Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Esalen - Big Sur, California
Date this lecture was recorded: August 11, 1998
“Novelty theory has always said as the universe ages it becomes more and more complicated. Period.” -Terence McKenna
In today’s podcast Terence McKenna talks about one of his most abiding interests, the increase of novelty/complexity in the universe. Along the way he also touches on psychedelics, the Esalen Institute, dark matter, and modern physics.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
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.
00:00:28 ►
And I’d like to begin by thanking Roger M. and David B., who recently made donations to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:34 ►
Also, I’d like to thank Allison R., Sergey P., and Dan N.,
00:00:40 ►
who became my 5th, 6th, and 7th patrons of my new writing project,
00:00:44 ►
which you can find more about at patreon.com.
00:00:48 ►
That’s p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com.
00:00:51 ►
Now, in the comments back on podcast number 536,
00:00:56 ►
Bert T. mentioned the pops and clicks in the recent Terrence McKenna recordings.
00:01:01 ►
And he’s correct, they are somewhat bothersome.
00:01:04 ►
So I went ahead and bought a new
00:01:05 ►
machine to digitize today’s tape. Guess what? The pops are still there. So either both of these
00:01:13 ►
digitizing machines are no good, or the microphone that Terrence used from podcast 534 onward
00:01:19 ►
had a problem whenever his recording volume went too high. Either way, I’m sorry about the slight distortion.
00:01:27 ►
Hopefully it doesn’t completely ruin the experience of these Terrence McKenna talks for you.
00:01:33 ►
Now, today’s program, I just discovered,
00:01:36 ►
begins with the final 14 minutes of the talk that we last heard from Terrence in Podcast 538.
00:01:42 ►
I was going to insert a little comment at the break to signify the beginning of
00:01:47 ►
today’s talk, but, well, it’s really quite clear, and so I’ll leave it up to you to figure out that
00:01:52 ►
when, well, after about 14 minutes you hear Terrence say, well, why don’t we knock off then?
00:01:59 ►
When you hear that, I’m sure you’re going to realize there’s still another hour of the Bard McKenna yet to come.
00:02:10 ►
Now, the main part of this talk was recorded on August 11th, 1998,
00:02:13 ►
which happened to be my 56th birthday,
00:02:17 ►
and was only 12 days after he gave the Valley of Novelty workshop that I podcast beginning with number 27 back in February of 2006.
00:02:23 ►
And at that conference, in my first conversation with Terrence,
00:02:27 ►
he told me that I thought I should come to the Entheobotany conference
00:02:31 ►
being held in Palenque the following January.
00:02:33 ►
I still remember his little grin when he added,
00:02:36 ►
that conference has been known to change people’s lives.
00:02:40 ►
And it most certainly did for me.
00:02:43 ►
It wasn’t Terrence’s presence at the conference that changed my life, however.
00:02:47 ►
As you already know, well, that’s where I met the woman to whom I’m now married.
00:02:52 ►
And a few months after that conference in Palenque,
00:02:54 ►
I took a leave of absence from my job in Florida and moved out here to the coast.
00:02:59 ►
Mary C. and I were married late that same year.
00:03:02 ►
I guess that eventually I’ll have to let my old company know
00:03:06 ►
that I want to make that temporary leave of absence a permanent one.
00:03:10 ►
But they’ve probably figured that out by now.
00:03:13 ►
Anyway, enough of my babbling.
00:03:15 ►
Let’s get back to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur
00:03:18 ►
on an August evening in 1998
00:03:21 ►
and learn a little more about what was on the mind of McKenna.
00:03:25 ►
Until very recently, you know as recently as 1910 or so, Rudolf Otto, who was a great
00:03:36 ►
philosopher of religious experience, he defined God as the wholly and totally other.
00:03:48 ►
Well, to somebody raised on tabloid newspapers
00:03:53 ►
in 50s science fiction,
00:03:55 ►
the wholly, totally other
00:03:57 ►
sounds much more like invaders from the rim
00:04:01 ►
than anything associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:04:07 ►
Somehow in the same way that we have Disney-fied the elves,
00:04:12 ►
we’ve actually Disney-fied God too.
00:04:16 ►
And so the old-fashioned phrase, God-fearing,
00:04:23 ►
it has a very anachronistic ring. We modern people don’t
00:04:30 ►
fear God. We deconstruct God. We may seek God as spiritual counselor and friend. If
00:04:40 ►
we’re God-positive people, if we’re God-negative people,
00:04:47 ►
we deny the very phenomenon.
00:04:50 ►
But if you spoke of being God-fearing,
00:04:54 ►
some people, I think, would think you must be Amish or Mennonite or something.
00:04:59 ►
It’s such an old-fashioned emotion.
00:05:12 ►
an old-fashioned emotion. The alien that comes through the psychedelic experience is terrifying in its alien-ness, in and of itself. It isn’t that it does anything
00:05:19 ►
terrifying or that it promises a threat it’s simply that its existence inspires
00:05:27 ►
an awe which mutates into terror because it so turns on end all cultural values
00:05:41 ►
in a way you could almost say that that culture is a defense against the sense of this thing, the wholly and totally other, which is there. say to you such as when you’re on your deathbed and you know what’s being sold down at the market
00:06:07 ►
no longer has any interest for you and what’s on tv seems irrelevant because you’re going to die
00:06:15 ►
in the next hour in other words once you move beyond cultural values then this terror this terror, this awesome thing waits, it also attends birth, you know, but only momentarily
00:06:30 ►
because as soon as it’s determined that you’re alive, basically, as an infant being born,
00:06:38 ►
you’re folded into the mechanisms of the waiting culture. so very rarely do we come nakedly against this thing which is
00:06:50 ►
there all the time i maintain the reason it happens with with a drug like dmt is because
00:06:57 ►
what drugs really do is dissolve this cultural illusion They dissolve it so thoroughly that then this other thing,
00:07:07 ►
which we’ve forgotten, can rush in.
00:07:11 ►
I’ve noticed, I may be susceptible to this,
00:07:14 ►
but it does get described in the psychological dictionaries of pathology.
00:07:22 ►
But I’m susceptible, and I always have been to I
00:07:28 ►
suppose you would call it a form of hysteria but it’s fear in wilderness
00:07:34 ►
places and if you have this you know exactly what I mean if you don’t have it
00:07:44 ►
you it just seems like some kind of pathological weirdness.
00:07:47 ►
But it happens when you are alone in wilderness.
00:07:51 ►
In other words, when there is nobody there expressing cultural values.
00:07:57 ►
It’s a recognized phenomenon of the human condition.
00:08:01 ►
of the human condition there’s a
00:08:05 ►
there’s an anthropology book
00:08:08 ►
about a tribe
00:08:09 ►
in
00:08:10 ►
Sumatra
00:08:12 ►
the Tambunan
00:08:14 ►
the subtitle of the book is
00:08:17 ►
something like
00:08:20 ►
the felt presence of the other
00:08:23 ►
in the extra community context and it talks about how
00:08:29 ►
another name for it is wendigo psychosis the wendigo this is the more spectacular form this is
00:08:37 ►
something that happens in the north woods of canada where people who are out in these extreme wildernesses become convinced that they’re being
00:08:47 ►
stalked by this animal, which is a supernatural animal, the wendigo. And the Indians know this
00:08:56 ►
thing, and they fear it. It’s sort of like the Satchamama idea in the Amazon. It’s an enormous beast that is more feared by the people
00:09:09 ►
than anything making it onto the Discovery Channel.
00:09:13 ►
They can handle anacondas.
00:09:16 ►
They can handle jaguars.
00:09:17 ►
But the Windigo and the Satchimama are beyond the hunter’s skill,
00:09:24 ►
the shaman’s power.
00:09:26 ►
It’s something overwhelming.
00:09:29 ►
And I think that part of the consequences
00:09:32 ►
of scientific materialism and existentialism
00:09:36 ►
is to place us into an extracultural environment
00:09:41 ►
and then we are afraid of you know something strange
00:09:47 ►
that comes from the sky that is so intimately hostile that it you know
00:09:55 ►
wants to look up our rear ends and trade our fetal tissue and you know mess with
00:10:02 ►
us in in ways which aren’t rational
00:10:06 ►
if it’s a true species come from another star system.
