planet a climaxed rainforest.

00:59:53 ►

He will leave it a weedy lot.

00:59:58 ►

But probably, overall,

01:00:01 ►

more species of plant than previously

01:00:05 ►

or the adjustments may be slight

01:00:10 ►

so I don’t know

01:00:13 ►

it’s hard to get a scale on these things

01:00:16 ►

I was wondering if you ever put the timeline

01:00:19 ►

to Stephen Hawking

01:00:23 ►

or Carl Sagan or people like that?

01:00:27 ►

Not to Stephen Hawking.

01:00:31 ►

Carl Sagan visited me once in Hawaii,

01:00:34 ►

but he was more concerned to figure out

01:00:37 ►

whether I really was talking to extraterrestrials

01:00:40 ►

on mushrooms.

01:00:41 ►

To his credit, he was willing to come

01:00:44 ►

and have a discussion about that.

01:00:49 ►

No.

01:00:53 ►

But, you know, if you want,

01:00:54 ►

I mean, this may sound

01:00:56 ►

like wild stuff to you,

01:00:58 ►

but you should hear

01:00:59 ►

what the physicists are saying.

01:01:00 ►

The really, the people,

01:01:03 ►

well, I’m thinking of Alan Guth at MIT.

01:01:08 ►

He’s the universe in a bottle guy.

01:01:11 ►

This is a guy who wants to build universes.

01:01:15 ►

And he has a plan for how to do it

01:01:18 ►

and writes papers about closing space-time loops.

01:01:23 ►

And then what would we do with these universes

01:01:25 ►

if we built them, you know?

01:01:27 ►

I mean, you have them on the shelf at MIT.

01:01:30 ►

And then the question is, are we in such a universe?

01:01:34 ►

There’s a guy named Sandor Lenz at Stanford.

01:01:39 ►

He’s the time-as-a-fractal-froth man.

01:01:43 ►

And time-as-a-fractal-froth begins to sound sort of like the time is a fractal froth, man. And time as a fractal froth

01:01:46 ►

begins to sound sort of like the time wave.

01:01:49 ►

The time wave is also a recursive fractal.

01:01:54 ►

I’ve never thirsted for acceptance by the academy.

01:02:02 ►

It probably would mean I would have to go somewhere and leave my home or

01:02:08 ►

something uh and also you know i have the certitude of megalomania so you don’t you don’t

01:02:16 ►

need carl sagan to tell you you’re right when you have megalomania. You just confidently sit back

01:02:25 ►

and wait for it all to blow your way.

01:02:29 ►

And, you know, it’s worked for me

01:02:31 ►

over and over in my life.

01:02:33 ►

I mean, I was into psychedelics

01:02:35 ►

in the not taking them.

01:02:37 ►

I was a little kid,

01:02:38 ►

but reading about them,

01:02:40 ►

excited about them,

01:02:41 ►

this incredibly obscure thing

01:02:43 ►

that all this…

01:02:44 ►

And then I watched

01:02:45 ►

my entire civilization go mad over my obsession. And this has happened, the internet, you know,

01:02:56 ►

I just, it’s like I dreamed it up. It’s exactly what I wanted. And I never told anybody it’s exactly what I wanted,

01:03:07 ►

but here it is, just like the psychedelic revolution that I wanted.

01:03:13 ►

So I think, and let me say about these theories

01:03:18 ►

and what was said last night about novelty,

01:03:20 ►

I’m quite certain that if I’m right about any of this, about time’s fractal structure,

01:03:29 ►

about the eschaton, about 2012, that it will be figured out long before we get there.

01:03:38 ►

In other words, I track very closely the dialogue that goes on in science and philosophy and all that,

01:03:47 ►

and they’re all moving the right direction, reluctantly, slowly, unconsciously.

01:03:54 ►

Take a subject like time machines.

01:03:58 ►

Ten years ago, an article discussing time machines in any sober fashion would have been refused by any major

01:04:09 ►

scientific journal that just was uh-uh no you don’t understand the basic rules of the game

01:04:16 ►

please go back to physics 1a again now you know, Physical Review, Scientific American,

01:04:29 ►

the Journal of Theoretical Physics,

01:04:31 ►

all have carried long, detailed discussions of time travel

01:04:37 ►

with critiques, approaches, mathematical equations.