00:10:11 ►
I don’t think they’d start the contact with the human race
00:10:15 ►
by checking us all for hemorrhoids.
00:10:17 ►
That doesn’t feel right.
00:10:22 ►
So it’s something else then.
00:10:24 ►
It’s something else.
00:10:25 ►
And it is a template
00:10:27 ►
of our fears.
00:10:30 ►
Our fears of being penetrated
00:10:31 ►
in a perverse manner.
00:10:33 ►
That’s basically what’s going on there.
00:10:36 ►
Our fears of
00:10:37 ►
having our
00:10:39 ►
genetic material tampered with.
00:10:42 ►
That’s what the fetal tissue
00:10:43 ►
trading is all about our
00:10:46 ►
fears of having our humaneness compromised I think I mean it is in a
00:10:53 ►
sense a true boogeyman it’s pure unadulterated fear the the aliens of
00:11:00 ►
popular culture the grays the slant-eyed all the zoo of things
00:11:08 ►
that haunt the tabloids
00:11:09 ►
are very different from
00:11:11 ►
the DMT creatures
00:11:16 ►
who are much more similar to
00:11:19 ►
the earth-centered
00:11:20 ►
supernatural beings
00:11:26 ►
like fairies, elves, gnomes,
00:11:29 ►
nixies, sprites, afrits, djinns, tree spirits,
00:11:33 ►
who all have a morbid quality.
00:11:38 ►
I mean, they all enchant in some way
00:11:42 ►
and lead astray,
00:11:50 ►
but it’s not a planetary invasion and it’s not and it doesn’t have these sexual overtones of sexual anxiety that seem to attend this this other thing
00:11:59 ►
bottom line i think it’s a wonderful
00:12:05 ►
being alive
00:12:08 ►
is a very interesting situation
00:12:10 ►
but only if you pay attention
00:12:12 ►
otherwise it tends
00:12:14 ►
to drift into the background
00:12:16 ►
and something else
00:12:18 ►
takes its place
00:12:20 ►
our circumstance
00:12:21 ►
is extraordinary
00:12:23 ►
even measured against the existence of animal
00:12:27 ►
life on this planet, our situation is extraordinary. And a mind is a very dynamically chaotic,
00:12:39 ►
undefined thing. Still more, you know, the group mind of a species.
00:12:47 ►
The nature of information is not understood.
00:12:52 ►
The nature of this thing coordinating all this information,
00:12:55 ►
which we call the human soul, is not very well understood.
00:13:02 ►
One of the fallacies that haunts clear thinking is the is the
00:13:07 ►
fallacy of the mundane there really is no mundane when you start deconstructing
00:13:15 ►
things everything be turns out mystery stands behind the simplest phenomena the simplest act its casuistry reaches back
00:13:30 ►
eons of time its implications spread out through the universe and you know who is witness to all of this, simply the unaided human mind trying to struggle forward toward a model of itself
00:13:50 ►
and a model of the world that it’s embedded in.
00:13:54 ►
And culture, even the culture of science or the culture of mathematics,
00:14:01 ►
mathematics Where it pretends to build firm ground
00:14:05 ►
There is in fact really only
00:14:09 ►
quicksand or at the very best the kind of bridges that occur in in
00:14:17 ►
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Knights of the Round Table the kind of bridge that you can ride a horse across
00:14:27 ►
before the bridge burns and tumbles into the abyss but that’s all you can move across it i mean we’re
00:14:36 ►
constantly living like that you know think how many of us are dead almost all of us are dead. Almost all of us are dead at any given time.
00:14:46 ►
I don’t mean this in a Gurdjieffian or metaphorical sense.
00:14:49 ►
I mean that 99.99% of all human beings who ever lived are now dead.
00:14:55 ►
The living portion of mankind is a thin sliver
00:15:00 ►
compared to all who have come and gone over the past three or four million years.
00:15:08 ►
And so the enterprise of understanding,
00:15:11 ►
which seems to rest with the living,
00:15:17 ►
inherits a huge momentum
00:15:19 ►
from these people who’ve gone before.
00:15:22 ►
I mean, the dynamic tension or the interest in life,
00:15:30 ►
at least for me, is in trying to be a human being
00:15:35 ►
to whatever degree that’s possible,
00:15:37 ►
and then in also trying to understand it all from the outside,
00:15:42 ►
trying to be, you know, both fully human and somehow
00:15:47 ►
fully extra-environmental, extra-human. My mother, for God knows what reasons, because
00:15:58 ►
it didn’t particularly lie in her background or education, named me after a Roman poet and this Roman
00:16:08 ►
poet was a fairly minor character and he wrote these sort of foppish little
00:16:15 ►
social comedies these plays but one quote survives from the Roman poet Terence he said I am a human being and therefore
00:16:30 ►
nothing human is alien to me and the you know the dilemma of our moment in
00:16:41 ►
modernity I think in terms of these whisperings from the other,
00:16:46 ►
is to decide that nothing human is alien to us
00:16:54 ►
and that all aliens have one foot in humanness.
00:17:02 ►
Well, why don’t we knock off there?
00:17:04 ►
That’s good enough thank you a meandering diatribe but hey
00:17:11 ►
waiting for other people to show up and just because i couldn’t resist
00:17:19 ►
i’ve been wanting to talk about this book and i decided I’d talk about it just a little bit. This book is called
00:17:25 ►
On the Edge. It’s a novel. It’s not available in this country but you can order it from amazon.com
00:17:35 ►
because it’s an English novel. It’s by a guy named Edward St. Aubin. Teddy to his friends.
00:17:49 ►
Teddy to his friends and some of you may remember Teddy he was here about five years ago very quietly doing research and this is the product of that research this is a novel about the world
00:17:57 ►
we’re sitting in this evening and there I thought I would read just a little tiny bit of this because it amused me not for
00:18:11 ►
any other reason I don’t know how many times I’ve eaten in the Esalen dining room I don’t know how
00:18:20 ►
many times many of you have eaten there and it’s always a psychological environment fraught with various possibilities.
00:18:32 ►
He’d seen this girl earlier in the tubs.
00:18:37 ►
Peter didn’t have long to wait to see Crystal again.
00:18:41 ►
He found her a couple of hours after they had met in the tubs queuing up for dinner in
00:18:46 ►
the lodge her short t-shirt left her belly exposed and he saw the navel ring again the skin a little
00:18:53 ►
inflamed where the ring pierced the lower edge of her navel hi crystal he said picking up a plate
00:18:59 ►
and following her down the line of salads you’re’re staring at my ring, she said.
00:19:07 ►
Ah, yes, I’m afraid I was, he said,
00:19:10 ►
transferring his gaze to the sliced cucumbers.
00:19:13 ►
Don’t be afraid, at least not of that, she laughed.
00:19:17 ►
When they put this ring in, I had an orgasm right there in the shop.
00:19:21 ►
It was wild.
00:19:22 ►
The guy said, this is definitely your energy center.
00:19:27 ►
Peter was silenced by this information,
00:19:29 ►
but recovered in time to say,
00:19:32 ►
does it still have that effect on you?
00:19:35 ►
Sure, that’s why it’s there.
00:19:37 ►
Gosh, thought Peter,
00:19:39 ►
these California girls are amazing.
00:19:42 ►
He felt his own Englishness and stiffness
00:19:44 ►
and inability to decipher Crystal’s
00:19:47 ►
candor. If an English woman told you about an orgasm the second time you chatted together,
00:19:53 ►
you knew that she either wanted sex straight away or that she’d been educated at a convent.
00:19:59 ►
Over here, one had no idea what it meant. Peter wanted to ask Crystal to sit with him,
00:20:07 ►
but in the communal dining room
00:20:08 ►
he felt the usual sense of personal and social meltdown
00:20:12 ►
known locally as lodge psychosis.
00:20:16 ►
Instead of the sense of community it was designed to promote,
00:20:21 ►
the lodge shipwrecked its occupants
00:20:23 ►
by presenting them with a series of treacherous
00:20:26 ►
whirlpools and rocky dilemmas. Acquaintances imagined they were friends. Friends turned
00:20:34 ►
into strangers. Seminarians were looked down on by residents and residents exploited by staff.
00:20:41 ►
Teachers appeared to be available to students but were suddenly
00:20:45 ►
ringed by jealous lovers and competitive sidekicks. Anyone at any time could come
00:20:51 ►
and process an issue with you. However turgid or trivial, whether you could
00:20:57 ►
remember meeting them before or not, the person to whom you told the secret of
00:21:02 ►
your mother’s mental illness the night before
00:21:05 ►
might not remember your name by lunchtime the next day.
00:21:10 ►
The permissiveness that made sex seem pleasingly inevitable
00:21:14 ►
made you realize more sharply the internal constraints
00:21:17 ►
that prevented you from approaching the objects of desire.
00:21:21 ►
But the same permissiveness could not stop the bore you most dreaded from bearing
00:21:26 ►
down on you with greedy tactlessness when you were deeply engaged with someone else.
00:21:32 ►
Like the place as a whole, the lodge made a partial transcendence of the formalities
00:21:37 ►
and hypocrisies of ordinary social life, but, at the same same time generated the longing for the good manners and the privacy
00:21:46 ►
which these formalities, until they became corrupted, were designed to protect.
00:21:52 ►
Psychologically bleeding and half-drowned, but still hoping to preserve an air of purpose
00:21:57 ►
and self-possession, Peter had often wandered back and forth in the last three days, plate
00:22:02 ►
in hand, meeting or avoiding glances he was no longer
00:22:07 ►
calm enough to interpret accurately or being dragged with a fixed smile on his face to a
00:22:13 ►
table of people he had no reason to spend time with shall we sit together he murmured almost
00:22:20 ►
inaudibly sure and then this I particularly liked.
00:22:26 ►
It isn’t this room,
00:22:28 ►
but it’s a room within 150 feet of us that way.
00:22:33 ►
And we’ve all been there,
00:22:34 ►
or I assume most of us have been there.
00:22:37 ►
In the dimness of the large white room,
00:22:40 ►
30 seminarians formed a rough circle,
00:22:43 ►
sleepy after dinner and relaxed by the introductory nature of the meeting,
00:22:47 ►
they slouched, stretched, or leaned on huge cushions.
00:22:53 ►
Some sat in a half-lotus position.
00:22:56 ►
Others rested their chins on their clutched knees.
00:22:59 ►
Occupying the noonday point on this human clock,
00:23:02 ►
Martha Goldenstein and her assistant were languaging
00:23:07 ►
up the aims of their workshop. Outside the sea let go and moved on with a fluency which
00:23:14 ►
even Martha must have regarded as an unobtainable ideal. This is a workshop called Letting Go
00:23:21 ►
and Moving On, and who Martha Goldenstein is.
00:23:25 ►
There are lots, if you’re an Esalenite,
00:23:28 ►
you’ll recognize lots of people in here,
00:23:30 ►
and with all, is it pronounced Romana Clef?
00:23:35 ►
Romana Clef?
00:23:37 ►
Romana Clef?
00:23:39 ►
A novel which thinly disguises personalities
00:23:42 ►
easily recognized to insiders.
00:23:45 ►
This is full of them.
00:23:46 ►
Who knows, some of you might be in here.
00:23:50 ►
Anyway, On the Edge by Eddie St. Aubin.
00:23:53 ►
I think he’ll be invited back.
00:23:56 ►
Nancy was vaguely amused.
00:23:59 ►
Of course, what Bobo will think, I’m not sure,
00:24:02 ►
but everybody has to take their knocks in this world.
00:24:09 ►
All right.
00:24:11 ►
So there are some people back for more from last night.
00:24:18 ►
Well, it wasn’t explained.
00:24:20 ►
It was thematically unfolded.
00:24:23 ►
We did talk a little bit about aliens last night I said all
00:24:29 ►
the usual things I always say so I think you’ve sat through it many a time nothing terribly new
00:24:37 ►
to add to all of that there have been developments in the past year the whole episode with the martian second martian
00:24:52 ►
global surveyor which went into orbit around mars and then was used to image the area of mars called Mars called Sidonia where the face on Mars supposedly resides and as you
00:25:07 ►
probably know if you care about all of this the more high-resolution
00:25:12 ►
photographs seem to show a more normal landscape the rhetoric spawned by the
00:25:21 ►
event was anything but normal all positions hardened this seems
00:25:27 ►
to be the new way it works you know nothing sets a theory on the path to
00:25:36 ►
legitimacy like being disproved it’s almost a prerequisite I got one piece of
00:25:43 ►
email at the height of that controversy where
00:25:46 ►
somebody said, well, of course it doesn’t look like a face. Do you think the aliens
00:25:53 ►
would be fool enough to make it look like something recognizable? So then I realized
00:26:01 ►
that the logic was no longer simply circular.
00:26:05 ►
It had acquired a sort of Mobius strip effect,
00:26:09 ►
where the fact that it didn’t look artificial
00:26:13 ►
had now become the strongest argument for its artificial nature, obviously.
00:26:22 ►
I’m interested in all of this.
00:26:24 ►
I’m interested in all of this I’m more interested in the human personalities
00:26:28 ►
behind these things
00:26:30 ►
because in the absence of certain knowledge
00:26:33 ►
about whether a given story
00:26:38 ►
someone’s telling is true or not
00:26:40 ►
it’s become much more interesting to me
00:26:43 ►
to look at the personalities.
00:26:46 ►
And I was pretty confident that this was a good method.
00:26:50 ►
I still am confident that it’s a good method.
00:26:53 ►
That if someone seems completely odd in other ways,
00:26:58 ►
then their commitment to a peculiar belief makes the belief suspect but we tried to do a trial log about this
00:27:09 ►
with Rupert and Ralph in Santa Cruz a few weeks ago and they both just climbed
00:27:16 ►
all over me and said it was a terrible method and that it opened the door to witch hunts and ad hominem arguments and so forth and so on
00:27:29 ►
and then rupert’s knockout argument was most great discoveries have been made by people who couldn’t
00:27:40 ►
stand the kind of scrutiny i was bringing to bear on people.
00:27:51 ►
That being nuts is no indication that you’re not a genius or on the right track.
00:27:54 ►
That only time can decide.
00:28:01 ►
And that if you turn out to have enunciated a great truth the fact that you thought
00:28:07 ►
your cat was an angel and that you talked to birds isn’t going to be held against you
00:28:14 ►
it’s also you know one of the paradoxes that people don’t often don’t live by the philosophies they propound.
00:28:27 ►
Probably the most spectacular example of that is the English 17th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham,
00:28:35 ►
who is known as the founder of utilitarianism
00:28:38 ►
and who proposed this thing he called the utile,
00:28:44 ►
which was to be a unit of worth
00:28:46 ►
that could be applied to work, art, objects, money.
00:28:54 ►
As a utilitarian, Bentham was a rationalist and an atheist,
00:28:59 ►
but when it came time to go to glory,
00:29:04 ►
he had himself mummified.
00:29:07 ►
And now if you go to the Ashmolean Museum, just on the left, as you go in the front door
00:29:13 ►
of the side wing, there in a glass case, hat on head, cane in hand, is Jeremy Bentham in
00:29:22 ►
his mummified state, staring from a glass case.
00:29:27 ►
So he sort of had his cake and ate it too.
00:29:32 ►
So did Lenin, for that matter.
00:29:34 ►
I mean, for a dialectical materialist to allow an embalming and a shrine to be built to him
00:29:42 ►
is fairly peculiar.
00:29:53 ►
Let’s see we’re still calling for topics so it’s not too late well no that isn’t one of them that’s
00:29:59 ►
been dealt with that has a check after it, anything but that.
00:30:17 ►
Someone asked me if I would talk a little bit about novelty theory,
00:30:22 ►
and to those of you who have heard it a zillion times,
00:30:26 ►
the stress will be on a little bit and on new things.
00:30:30 ►
There have been a couple of new developments in the past year.
00:30:34 ►
Let’s see. Well, for one thing, I mean, you know,
00:30:38 ►
revolutions in physics now come so quickly
00:30:42 ►
that we hardly have time to adjust to one before there’s another
00:30:46 ►
but there was a very startling uh i guess i can’t call it a revolution because not everybody has
00:30:55 ►
converted to the new truth but there was an interesting development in physics over the past year, which is a number of very precise measurements were taken of
00:31:10 ►
nearby star clusters and their rates of velocity and dispersion. And it was discovered that there seems to be some kind of previously not only undetected but unsuspected force in the universe
00:31:34 ►
that was described in the popular press as an anti-gravitational force what it is is that you know for the past 50 years or so a question in
00:31:50 ►
astrophysics has been is the universe expanding infinitely or is it going to reach a point of maximum gravitational expansion and then gravitational expansion will reverse
00:32:09 ►
and it will fall back upon itself
00:32:12 ►
so that it will reach a maximum radius
00:32:16 ►
and then begin to fall back on itself.