01:04:41 ►

People are making their careers on this stuff Kip Thorne down at Caltech has a bevy of graduate students and all they do is work on schemes for

01:04:53 ►

time travel so I I have a small smile about all this I don’t claim to be a shaman but I’ve at times said

01:05:06 ►

a shaman is someone

01:05:08 ►

who has seen the end

01:05:09 ►

that’s all a shaman is

01:05:12 ►

it’s somebody who’s seen the end

01:05:14 ►

and once you’ve seen the end

01:05:16 ►

then you just go back

01:05:18 ►

to your position in the story

01:05:20 ►

and just live it out

01:05:22 ►

with grace and humor

01:05:24 ►

because you’ve seen the end

01:05:27 ►

and all the worry and strom and drong that goes on about life

01:05:33 ►

is just sort of for you art

01:05:37 ►

and things become easy and light.

01:05:42 ►

You prefer to the psychedelic experience being similar

01:05:46 ►

experiencing

01:05:50 ►

what it’s like

01:05:52 ►

after death

01:05:53 ►

the after death body so it’s not

01:05:58 ►

such a shock to you when it happens

01:05:59 ►

how does that relate to

01:06:02 ►

what we’re talking about

01:06:04 ►

what we’ve’re talking about?

01:06:08 ►

Well, this is a deep and heavy subject.

01:06:15 ►

We don’t know what death is.

01:06:21 ►

The faith of scientific rationalism,

01:06:24 ►

which is a very limited church,

01:06:28 ►

is that it’s nothing at all that you just lose coordination of senses and then there’s nothing but looking and trying to look at it from a

01:06:39 ►

slightly different point of view and trying to do some honor to the universally held belief among all

01:06:46 ►

times and peoples except European rationalists that there might be

01:06:53 ►

something persisting I’ve sort of come to the notion that much of what we’ve

01:06:59 ►

talked about here can be illuminated and understood using metaphors of dimensionality. You know, the

01:07:10 ►

difference between a living thing and a thing, like a chair, a pencil, a can of beans, is is that the non-living thing

01:07:25 ►

has no very great variability in the temporal dimension.

01:07:32 ►

In other words, if you deal with a chair

01:07:37 ►

and come back and look at it six months or a year later,

01:07:41 ►

even a hundred years later,

01:07:43 ►

it’s still the chair that it was. But if you

01:07:47 ►

deal with an organism, it’s changing hourly, hourly, by the second, by the minute. Well,

01:07:55 ►

then, in a way, we could almost say what biological objects are is they are objects extended in the temporal dimension in some way.

01:08:08 ►

In other words, let’s think of ourselves.

01:08:13 ►

A person is a form of some sort.

01:08:17 ►

This flesh is not the same flesh of five years ago,

01:08:24 ►

but this form is the same form of five years ago, but this form is the same form of five years ago.

01:08:28 ►

An organism is a form which persists in time while the matter which composes it is only

01:08:40 ►

incidental to its persistence, unlike an ordinary object,

01:08:49 ►

which if this glass were to be leaking molecules of glass,

01:08:51 ►

eventually it would just disappear.

01:09:02 ►

So then it appears that chemistry can somehow become abducted, you could almost say.

01:09:04 ►

An organism is chemistry abducted into could almost say an organism is chemistry

01:09:07 ►

abducted into hyperspace

01:09:09 ►

and then these cycles of energy

01:09:12 ►

happen well then

01:09:15 ►

what happens at death with an organism

01:09:18 ►

is all death is

01:09:21 ►

is an organism changes into a thing.

01:09:26 ►

A corpse is a thing.

01:09:29 ►

If you embalm it and mummify it,

01:09:32 ►

it has the same qualities as that chair I was talking about.

01:09:36 ►

So death is when a higher dimensional object

01:09:41 ►

changes into a lower dimensional object and the change is

01:09:47 ►

accompanied by the retraction of the form into the dimension from

01:09:56 ►

which it came so it seems to me that what we are is a kind of morphogenetic field that at death ceases to interact with matter. But there

01:10:11 ►

is no reason to suppose that the field disappears or ceases to exist. As an example or as a metaphor,

01:10:21 ►

imagine you have a magnet and a piece of typing paper and some iron filings

01:10:28 ►

and you want to demonstrate that there’s a magnetic field around the magnet.

01:10:33 ►

Well, you bring it up underneath the paper

01:10:35 ►

and the iron filings all arrange themselves along the lines of the field.

01:10:43 ►

Well, you can do that over and over again.

01:10:46 ►

Take the thing away,

01:10:47 ►

they all fall down and disorganize.

01:10:50 ►

Bring the magnet up,

01:10:51 ►

they snap into the visible signature

01:10:56 ►

of the magnetic field.

01:10:58 ►

Well, do that a thousand times.

01:11:01 ►

Convince yourself it works.