00:32:19 ►
Well, these new measurements seem to indicate
00:32:22 ►
that once you subtract all the known physical forces in the universe,
00:32:29 ►
these star clusters, there is a residuum of unexplained expansive velocity.
00:32:40 ►
In other words, the answer to the question,
00:32:42 ►
will the universe eventually cease expanding
00:32:47 ►
and fall back on itself
00:32:49 ►
the answer now seems to be no
00:32:51 ►
it never will
00:32:53 ►
now this may seem very technical and so forth
00:32:57 ►
but it actually addresses some fairly basic questions
00:33:01 ►
it means that
00:33:03 ►
if true
00:33:05 ►
and the data is being
00:33:07 ►
second checked and third
00:33:09 ►
checked now but if
00:33:11 ►
true it means
00:33:13 ►
that
00:33:14 ►
the universe is not at its
00:33:19 ►
largest scale cyclical
00:33:21 ►
it isn’t like a great
00:33:24 ►
breathing creature that expands outward
00:33:27 ►
millions billions of years then collapses inward then expands again it
00:33:33 ►
seems to be a one-shot event that emerges from a singularity and spreads
00:33:41 ►
out forever well I don’t know how long forever is,
00:33:47 ►
but it’s certainly a lot longer than 12 billion years,
00:33:51 ►
which is the current age of the universe, 12 to 15 billion years.
00:33:56 ►
So this seems to indicate that we’re in some sense near the beginning
00:34:01 ►
of the life of the universe,
00:34:04 ►
and that whatever is going to happen in this universe
00:34:07 ►
it’s never going to be erased by cosmic backsliding we talked a couple of nights ago or
00:34:14 ►
maybe it was last night about the second law of thermodynamics which leads to entropy heat death
00:34:29 ►
heat death breakdown of all structure and dissipation of order apparently this universe will end like that not in a re-coalescence into a primal mass and a
00:34:37 ►
re-explosion and re-unfolding of its topology.
00:34:46 ►
So in a sense that’s both the death sentence
00:34:50 ►
on order and structure and morphology in the universe
00:34:55 ►
or perhaps not.
00:34:57 ►
Perhaps the death sentence was the belief
00:35:00 ►
that a time would come when the galaxies
00:35:03 ►
would stop moving apart and
00:35:05 ►
would begin to move inward and of course in a situation like that gas pressure
00:35:11 ►
and radiation and everything eventually would reach very critical levels and all
00:35:18 ►
and structure would melt down into an enormous black hole. So in a sense it clears the deck of this possibility
00:35:30 ►
that the universe will fall back upon itself into a simpler state.
00:35:35 ►
It means it either goes forward infinitely into entropy
00:35:39 ►
or it goes forward infinitely into the overwhelming of entropy
00:35:47 ►
by this strange non-equilibrium phenomenon that we call organic life
00:35:55 ►
and at its higher expression, mind.
00:36:00 ►
What does all this have to do with novelty theory?
00:36:03 ►
Well, basically it keeps novelty theory alive.
00:36:07 ►
In fact, it’s a tremendous argument for it,
00:36:10 ►
because novelty theory has always said,
00:36:13 ►
as the universe ages, it becomes more and more complicated, period.
00:36:21 ►
It doesn’t say, as the universe ages, it becomes more and more complicated up and to a
00:36:26 ►
certain point and then the process reverses as it falls back into a state of compression.
00:36:37 ►
This idea that the, it’s interesting how this discovery took place discoveries take
00:36:45 ►
place in a number of ways usually in science people are looking for something
00:36:51 ►
and so a theory doesn’t quite parse there’s a missing link there’s a hidden
00:36:59 ►
dimension and people go looking for the answers and then they either find them and don’t find them.
00:37:11 ►
In this case, and some of the great and truly, you know,
00:37:15 ►
society reconstructing ideas have come this way. In this case, the results were completely unexpected
00:37:19 ►
and nobody was looking for them.
00:37:21 ►
These measurements carried out on these star clusters
00:37:25 ►
were essentially to confirm existing theory.
00:37:29 ►
And when the data came back that these things were expanding,
00:37:34 ►
it was unexpected.
00:37:37 ►
No theory demanded it.
00:37:39 ►
And yet, you know, it appears to be incontrovertibly true.
00:37:44 ►
And yet, you know, it appears to be incontrovertibly true.
00:37:51 ►
Einstein, in the 30s, played around with this idea. And he produced at one point in his career what he called the cosmological constant,
00:37:58 ►
which was an expansion factor built into the universe at the at the axiomatic level in other words it was just
00:38:08 ►
given by god it did not proceed from logical declension and he fiddled around with this for
00:38:16 ►
five or six years eventually abandoned it described it as the biggest waste of time of his entire life,
00:38:29 ►
the biggest technical mistake he had ever been involved with. It now appears he was spot on.
00:38:33 ►
The cosmological constant is real, it is a constant,
00:38:38 ►
the value is close to what he calculated it to be,
00:38:41 ►
and it gives us a universe which once born expands forever so that
00:38:50 ►
was a big support for novelty theory it was felt that it was not necessary in
00:38:59 ►
other words it was felt that and it hypothesizes a force, you see,
00:39:05 ►
a force that in science fiction terms we would have to describe as anti-gravity.
00:39:13 ►
Under the influence of gravity, everything should eventually reach its gravitational limit.
00:39:19 ►
Under the attraction of everything else, it should then begin to fall backward.
00:39:22 ►
under the attraction of everything else,
00:39:24 ►
it should then begin to fall backward.
00:39:28 ►
But Einstein’s constant puts enough of an oomph into the mix
00:39:33 ►
that the gravitational force
00:39:36 ►
is not sufficient to overcome it,
00:39:39 ►
and the universe will just continue to fly
00:39:42 ►
in all directions outward from its origin point forever
00:39:47 ►
so in a way though you probably didn’t feel the speed bump this little series of discoveries in
00:39:56 ►
physics last year pretty much if if it holds up if, settles a question that people have pondered
00:40:06 ►
for as long as people have been staring into campfires,
00:40:09 ►
which is, is the universe cyclical,
00:40:13 ►
as the Hindu cosmologies tend to believe,
00:40:18 ►
always larger and larger cycles,
00:40:20 ►
or is it a one-shot deal?
00:40:24 ►
And Western philosophy has always leaned toward the idea
00:40:29 ►
that while there may be cycles within cycles but ultimately there is a a large a cycle so large
00:40:39 ►
that it doesn’t repeat ultimately in this model the universe is what’s called a damped oscillation. And I think
00:40:47 ►
you can imagine what that is. A damped oscillation is when you pluck a string on a cello and then
00:40:54 ►
listen very carefully, it actually dies away. I mean, it fades, but eventually it is truly gone.
00:41:04 ►
It fades, but eventually it is truly gone.
00:41:06 ►
That’s a damped oscillation.
00:41:10 ►
So that’s what the physics seems to have secured,
00:41:13 ►
that this is the kind of universe we’re in. It raises ethical, I suppose, and philosophical questions
00:41:18 ►
in the sense that it means where we stand tonight,
00:41:24 ►
no one has ever been before
00:41:26 ►
there aren’t worlds which precede and follow history like bubbles in a glass of beer
00:41:35 ►
it raises the stakes, being becomes more important, the unique moment becomes truly unique it’s sort of in line with
00:41:49 ►
that related to the same data set if you want which is the very large-scale
00:41:56 ►
physical universe there was another development not exactly development but
00:42:02 ►
sort of the debate sharpened and clarified.