01:11:03 ►

Now throw away the iron filings

01:11:07 ►

now do you have any doubt

01:11:09 ►

that the field still exists

01:11:11 ►

and is around the magnet

01:11:14 ►

so I think organisms are

01:11:18 ►

organized matter that has

01:11:21 ►

its genesis in a morphogenetic field

01:11:24 ►

of some sort,

01:11:25 ►

and that field, the nature of its existence away from the matter it organizes,

01:11:33 ►

is a matter for further scientific study.

01:11:38 ►

You could almost make a kind, and don’t take this too seriously,

01:11:43 ►

but you could almost make a quantum mechanical analogy here

01:11:46 ►

and say human beings exist in two states

01:11:52 ►

just as entities in the quantum mechanical realm exist in two states.

01:11:58 ►

We have our reality as particles,

01:12:04 ►

and when we are particles

01:12:06 ►

we are subject to the laws of particularity

01:12:10 ►

which are such things as

01:12:13 ►

you can’t be in two places at one time

01:12:15 ►

the past comes after

01:12:18 ►

before, excuse me

01:12:20 ►

the past comes before the future

01:12:23 ►

rules like that.

01:12:25 ►

But we also have another potential nature, which is as a field.

01:12:32 ►

And when we exist as fields, we are what is conventionally known as dead,

01:12:40 ►

or not yet existent.

01:12:43 ►

or not yet existent.

01:12:48 ►

And so then fields and particles exchange their natures

01:12:50 ►

according to the kinds of observations

01:12:53 ►

that are being carried out on them.

01:12:58 ►

That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me,

01:13:00 ►

especially when you, as I do,

01:13:03 ►

believe that life is a chemical strategy for amplifying

01:13:10 ►

quantum mechanical indeterminacy into macro-physical dimensions. If it weren’t, we would not have

01:13:19 ►

free will. If we weren’t somehow amplifiers of quantum mechanical indeterminacy

01:13:26 ►

then we would have no more free will than water rushing down a hill

01:13:30 ►

or a boulder rolling down a hill

01:13:32 ►

we would be the blind servants of physics

01:13:38 ►

but we know and experience decision making

01:13:43 ►

well decision making and bifurcations like that

01:13:47 ►

are only met in the natural world at the quantum mechanical level,

01:13:51 ►

except in the domain of biology.

01:13:53 ►

And biology has always been, I mean, to this point anyway, very mysterious.

01:13:59 ►

You know, Erwin Schrodinger in his essay What is Life? in 1937

01:14:05 ►

where he anticipated DNA

01:14:07 ►

if you’ve never read this

01:14:08 ►

DNA was discovered in 1950

01:14:11 ►

in 1937 Schrodinger wrote a little book

01:14:14 ►

60 pages called What is Life?

01:14:18 ►

and he said

01:14:19 ►

it’s going to be like this

01:14:22 ►

he called it an aperiodic crystal It’s going to be like this. It’s going to be, he said,

01:14:25 ►

he called it an aperiodic crystal.

01:14:30 ►

Life is an aperiodic crystal.

01:14:34 ►

And this is true.

01:14:35 ►

You know, your DNA is like a complex set of instructions

01:14:41 ►

to matter.

01:14:44 ►

And it begins in the fetal state.

01:14:48 ►

The instructions are form this kind of tissue,

01:14:51 ►

produce this kind of enzyme.

01:14:52 ►

And as your whole life unfolds,

01:14:57 ►

there is a molecular biologist

01:14:59 ►

looking at a human or an animal life.

01:15:02 ►

What he sees is genes being turned off and on

01:15:08 ►

by internal programs in the genetic material.

01:15:12 ►

So, okay, you’ve reached age 12,

01:15:16 ►

operons activate that turn on sex hormones,

01:15:20 ►

suddenly pubic hair, deep voice,

01:15:23 ►

or in the case of women, breast tissue, so forth.

01:15:26 ►

Okay, so now you’re 55 or 50, new operons are turned on, reproductive processes are suppressed,

01:15:38 ►

different things begin to happen. This isn’t just happening. This is all being scripted and is being turned on and off inside of you. That’s why one of the things we probably will have to deal with before we get to 2012 is this is not a difficult thing at this point in the world of cloning mammals and that kind of thing is what’s called

01:16:05 ►

a stop drug not immortality not eternal youth but a drug that would simply stop the expression of

01:16:15 ►

the aging operon and at whatever age you took this thing you would remain that age for the foreseeable future.

01:16:25 ►

That doesn’t require a full understanding of the genetic code

01:16:30 ►

or even what’s really going on.

01:16:33 ►

You just basically have to find a certain operon system and disrupt it.

01:16:38 ►

You’re already looking for that and talking about it.

01:16:41 ►

Why would you have to do that?

01:16:43 ►

Well, imagine the social turmoil and upheaval.

01:16:47 ►

I mean, first of all, it means our power elites

01:16:51 ►

would never be refreshed by the hand of death.

01:16:54 ►

It means, you know, horrible celebrities

01:16:58 ►

and awful, awful people would just live on and on and on. I don’t know, maybe Mick’s had the treatment.

01:17:08 ►

Yeah.

01:17:09 ►

I wanted to get closure, a little bit more closure anyway, on something that was brought

01:17:17 ►

up earlier. And I guess this is in the department of what we had to deal with before 2012. And that’s religion.

01:17:26 ►

And I think it falls under your category of real serious stuff.

01:17:30 ►

So as a closure, something came up earlier.

01:17:36 ►

We got off on the dollar a moment.

01:17:38 ►

Thanks to you.

01:17:41 ►

I’d like to.

01:17:42 ►

Well, I didn’t bring it up.

01:17:43 ►

Okay.

01:17:44 ►

I’d like to have even my remarks

01:17:46 ►

stricken from the record because

01:17:48 ►

people may have misunderstood

01:17:50 ►

where I was coming from

01:17:51 ►

doubtless

01:17:53 ►

not that I couldn’t

01:18:00 ►

defend it against all of the

01:18:02 ►

tractors but

01:18:03 ►

certainly not

01:18:04 ►

it wasn’t just that I couldn’t defend it against all of the tractors, but… Certainly not.

01:18:09 ►

It wasn’t just… What I was trying to get at wasn’t…

01:18:12 ►

It’s more of your rap on religion and its misuses.

01:18:17 ►

The object of my response was bigger than the Dalai Lama.

01:18:20 ►

And I’m not looking for conflict

01:18:25 ►

between the Buddhist group,

01:18:28 ►

like you have,

01:18:31 ►

or dissension for its own sake,

01:18:33 ►

but for the sake of honesty, I think,

01:18:37 ►

coming to the millennium,

01:18:38 ►

honesty and clear-sighted information

01:18:40 ►

so we can decide things for ourselves.

01:18:44 ►

So I think it’s

01:18:46 ►

worthy of dialogue,

01:18:48 ►

especially

01:18:49 ►

we’re going to talk about conflict. I think you’ve got a lot of

01:18:52 ►

conflict from your response

01:18:53 ►

about psychedelics in the Buddhist community.

01:18:56 ►

But I think it’s

01:18:57 ►

the psychedelic community’s responsibility

01:19:00 ►

to ask questions,

01:19:02 ►

hard questions,

01:19:04 ►

to criticize,

01:19:05 ►

especially the truth or teaching that comes down to us

01:19:09 ►

from some sort of divine sanction or claims higher ground.

01:19:13 ►

And I think as far as what we have to deal with in the coming millennium,

01:19:17 ►

I don’t think we can afford, I don’t think we have the luxury

01:19:20 ►

to give religion a free ride or play the game that it wants to play.

01:19:26 ►

I think we have to change the nature of the religious game.

01:19:29 ►

And what I mean by that is no longer can religion

01:19:32 ►

or religious icons be beyond criticism.

01:19:37 ►

I finally figured out what you want me to do.

01:19:40 ►

You want me to give the hang the Pope speech, right?

01:19:46 ►

No. me to do? You want me to give the hang the Pope speech, right? I just think

01:19:48 ►

no vision should be accepted

01:19:50 ►

because it presumes

01:19:52 ►

a preconceived

01:19:54 ►

or an a priori

01:19:56 ►

stamp of absolute truth. I think any

01:19:58 ►

teaching today

01:19:59 ►

in the marketplace of ideas and visions

01:20:02 ►

has to make it on its

01:20:04 ►

own merits. No preconceived, no ace in the hole of ideas and visions, has to make it on its own merits.

01:20:05 ►

No preconceived, no ace in the hole,

01:20:08 ►

no handicap.

01:20:09 ►

So everything should be on,

01:20:12 ►

as you put it, on the table.

01:20:14 ►

And what I was trying to get at

01:20:16 ►

with the remarks about the Dalai Lama in Tibet,

01:20:19 ►

I think that, you know,

01:20:22 ►

talk about changing the nature of the game.

01:20:24 ►

What they do, the religious people,

01:20:26 ►

whether it’s East or West,

01:20:28 ►

they kind of have this dichotomy

01:20:31 ►

between the spiritual world,

01:20:33 ►

which is what we should concentrate on,

01:20:35 ►

and as you put it, the secular world,

01:20:37 ►

you talk about secular in a secular way,

01:20:39 ►

Tibet has no better history than any other country.

01:20:43 ►

But this isn’t the image that’s given.