00:42:06 ►
And that is, as you probably know if you worry about astrophysics and the issues it grapples
00:42:13 ►
with, there is this big problem, probably the biggest unsolved problem in astrophysical
00:42:21 ►
modeling, is this question of what is called a dark matter what this is about is the
00:42:35 ►
universe behaves as though there’s about 97% more of it than we can see. In other words,
00:42:49 ►
we look out into the starry universe and we see quasars and pulsars
00:42:51 ►
and stars and star clusters
00:42:54 ►
and galaxies and brown dwarfs
00:42:56 ►
and gas clouds and all these things.
00:42:59 ►
But when you add it all together,
00:43:02 ►
it’s only 3% of what should be there for the
00:43:08 ►
universe to hang together the way that it does and this problem has been
00:43:15 ►
physicists have been aware of this problem for about 30 years they call it it the dark matter problem because they assume that that the cohesiveness of the
00:43:30 ►
universe could only be because there are large amounts of unobserved matter that
00:43:37 ►
are contributing to the gravitational field of the large-scale cosmos and then
00:43:44 ►
the question becomes well where is this dark matter
00:43:48 ►
i mean we build better and better telescopes we look in more and more rarefied sections of the
00:43:54 ►
electromagnetic spectrum but we don’t see the dark matter doesn’t swim into view view one group wants to is looking for these things called machos which are
00:44:09 ►
massive haloed something objects anyway I can’t remember what the acronym stands
00:44:16 ►
for but the concept is some big things that we’ve overlooked the equivalent of
00:44:22 ►
brown dwarfs which are larger than stars
00:44:25 ►
larger than planets and saying there must be billions of these things in the
00:44:32 ►
universe that we just don’t see the other school of astrophysics says no no
00:44:38 ►
it’s wrong to look for this in these massive objects. It’s that the neutrino must have
00:44:48 ►
mass. Now the neutrino is an interesting creature.
00:44:52 ►
It’s one of these counterintuitive
00:44:55 ►
concepts which science depends on. In a single
00:44:59 ►
cubic centimeter of any amount of space or time
00:45:03 ►
something like 10 high 14 neutrinos per second
00:45:09 ►
are are are moving through a cubic centimeter of space how much is that well 10 high 14 is what a hundred a thousand trillion neutrinos per second
00:45:29 ►
penetrating every cubic centimeter of space and these things are hellishly difficult to detect
00:45:38 ►
a neutrino can pass through the earth and never encounter anything the earth is basically transparent
00:45:48 ►
to neutrino so trying to like to picture these things of which there are more of them than
00:45:54 ►
anything else in the universe so obviously if neutrinos had mass even if it was a very slight amount of mass there are so many of them that
00:46:07 ►
you could redo the arithmetic of reality
00:46:10 ►
and come up with a hell of a lot of
00:46:12 ►
previously undetected mass recently an
00:46:22 ►
experiment which has been long-running
00:46:24 ►
in Japan
00:46:25 ►
and I forget where the other detector is,
00:46:30 ►
France or something like that.
00:46:32 ►
Anyway, in the bottom of these very deep mines,
00:46:36 ►
they build these tanks
00:46:39 ►
with tens of thousands of gallons
00:46:42 ►
of what is essentially cleaning fluid in them.
00:46:45 ►
And they believe that one in something like 10 high 20 neutrinos will actually,
00:46:56 ►
one in 10 high 20 will actually collide with an atom of this solvent liquid
00:47:03 ►
and it produces a flash of blue light called Cherenkov
00:47:09 ►
radiation. This we don’t have to understand, or at least I’ve managed to live without understanding
00:47:16 ►
what it is. But you can build a photo detector and detect these things. Well, there was a supernova burst in the past year,
00:47:28 ►
and they detected the neutrino flux rose on the Japanese detector,
00:47:35 ►
and something like an eighth of a second later,
00:47:38 ►
the French detector also detected this wave
00:47:42 ►
of large numbers of neutrinos moving through the Earth.
00:47:46 ►
And for the first time, they were able to calculate the mass of the neutron.
00:47:54 ►
But not enough to account for the dark matter that seems to be missing.
00:48:02 ►
Well, so what does all this have to do with novelty theory?
00:48:06 ►
Well, simply this.
00:48:10 ►
Maybe there is no missing mass.
00:48:14 ►
Maybe there is no dark matter.
00:48:17 ►
Maybe what’s missing is a law or two.
00:48:20 ►
That wouldn’t be a more elegant solution.
00:48:23 ►
And what I’ve always said about novelty theory
00:48:27 ►
or one of its ideas
00:48:31 ►
that it kicks out quite naturally
00:48:34 ►
is the idea that
00:48:36 ►
once something complicated exists
00:48:40 ►
it has a kind of inertia for existence
00:48:44 ►
you know I’ve said once novelty is established
00:48:49 ►
nature tenaciously maintains it
00:48:52 ►
it doesn’t easily give up
00:48:55 ►
and go back to a simpler state
00:48:57 ►
so let’s imagine now that we’re looking at
00:49:01 ►
an enormous spiral galaxy
00:49:03 ►
comparable to M3-1 in Andromeda.
00:49:08 ►
And the question you’re asking yourself is,
00:49:12 ►
what keeps it together?
00:49:14 ►
You know, a hundred billion stars circling around a black hole.
00:49:19 ►
What keeps these stars from flinging themselves off
00:49:23 ►
into the ex-great intergalactic night? Why does the
00:49:28 ►
thing hang together? Well, the orthodox
00:49:32 ►
answer is there must be missing matter that we can’t see
00:49:35 ►
that is contributing and raising the amount of gravity in the system
00:49:40 ►
and that’s why it holds together. But I say no.
00:49:44 ►
It holds together simply because it is together.
00:49:48 ►
In other words, it has attained a dynamic status as an entity.
00:49:55 ►
Its sheer wish to maintain itself as it is, is sufficient to overcome the forces which are trying to fling it apart
00:50:06 ►
what’s interesting about this is if you you could actually begin if you believed
00:50:13 ►
this and you were a professional astrophysicist you could actually begin
00:50:17 ►
to calculate your way toward a mathematical value for the universal constancy of the novelty factor.
00:50:28 ►
What you would do is you would calculate the visible mass of a galaxy,
00:50:34 ►
calculate the amount of force necessary to fling it apart,
00:50:40 ►
subtract one from the other,
00:50:41 ►
and what you have left over is apparently this hidden
00:50:47 ►
tendency to cohesiveness that’s holding the thing together
00:50:52 ►
theoretically you could do this on a human being a human society a population of
00:50:59 ►
atoms a
00:51:00 ►
Molecule, but of course these things are very very difficult to separate from their background
00:51:07 ►
from their background. With a spiral galaxy suspended in intergalactic space
00:51:13 ►
you can actually make a fairly accurate estimate of how much mass you’re looking at
00:51:20 ►
at what its rotation speed is, at what the factors are, the tidal factors trying
00:51:26 ►
to tear it apart, and how great its attraction for itself would have to be to overcome that.
00:51:33 ►
So that was…
00:51:37 ►
See, if novelty theory is true, then on large scales it would have to operate that way we’ve always talked about it
00:51:48 ►
on tiny scales either the scale of human history a few tens of thousands of years or on much smaller
00:51:57 ►
scales atomic molecular and and systems like that but at But at the cosmic scale,
00:52:06 ►
you actually can begin to get a feeling for the mathematics of it.
00:52:12 ►
So those were the two areas in the past year
00:52:16 ►
that on the cosmic scale have contributed to strengthening novelty theory.
00:52:23 ►
The discovery of this apparently universally deep repulsive force
00:52:29 ►
that is causing the universe to expand forever,
00:52:33 ►
to never retrace its steps.
00:52:36 ►
And then paradoxically, this strange force
00:52:41 ►
that favors the coherency of large structures
00:52:44 ►
and doesn’t allow them to come apart strange force that favors the coherency of large structures
00:52:45 ►
and doesn’t allow them to come apart
00:52:47 ►
even when the gravity necessary to hold them together is absent.
00:52:55 ►
Let’s see.
00:52:57 ►
How does fractal and mental breath stuff fit in?
00:53:01 ►
Have you given that a thought?
00:53:03 ►
How that might have a relevance
00:53:05 ►
to all that?
00:53:07 ►
Well, it’s relevant in the sense
00:53:10 ►
that
00:53:11 ►
novelty
00:53:14 ►
theory is a wave mechanical
00:53:16 ►
view
00:53:18 ►
of nature that
00:53:19 ►
assumes that the
00:53:21 ►
basic pattern of
00:53:23 ►
cohesion and change
00:53:26 ►
is repeated at many, many scales.
00:53:29 ►
That’s what a fractal is.
00:53:30 ►
It’s a self-similar curve.
00:53:33 ►
You all understand this, right?
00:53:35 ►
It’s simply,
00:53:42 ►
it’s a curve made of smaller versions of itself.
00:53:47 ►
And every level of the curve is made of versions of itself at different scales.
00:53:54 ►
The most obvious example to look at in your mind is a circle.
00:54:00 ►
Think of a circle.
00:54:01 ►
As you zero in on a portion of the circle, it has slight curvature.
00:54:07 ►
While as you zero in on a portion of it, 1,100, the size of the first portion, it still has slight curvature.
00:54:15 ►
At all scales, the curve is self-similar. A circle is the simplest of all fractals.
00:54:23 ►
It’s also the most boring
00:54:25 ►
I mean not for other reasons
00:54:28 ►
but fractals
00:54:31 ►
until the advent of computers
00:54:34 ►
were very difficult to calculate
00:54:36 ►
they were only called fractals since the 1970s
00:54:41 ►
before that they were called
00:54:44 ►
pathological curves and that, they were called pathological curves. And the reason they were called pathological
00:54:53 ►
was because it was hellaciously difficult to calculate them. Literally, it would make
00:55:00 ►
you lose your mind. I remember when I was a kid, I knew about these things,
00:55:06 ►
and I knew the method for making them.
00:55:09 ►
I mean, the method is very simple.
00:55:11 ►
Make, draw a shape on a piece of paper.
00:55:13 ►
It could be an L.
00:55:16 ►
Now replace, you know how an L is,
00:55:20 ►
oh, I drew it backward, but here’s an L.
00:55:23 ►
Now replace the down swoop of the L
00:55:27 ►
and the horizontal swoop of the L.
00:55:33 ►
Replace each one with an L.
00:55:36 ►
And you get a thing which looks like this.
00:55:40 ►
You can follow that, right?
00:55:42 ►
Well, now replace each one of those straight segments with an L.
00:55:46 ►
Now you have reached what is called the second fractal stage of this particular figure.
00:55:52 ►
Now replace each of those straight segments with an L.
00:55:58 ►
But what you discover is by the time you get to stage 4, 5, or 6,
00:56:03 ►
by the drawing on a piece of paper method,
00:56:06 ►
the thing has become hellaciously complicated
00:56:10 ►
and higher stages of the fractal can’t be calculated at all.
00:56:17 ►
It has too many strokes in it, if you want to put it that way.
00:56:20 ►
But in a computer, this is the kind of stuff computers eat for breakfast.
00:56:20 ►
I’ll put it that way.
00:56:25 ►
But in a computer, this is the kind of stuff computers eat for breakfast, and you can produce fractals up to the 12th level of iteration.
00:56:32 ►
And what’s strange is that when you do this,
00:56:35 ►
it’s very hard to predict how the fractal is going to look.
00:56:40 ►
You start out with something just like the L,
00:56:44 ►
with being replaced by Ls.
00:56:46 ►
But by the time you get to the eighth or ninth level of iteration,
00:56:50 ►
the thing looks like exquisitely designed Louis Comfort Tiffany jewelry or something like that.
00:56:59 ►
It’s very, very hard to predict.
00:57:03 ►
Well, this is how nature builds, apparently, at every level.
00:57:10 ►
An example would be the veination on the surface of your liver
00:57:16 ►
and the delta of the Nile from an altitude of 200 miles
00:57:23 ►
do not look different at all.
00:57:26 ►
They obviously are built and created by the same forces,
00:57:32 ►
forces which divide fluid dynamics into finer and finer flow.
00:57:38 ►
This is probably the most powerful insight
00:57:42 ►
into the mathematical structure of nature of the last thousand years,
00:57:47 ►
which is saying something when you consider that the calculus is a contender.
00:57:54 ►
But all of nature yields to this insight.
00:58:00 ►
You know, one of the things that they talk about well like the question
00:58:08 ►
what is the length of the coastline of England this seems like a fairly
00:58:13 ►
straightforward question until you actually begin to measure the coastline
00:58:18 ►
of England and you discover that unless you make certain arbitrary assumptions, the coastline of England
00:58:26 ►
is infinite. Are we going to measure with a stiff measuring rod that is a mile long,
00:58:36 ►
or a foot long, or an inch long, or a millimeter long? The shorter our measuring stick,
00:58:48 ►
the longer the coast of England becomes.
00:58:50 ►
And the question,
00:58:52 ►
what is the length of the coast of England,
00:58:54 ►
is a meaningless question.
00:58:55 ►
Choose a number.
00:58:57 ►
That’s your answer.
00:59:00 ►
You can always reason backward to assumptions that would give you that answer.
00:59:04 ►
Fractals are very real
00:59:07 ►
in that they are not only spatially happening,
00:59:12 ►
they are temporally happening.
00:59:15 ►
Before I go to temporal happenings,
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an example of spatial distribution of fractals
00:59:22 ►
is dust bunnies.
00:59:24 ►
You know, dust bunnies are those weird
00:59:27 ►
agglomerations of hair and crud
00:59:30 ►
that live under beds and in the backs of cupboards.
00:59:33 ►
Well, they come in all sizes.
00:59:36 ►
They come from too small to see
00:59:38 ►
up to occasionally Moby Dick sized dust bunnies
00:59:43 ►
where cleaning has not gone on Moby Dick sized dust bunnies where
00:59:45 ►
cleaning has not gone on
00:59:48 ►
with sufficient diligence
00:59:50 ►
also
00:59:53 ►
the temporal
00:59:54 ►
processes are
00:59:56 ►
fractal
00:59:57 ►
my most personal
01:00:01 ►
encounter with the power of
01:00:04 ►
fractals in nature,
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I’ve told this story, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to tell it again.
01:00:10 ►
I was with a group of people in a workshop many years ago,
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and we were on a beach down north of Vandenberg,
01:00:18 ►
a very large beach.
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It’s called Point Sal.
01:00:23 ►
Sal. Sal.
01:00:24 ►
I don’t know if you can still get in there
01:00:25 ►
but it’s beautiful there’s all kinds of sea life and undisturbed beach so I was
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on this beach and I was walking and I was in an altered state such that I was
01:00:42 ►
paying very close attention to what was going on around me.
01:00:46 ►
And after walking for a while on this absolutely white beach,
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I came upon a little black rock, just a flat rock about that big.
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And I noticed it, because there was very little to notice on this beach,
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and I was sort of shelling in a half-hearted way at the time.
01:01:10 ►
So I noticed this black rock, and then I kept walking.
01:01:14 ►
And I came after quite a while, after five minutes of walking or so,
01:01:22 ►
I came to an identical black rock, just like the first one.
01:01:28 ►
And I thought, well, that’s interesting, strange. And then I had, as you sometimes do in altered
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states, I had an idea which burst on me, fully formed.
01:01:48 ►
I stopped walking along the beach,
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stopped at the second black rock,
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turned around,
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and I walked back to the first black rock, and I counted my steps.
01:02:00 ►
It was like 720 steps.
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And then I kept walking south on the beach,
01:02:08 ►
and I began the count again from zero.
01:02:12 ►
And at 723 steps,
01:02:15 ►
there was a third black rock lying on the beach.
01:02:21 ►
Well, rather than yield to the idea that the aliens were directing me or that this was
01:02:27 ►
a revelation of God’s intent for man I realized no it’s nothing like that what it is is this in
01:02:35 ►
this enormous Bay and this perfect beach are actually functioning as a computational engine of some sort,
01:02:45 ►
solving a fractal equation, a dynamic equation,
01:02:51 ►
that dictates the placement of black rocks on this beach.
01:02:56 ►
And I’m sure had I walked south another 720 to 30 feet,
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there would have been yet another black rock.
01:03:05 ►
Well, unless you’re loaded, this kind of thing will completely escape you
01:03:10 ►
99.9% of the time.
01:03:15 ►
But that doesn’t mean it’s not going on.
01:03:18 ►
It is. It is going on.