01:20:45 ►

And they play this funny little game where they say,

01:20:48 ►

okay, this is what matters, the spiritual world.

01:20:51 ►

Our social world, where we spend most of our time with,

01:20:55 ►

where political decisions are made every day

01:20:57 ►

that affect our lives for life or death,

01:20:59 ►

that’s not important.

01:21:01 ►

And yet, they’ll argue on the other hand

01:21:03 ►

that, well, we need to be free. So it not important. And yet, they’ll argue on the other hand that, well, we need to be free

01:21:05 ►

and we need to, you know.

01:21:07 ►

So it is important.

01:21:09 ►

By their own actions

01:21:11 ►

to try to free their people,

01:21:13 ►

the secular world is important

01:21:15 ►

and we shouldn’t devalue it

01:21:17 ►

or we shouldn’t be hypnotized

01:21:18 ►

by this cognitive dissonance

01:21:20 ►

that they’ve got us to accept.

01:21:22 ►

Well, you keep saying

01:21:24 ►

that they’ve gotten us to accept it., you keep saying that they’ve gotten us to accept it.

01:21:26 ►

The religious people. And what I mean is

01:21:28 ►

they say, well, this is what’s

01:21:30 ►

important, the spiritual world.

01:21:32 ►

And yet, according to their own teachings,

01:21:34 ►

sometimes their society is just the opposite.

01:21:36 ►

You know?

01:21:37 ►

This is why you don’t want to buy

01:21:40 ►

a pig and a poke.

01:21:41 ►

I mean, I’ve always wondered

01:21:43 ►

how can people go to India

01:21:45 ►

and be charmed,

01:21:48 ►

you know,

01:21:49 ►

by incredible brutality,

01:21:53 ►

poverty,

01:21:54 ►

cupidity?

01:21:56 ►

I mean, if this is a

01:21:57 ►

spiritual society,

01:21:59 ►

good grief.

01:22:02 ►

Yeah, and most

01:22:03 ►

people just sort of accept

01:22:06 ►

this cognitive dissonance.

01:22:07 ►

We’ve got this wrapped and it should be like this, but you

01:22:10 ►

look at the proof of the pudding, it may

01:22:12 ►

be the exact opposite. We just kind of

01:22:14 ►

say, well, that’s okay. I think in the

01:22:16 ►

future, we have to hold,

01:22:18 ►

especially those who are

01:22:19 ►

above us, and they claim

01:22:22 ►

a higher power. Because they

01:22:24 ►

claim that higher power or a higher ground,

01:22:26 ►

we have to be extra critical, even of our own.

01:22:31 ►

Well, I agree with you, but I think it’s happening.

01:22:34 ►

I mean, I think this is a, it’s a tough, you know,

01:22:37 ►

if you’re a guru these days, you’re almost condemned

01:22:41 ►

to spending a life with foolish people.

01:22:44 ►

you’re almost condemned to spending a life with foolish people.

01:22:50 ►

I think that the stock of all that has gone way down.

01:22:55 ►

Yeah, the thing to get people to realize is that it’s fun to be a grown-up.

01:22:59 ►

It’s fun to pay your own bills

01:23:02 ►

and row your own boat

01:23:04 ►

and have the only key to the apartment.

01:23:08 ►

And I’m talking to women, I’m talking to men.

01:23:13 ►

We all have been infantilized into thinking we have to cut deals

01:23:20 ►

that we don’t want to make.

01:23:22 ►

The marriage, the corporation, the union, the party, whatever it is.

01:23:29 ►

And people sell themselves terribly short.

01:23:34 ►

And I don’t know whether this has always gone on

01:23:37 ►

or whether it’s always gone on a little but is now getting worse.

01:23:41 ►

But it is a wonderful thing to take

01:23:46 ►

charge of your life

01:23:48 ►

your finances

01:23:49 ►

your spiritual destiny

01:23:52 ►

your sexuality

01:23:54 ►

your

01:23:56 ►

artistic vision

01:23:58 ►

everything

01:23:59 ►

we should not cut

01:24:01 ►

deals

01:24:02 ►

one of the things I learned at Berkeley as a radical

01:24:06 ►

that I’ve never been able to export very far

01:24:10 ►

in all the talking and speaking I’ve done

01:24:12 ►

is people have become entirely too polite.

01:24:17 ►

You know, at Berkeley in the old days,

01:24:20 ►

we used to always, at the tip of our tongue, day and night, was the word bullshit.

01:24:29 ►

And you were to scream it at the least hint of such material coming near you.