01:03:21 ►
You know, we think of computers as artificial things under the control of human operators and
01:03:28 ►
so forth but in fact all nature computes all nature computes I remember once being again
01:03:39 ►
strangely enough you have to sort of slow down and observe with psychedelics or you miss these things but I
01:03:46 ►
discovered something almost anybody can observe if they will but take the time and that is after a rain
01:03:54 ►
if you go into a place where there are dense bushes or leaves and
01:04:00 ►
that
01:04:02 ►
every drop of water
01:04:29 ►
And that every drop of water that comes down at the end of a leaf, like on the point of a maple leaf, if there’s a flat surface behind that drop of water, and you position yourself very carefully, the light passing through the drop of water will create a fisheye lens image of the entire scene around you.
01:04:34 ►
No eyes are involved, no animals are involved. This is just simply a drop of water in the presence of light creates a 360 degree fisheye lens image of the world around it.
01:04:45 ►
Until I saw that, I couldn’t understand
01:04:49 ►
how in the world animal eyes ever evolved,
01:04:53 ►
because you imagine that it’s mechanically complicated.
01:04:57 ►
You say, how can an animal see something?
01:05:00 ►
It must involve very complicated mechanisms and chemistry.
01:05:04 ►
No, just hang a drop of water at the end of a toothpick
01:05:08 ►
and position a piece of typing paper behind it
01:05:12 ►
and then carefully search for the right perspective
01:05:15 ►
and eventually this little image of the world emerges.
01:05:20 ►
It’s almost as though the world wants to warp itself into a total image
01:05:27 ►
of itself it it has within itself this this capacity to image itself a hundred
01:05:36 ►
percent that was the answer to the question about fractals it sidetracked
01:05:43 ►
me from the other thing I wanted to mention.
01:05:46 ►
Not that that’s a bad thing.
01:05:48 ►
But the other thing I did want to mention was,
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and this isn’t an argument for the truth of novelty theory per se,
01:05:58 ►
it’s an argument for the fact that things are more novel than we suspect
01:06:02 ►
and that novelty can come from unexpected directions.
01:06:06 ►
And that is this data that came out, I believe it was last September,
01:06:12 ►
where this fellow Anton Zellinger and his group in Vienna at the Center for Quantum Encryption teleported a photon
01:06:26 ►
a distance of about 15 feet
01:06:30 ►
in a laboratory.
01:06:32 ►
Well, now this is a technology
01:06:34 ►
which I would have,
01:06:36 ►
if you’d offered me a bet,
01:06:38 ►
I would have said is impossible
01:06:40 ►
on any scale,
01:06:41 ►
10 years, a thousand years.
01:06:44 ►
I mean, this is a really counterintuitive technology.
01:06:49 ►
The photon was destroyed at its origin point.
01:06:55 ►
It did not travel between the two points.
01:06:59 ►
It was destroyed at point A, and it instantly appeared at point B
01:07:06 ►
instantly
01:07:07 ►
notice, not at the speed
01:07:10 ►
of light, but instantly
01:07:12 ►
and the mathematics
01:07:14 ►
which allowed this to be
01:07:16 ►
done
01:07:16 ►
place no upper limit
01:07:20 ►
on
01:07:21 ►
the structures which
01:07:24 ►
will behave this way.
01:07:25 ►
In other words, it was done with a photon
01:07:27 ►
because a photon is very light,
01:07:31 ►
very easy to move around.
01:07:32 ►
You don’t have to pump much energy into a photon
01:07:35 ►
to get it to do what you want.
01:07:37 ►
But the experiment did not preclude
01:07:41 ►
doing it with an electron or a molecule
01:07:45 ►
or 10 high 16 molecules for that matter.
01:07:51 ►
In other words, this seemed to be a technology where it’s Star Trek stuff.
01:07:57 ►
You step onto a platform, every atom in your body is ripped asunder
01:08:04 ►
and you instantly appear
01:08:07 ►
thousands, tens of thousands
01:08:09 ►
perhaps hundreds of thousands of miles
01:08:12 ►
from where you started
01:08:14 ►
and you have not made the trip
01:08:17 ►
your new body has been assembled instantaneously
01:08:23 ►
out of locally available matter
01:08:25 ►
at the arrival point.
01:08:28 ►
And the people who were doing these experiments
01:08:31 ►
said they felt that scaling up this technology
01:08:37 ►
and doing it with, you know,
01:08:40 ►
macro-physical objects
01:08:42 ►
was five to six years away.
01:08:47 ►
This is one of these things where I assume they’ll hit speed bumps along the way,
01:08:54 ►
but imagine the impact of a technology like that on our image of ourselves.
01:09:00 ►
I mean, imagine if several times a day your body was blown completely to smithereens and reassembled out of the air you breathe some hundreds or thousands of miles away from where you are.
01:09:16 ►
I mean, just what this would do to our notion of ourselves.
01:09:21 ►
And, of course, it impinges on questions like, is there a soul?
01:09:29 ►
And if there is, can it withstand that process?
01:09:31 ►
And if so, how?
01:09:41 ►
In Islamic teachings they say the human soul can move no faster than a horse’s gallop.
01:09:47 ►
This is an explanation for jet lag.
01:09:49 ►
You know, you fly to Paris,
01:09:52 ►
your soul is moving along at about 35 miles an hour.
01:09:54 ►
It takes it several days
01:09:56 ►
to catch up with the transported body,
01:09:59 ►
and then you sort of feel reunited
01:10:02 ►
with yourself and whole again.
01:10:07 ►
Let’s see if I can think of anything else along those lines.
01:10:11 ►
That was pretty startling stuff.
01:10:16 ►
The real technologies which shape the world are somewhat unexpected, I think.
01:10:23 ►
are somewhat unexpected, I think.
01:10:33 ►
Like, for instance, if you read future fantasizing of the year 1800,
01:10:36 ►
there is no hint.
01:10:41 ►
It’s a mechanical fantasy. There is no hint that within 50 years telegraph lines will be strung
01:10:50 ►
and that within 100 years radio and telephones and moving pictures,
01:10:57 ►
all of that comes basically out of the occult discoveries of the 19th century,
01:11:04 ►
that there were such things as electromagnetic fields,
01:11:09 ►
that these electromagnetic fields were not mere objects of theory,
01:11:16 ►
but that they could carry symphonic music
01:11:19 ►
and human speech and pictures around.
01:11:22 ►
Like that. Like that.
01:11:26 ►
Like that.
01:11:29 ►
An electromagnetic intrusion from…
01:11:35 ►
Well, these things are unruly.
01:11:42 ►
Anyway, that was…
01:11:44 ►
I wanted to mention
01:11:46 ►
all that because
01:11:47 ►
novelty theory
01:11:49 ►
once
01:11:51 ►
sort of had the feel to itself
01:11:54 ►
now the world is getting so
01:11:56 ►
crazy that novelty
01:11:58 ►
theory has to elbow
01:12:00 ►
and shove itself to the front
01:12:02 ►
of any discussion to even
01:12:04 ►
be heard anymore.
01:12:06 ►
Of course, it predicted this.
01:12:08 ►
It predicted that it would, not that it would spawn, but that history would provide it with
01:12:15 ►
an atmosphere of competitive ideas. Now there’s an endless number of positions which predict enormous and imminent change,
01:12:32 ►
which novelty theory does as well.
01:12:35 ►
Novelty theory explains why.
01:12:38 ►
These other theories tend either to say that, I don’t know, it’s God’s will or it’s built into the
01:12:47 ►
dynamics of the planet or something like that. For a long time we’ve had people like Edgar
01:12:56 ►
Cayce who were predicting earth changes. Indeed, the entire substructure of Western religion is built on apocalyptic thinking.
01:13:08 ►
I mean, the essential promise of Western religion is that God will enter history.
01:13:15 ►
This is an extraordinary claim.
01:13:18 ►
In Hindu or Buddhist terms, you can barely even articulate this idea.
01:13:24 ►
I mean, what does it mean god will enter history
01:13:27 ►
well first it means that history is somehow a message sent from god that you know human lives
01:13:37 ►
armies empires and dynastic families are the hieroglyphs upon which God writes the message of his, her, its revelation in time.
01:13:52 ►
That’s not a Hindu or a Buddhist idea at all, still less the idea that God created history and will redeem us from it at a certain point.