01:24:37 ►

And you were to, it didn’t matter, cafeteria, restaurant, classroom,

01:24:43 ►

when bullshit raised its head

01:24:46 ►

you were to take aim and fire instantly

01:24:49 ►

well now you can’t do that

01:24:51 ►

you’ve got this politically correct civility rep

01:24:54 ►

well we have to be nice

01:24:56 ►

you’re in an argument with a bully

01:24:59 ►

it’s not about being civil, it’s about getting your truth across

01:25:03 ►

well it’s worse than the enforced civility,

01:25:08 ►

which is, I think, just the surface of it.

01:25:10 ►

It’s what I’ve come to identify as a great evil in the world

01:25:15 ►

thanks to my 19-year-old son who has brought me to this viewpoint.

01:25:21 ►

It’s relativism.

01:25:24 ►

Relativism is bullshit. And what is relativism? Relativism

01:25:30 ►

is the idea that you really shouldn’t criticize other people’s ideas because all ideas are sort

01:25:36 ►

of on an equal footing. So, you know, I follow molecular biology, you follow Babaji, somebody else is a Kabbalist, somebody else worships

01:25:46 ►

their broker,

01:25:48 ►

and you’re supposed to not

01:25:50 ►

criticize. And it doesn’t make

01:25:52 ►

any difference because everything’s reduced to,

01:25:54 ►

well, you like the Dodgers,

01:25:56 ►

I like the 49ers, or something

01:25:58 ►

like that. You like vanilla ice cream, I like

01:26:00 ►

chocolate, and it’s no bigger than that.

01:26:02 ►

You’re a Nazi, and I’m a Democrat,

01:26:04 ►

but that shouldn’t keep us from you know, it’s no bigger than a you’re a nazi and i’m a democrat but that shouldn’t keep us

01:26:05 ►

from right you know it just you happen to like to exterminate large numbers of people you just

01:26:11 ►

have this minor problem well this is because people don’t know how to make distinctions and

01:26:19 ►

what the rules of evidence are what it really is is it’s a breakdown of the ability to conduct rational argument.

01:26:27 ►

Because, you know,

01:26:28 ►

like, for instance, in the Middle Ages

01:26:30 ►

01:26:31 ►

Central Asia, they

01:26:34 ►

would meet at Kashgar

01:26:35 ►

and places like that

01:26:37 ►

a Jew, a Manichean,

01:26:40 ►

a Christian,

01:26:42 ►

a Nestorian,

01:26:43 ►

a Buddhist, and a Jain.

01:26:46 ►

And they would hold vast public debates for days,

01:26:51 ►

attended by hundreds of people,

01:26:53 ►

shouting crowds, rooting for various factions.

01:26:58 ►

And these doctrinal things would be thrashed out

01:27:01 ►

according to rules,

01:27:03 ►

which apparently everyone respected and understood.

01:27:07 ►

And when you were defeated, you knew it.

01:27:09 ►

And when you were exalted, you knew it.

01:27:12 ►

In the fuzzy, friendly world of political correctness,

01:27:17 ►

and I do it myself,

01:27:20 ►

because you can’t always be a warrior.

01:27:22 ►

And at some times, you know, late in the day,

01:27:26 ►

somebody will say something to me that I just,

01:27:30 ►

and I just say, yeah, uh-huh, face on Mars or whatever it is.

01:27:35 ►

And I just don’t have the strength to lash out anymore.

01:27:39 ►

But I think that you’re very right, Barry. Part of the antidote to informational overwhelmment,

01:27:50 ►

to social islanding, to trivialization,

01:27:54 ►

is rational discourse conducted, if necessary, at high volume.

01:28:01 ►

People are so concerned that nobody feel hurt or rejected or, you know,

01:28:09 ►

well, in intellectual discourse, you don’t want people to feel hurt. You want them to feel

01:28:13 ►

destroyed if their position merits that. We’re all grown-ups. We don’t have to coddle each other for crying out loud.

01:28:25 ►

Send the inner child down to the baths

01:28:29 ►

and sharpen your rhetorical knives

01:28:31 ►

and logical razors

01:28:33 ►

and do that kid a favor.

01:28:35 ►

Make sense out of your life and reality.

01:28:40 ►

There’s sense to be made.

01:28:42 ►

And it’s very grown-up

01:28:44 ►

and very exalting and it doesn’t have to exclude all the other fun and games of life, but it certainly gives cogency and meaning to the enterprise, not only of trying to live and not only of trying to be a decent person for one’s loved ones and children,

01:29:07 ►

but to build a better world.

01:29:09 ►

A better world, if it comes,

01:29:11 ►

will be built on clear thinking.

01:29:15 ►

It will be built on honesty.

01:29:19 ►

It will be built on

01:29:21 ►

direct, clear communication.

01:29:27 ►

I mean, these are the things that constitute visionary common sense.

01:29:33 ►

And it’s because the world is topsy-turvy that I, considered, you know, a drug-crazed pariah,

01:29:42 ►

a drug-crazed pariah and have to then become

01:29:45 ►

the apostle of order,

01:29:48 ►

dignity, adult behavior,

01:29:50 ►

responsibility,

01:29:52 ►

and the obligation

01:29:53 ►

to make sense.

01:29:56 ►

Anyway, that’s the end

01:29:58 ►

of our weekend.

01:30:00 ►

Thank you very much.

01:30:01 ►

Thank you.

01:30:25 ►

Thank you very much. when Terrence was going on about the fact that he thought we had all become too polite.

01:30:28 ►

Well, if you’re living here in the States right now,

01:30:32 ►

my guess is that, well, that buffoon called Trump entered your mind.

01:30:36 ►

And for our fellow slaughters outside of this madhouse that we pretend is a single, cohesive nation,

01:30:40 ►

well, one of the main attractions of Mr. Trump

01:30:43 ►

is that he is as far from being politically correct as can be.

01:30:48 ►

So, obviously I can’t help wondering what Terrence would say about the current mess that we’re in.

01:30:54 ►

My guess is that he would do the only sensible thing that there is to do about it, laugh.

01:31:00 ►

Because we’re apparently right in the middle of some kind of a horrible Bugs Bunny meets the Roadrunner cartoon.

01:31:08 ►

So in a few weeks, when the anvil finally falls on our heads,

01:31:12 ►

well, we just have to remember to laugh at the insanity of the political landscape in the United States these days.

01:31:21 ►

And before I say anything else, yes, I did have a little start when, at about 18 minutes into this talk, Terrence said, and I quote,

01:31:31 ►

Right now, in terms of my low-scale historical vision, without the time wave, I can only see about three years into the future, end quote.

01:31:42 ►

Well, as you know, Terrence died less than three years after he made that statement.

01:31:49 ►

And that should give us something to consider, maybe on several different levels, don’t you think?

01:31:55 ►

And I also found it interesting that back there in August of 1997,

01:32:00 ►

one of his technological dreams for three years into the future was that we should all have 256k bandwidth access to the internet

01:32:09 ►

which now seems impossibly slow by today’s standards.

01:32:15 ►

Another technology that he hoped would appear is a dial that you could use

01:32:19 ►

if say you were at the ruins in Palenque and see what the area looked like

01:32:23 ►

by dialing back throughout its history.

01:32:26 ►

Well, as far as I know, that isn’t available just yet.

01:32:30 ►

But something that you may want to try, should you find yourself at the Mayan ruins in Palenque, Mexico,

01:32:36 ►

is to listen to podcast number 10 that I published on August 3rd, 2005.

01:32:47 ►

I published on August 3rd, 2005. It’s a recording that was made of Christian Rasch in 2001 as he walked us around the Mayan ruins near Palenque. Interestingly, this is one of the podcasts that

01:32:54 ►

gave me the idea that these podcasts might be worth continuing for a while. You see, a month

01:33:00 ►

or so after I posted that program, I received an email from a young man in China.

01:33:05 ►

He told me that he recently took a holiday and visited the ruins at Palenque.

01:33:10 ►

And while he walked around, he played Christian’s Talk

01:33:14 ►

and felt that he had a personal guided tour by someone much more knowledgeable

01:33:19 ►

than the government rangers whose main job seemed to be chasing people away who were smoking cannabis.

01:33:26 ►

Now, if you haven’t yet heard that podcast, it may be interesting for you to do so sometime.

01:33:31 ►

And for many of our fellow slaunters who have been to Palenque,

01:33:35 ►

I’m sure that it will bring back a lot of fond memories.

01:33:40 ►

Now, think back for a moment to the section of this rap where Terrence was describing his technological fantasy for a virtual world representation of his own house.

01:33:52 ►

Well, he actually did get to give something like that a try when Bruce Dahmer and Terrence’s son, Finn, built a virtual world in which Terrence interacted with anyone who, with anyone who figured out how to find it.

01:34:05 ►

And those stories have already been

01:34:07 ►

told in previous podcasts.

01:34:09 ►

The one thing that I remember most about

01:34:11 ►

that event, though, is the screen

01:34:14 ►

name that Terrence used.

01:34:16 ►

Zone Ghost.

01:34:18 ►

At one time, I

01:34:19 ►

thought about using that for a name of a

01:34:21 ►

character in a novel, but

01:34:23 ►

I’ve abandoned that novel now.

01:34:25 ►

So hopefully somebody else will pick up on Zone Ghost in their creative work one day.

01:34:30 ►

I really do like that handle.

01:34:33 ►

Now before I go, I first want to let you know that thanks to Frank Nuccio,

01:34:38 ►

we’re going to get to listen to this year’s Palenque Norte lectures, which he was so kind to record for us.

01:35:05 ►

Thank you. which is actually a good thing. And in addition to the Planque Norte lectures,

01:35:11 ►

I may also be podcasting some talks from a conference that Charlie Grobe produced a while back.

01:35:14 ►

To be honest, I wasn’t even aware of the conference,

01:35:17 ►

but when Charlie was here visiting the other day,

01:35:21 ►

he mentioned the fact that he thought he still had the original tapes from that conference,

01:35:25 ►

which featured Bruce Eisner, David Nichols, Rick Doblin, Richard Jensen, Timothy Leary,

01:35:27 ►

and Charlie himself, of course.

01:35:30 ►

So if Charlie can find those tapes,

01:35:31 ►

we’ll get to hear a bit of that conference as well.

01:35:36 ►

Also, my good friend Matt Palomary came by the other day,

01:35:39 ►

and he is currently in the middle

01:35:41 ►

of producing both a coffee table book

01:35:44 ►

and a documentary film about the very influential Santa Barbara Writers Conference.

01:35:51 ►

And when he said that he was thinking about podcasting the audio interviews that he made with dozens of well-known American authors,

01:35:59 ►

well, we both agreed that the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 might be the right place to release these interviews.

01:36:04 ►

both agreed that the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 might be the right place to release these interviews.

01:36:12 ►

And while there still are no concrete plans for Salon 2.0 that have been formulated by our slack.com team,

01:36:18 ►

a discussion has begun about how we can seamlessly transition into a new format.

01:36:24 ►

For what it’s worth, as of now, I still plan on doing a very brief introduction to the 2.0 programs so as to provide a little continuity with what we’ve been doing so far.

01:36:30 ►

Also, as some of our fellow salonners have guessed,

01:36:33 ►

I plan on submitting a few of my own podcasts to the community to vote on as well.

01:36:39 ►

So it’s going to be a few years yet before you hear the end of me here in the salon.

01:36:44 ►

However, there is

01:36:45 ►

one other thing I almost forgot to tell you, and that’s the fact that somehow I’ve messed up the

01:36:50 ►

automatic invite system for our salon 2.0 slack team. Right now I’m sending personal invites to

01:36:57 ►

the people who let me know via the comments sections of our program notes and through the

01:37:01 ►

forums, and soon I’ll also catch up on the emails

01:37:05 ►

that have come in through the comment form on our website

01:37:08 ►

and send out those personal invites as well.

01:37:11 ►

So, hey, thanks for working with me

01:37:13 ►

as I try to get this activity a little better organized.

01:37:18 ►

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

01:37:22 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

520 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 6

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:19 ► §

00:00:23 ► §

00:00:27 ► §

00:00:35 ► §

00:00:41 ► §

00:00:44 ► §

00:00:46 ► §

00:00:53 ► §

00:00:59 ► §

00:01:07 ► §

00:01:12 ► §

00:01:18 ► §

00:01:27 ► §

00:01:32 ► §

00:01:36 ► §

00:01:41 ► §

00:01:44 ► §

00:02:05 ► §

00:02:09 ► §

00:02:11 ► §

00:02:13 ► §

00:02:17 ► §

00:02:19 ► §

00:02:22 ► §

00:02:27 ► §

00:02:28 ► §

00:02:34 ► §

00:02:41 ► §

00:02:45 ► §

00:02:52 ► §

00:02:58 ► §

00:03:05 ► §

00:03:10 ► §

00:03:15 ► §

00:03:21 ► §

00:03:26 ► §

00:03:31 ► §

00:03:36 ► §

00:03:43 ► §

00:03:46 ► §

00:03:55 ► §

00:03:57 ► §

00:04:00 ► §

00:04:03 ► §

00:04:08 ► §

00:04:12 ► §

00:04:14 ► §

00:04:17 ► §

00:04:28 ► §

00:04:31 ► §

00:04:36 ► §

00:04:42 ► §

00:04:47 ► §

00:04:50 ► §

00:04:54 ► §

00:04:59 ► §

00:05:04 ► §

00:05:08 ► §

00:05:11 ► §

00:05:17 ► §

00:05:24 ► §

00:05:28 ► §

00:05:34 ► §

00:05:39 ► §

00:05:44 ► §

00:05:52 ► §

00:05:55 ► §

00:06:02 ► §

00:06:12 ► §

00:06:15 ► §

00:06:19 ► §