01:14:06 ►
All this is worth talking about because as we approach the millennium,
01:14:11 ►
it’s one of those dwell points where the enthusiasts of this theory
01:14:21 ►
think it would be a mighty symmetrical and aesthetically pleasing moment
01:14:27 ►
for God to just lift the veil and enter history. The last time we had to put up with this was
01:14:36 ►
in the year 1000, but it was very diffuse. I mean, even though it was diffuse, the year 1000 had an enormous impact on
01:14:48 ►
the Western psyche, but not like the year 2000
01:14:52 ►
will happen. Around the year 1000,
01:14:56 ►
only extremely educated and sophisticated
01:14:59 ►
people knew that it was 1000.
01:15:04 ►
Well, people didn’t do dates
01:15:07 ►
the way we do
01:15:08 ►
for instance if you were a peasant
01:15:10 ►
in some feudal situation
01:15:14 ►
usually your notion of time was
01:15:17 ►
this is the fifth year of the second decade
01:15:22 ►
of Prince Louis reign
01:15:24 ►
that’s how time was delineated of the second decade of Prince Louis’ reign.
01:15:28 ►
That’s how time was delineated.
01:15:36 ►
Of course, the international intelligentsia knew that the year 1000 was approaching.
01:15:40 ►
In fact, there is a description of the midnight mass
01:15:44 ►
of December 31st, 999, where, I think it was actually, I don’t know why it wasn’t in Rome, but it was in Venice, the Pope was in Venice. the bells and as the last gong sounded out the twelfth strike of the bell you know there was
01:16:12 ►
this long moment it’s it’s what in Norse mythology is called the Gidniagol gap it’s that moment where
01:16:23 ►
one world age ends and another begins and you reach across the gap
01:16:28 ►
and you don’t know if anything is there or not well then uh nothing you know there was no trump
01:16:37 ►
of judgment there was no chariot descending from the sky and time which had stopped in a sense picked up and began rolling
01:16:49 ►
again it will be much more dramatic uh for us because it will be a worldwide event attended
01:16:57 ►
by all kinds of hysteria over the stability of the internet and so forth and so on. And even though, you know, the Chinese, the Jews, the Muslims,
01:17:07 ►
and all kinds of other people are using different calendars,
01:17:12 ►
the Gregorian calendar is an enormous framing metaphor
01:17:19 ►
for most people’s lives.
01:17:24 ►
Well, that’s an interesting question at first glance
01:17:27 ►
it appears arbitrary you know up until the 1500s Western civilization was ruled
01:17:36 ►
by what’s called the Julian calendar had been established by Julius Caesar. But the Julian calendar used a day count of 365 and one-quarter days.
01:17:51 ►
That’s only an approximation.
01:17:54 ►
One quarter isn’t quite, it’s slightly more than a quarter.
01:18:00 ►
Well, run it for a thousand years and you pick up 15 days of error. And the astronomers of the church were aware of this accumulating error in the calendar. Gregory the Great, hence the Gregorian calendar, Pope Gregory the Great declared in 1583
01:18:28 ►
that in Catholic countries,
01:18:31 ►
because the Reformation had already established Protestantism
01:18:36 ►
across northern Germany and in other places,
01:18:39 ►
but that in Catholic countries, that in December of 1583,
01:18:44 ►
but that in Catholic countries, that in December of 1583,
01:18:51 ►
the 5th of December would be followed by the 15th.
01:18:55 ►
In other words, they destroyed ten days.
01:19:02 ►
And this created, for a couple of centuries, a complete mess,
01:19:08 ►
because some countries didn’t like england didn’t make the correction until the 1780s because they were so adamantly anti-catholic so in diplomatic
01:19:17 ►
correspondence and this kind of thing and you can imagine insurance policies, investment instruments.
01:19:30 ►
You had to make sure that everybody was on the same calendar.
01:19:36 ►
And one by one, the Protestant countries converted to the Gregorian correction because the logic of it was pretty incontrovertible.
01:19:41 ►
If you stuck with the Julian day count then the great for
01:19:49 ►
instance the great church holidays were becoming twisted out of their place for
01:19:55 ►
example Easter Easter is the formula for Easter is Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.
01:20:09 ►
Well, if your calendar is out of kilter,
01:20:14 ►
then pretty soon the Easter date is too late in the year to make any sense.
01:20:20 ►
And so these calendrical corrections were needed.
01:20:23 ►
And so these calendrical corrections were needed.
01:20:35 ►
The Mayan calendar is a calendar, leaving aside all the woo-woo stuff about it,
01:20:49 ►
it’s a calendar which is based on the largest cycle human beings have ever observed on this planet. The largest cycle that affects this planet is what’s called the precession of the equinoxes. It was discovered by, is
01:20:57 ►
it Archimedes? Anyway, it was discovered in the second century before Christ in the West.
01:21:02 ►
discovered in the second century before Christ in the West, I see that Kim
01:21:06 ►
Malville’s group excavating in the
01:21:09 ►
southern Sudan this year discovered a
01:21:13 ►
Stonehenge-like ruin, not that
01:21:18 ►
Stonehenge-like, but I mean a kind of
01:21:21 ►
astronomical observatory, and the
01:21:23 ►
computer reconstruction of this thing
01:21:25 ►
seems to indicate that it was actually tracking the precession.
01:21:30 ►
The Maya must have picked up, not the Maya,
01:21:33 ►
but the proto-Maya, the Olmec,
01:21:36 ►
must have picked up on this same thing
01:21:39 ►
around the same time the Greeks were figuring it out
01:21:43 ►
because the Mayan calendar is designed so that it returns every 26,000 years
01:21:52 ►
to a very easily defined starting point.
01:21:58 ►
That starting point is a place in the Milky Way.
01:22:02 ►
You know, if you stand and look at the late summer sky from a high hill
01:22:09 ►
with the Milky Way spread out all in front of you, approximately at the zenith, there is a dark lane of dust which intrudes across the bright band of the Milky Way
01:22:28 ►
that that place astrophysicists say is the center of the Milky Way now the
01:22:41 ►
galaxy was not even defined as an entity for astrophysics
01:22:46 ►
except within the confines of the 20th century.
01:22:51 ►
But for reasons which you can call coincidence or synchronicity
01:22:56 ►
or miracle or primitive super science,
01:23:01 ►
the Maya were fixated on precisely this place in the sky the to
01:23:09 ►
the to the degree they were fixated on this spot they called it she Balba the
01:23:17 ►
path to the underworld they believed that the souls of the dead made a journey out into the stars and that this black
01:23:27 ►
slash across the face of the galaxy was a channel that the souls followed out to some
01:23:37 ►
transmundane realm a la gnostic speculation you, the idea that beyond the machinery of cosmic fate
01:23:46 ►
is the higher and hidden true God,
01:23:49 ►
and that after death, the light trapped in the soul
01:23:52 ►
is somehow sent there.
01:23:58 ►
So their calendar, which is a 26,000 year cycle,
01:24:12 ►
ends on December 21st, 2012 in our calendar. That’s a winter solstice, obviously, but it’s a very special winter solstice. It’s a winter solstice during which the heliacal rising of the sun
01:24:26 ►
is smack on this galactic set of crosshairs.
01:24:33 ►
In other words, the plane of the ecliptic
01:24:35 ►
along which the planets and the zodiacal signs are arrayed
01:24:40 ►
is moving over millennia into alignment with this completely independent other crosshair
01:24:50 ►
which is the galactic plane once every 13 000 years they align themselves
01:24:59 ►
at the winter solstice and the summer solstice so 13 000 years ago at the winter solstice and the summer solstice. So 13,000 years ago at the winter solstice,
01:25:08 ►
the heliacal rising of the winter solstice occurred in this same place.
01:25:14 ►
It takes a cycle of 26,000 years for it to return to the winter solstice point,
01:25:22 ►
as will happen in 2012 AD well if we then take
01:25:27 ►
as given that the calendrical cycle that is being tracked by these ancient people
01:25:35 ►
is this 26,000 year cycle then the year 2000 in our calendar, being only 12 years off,
01:25:48 ►
is simply not quite as deadly accurate as the Mayan.
01:25:56 ►
But the difference of 12 years over 26,000 is 0.0005%.
01:26:05 ►
So you could even argue that our own calendar,
01:26:09 ►
founded by Caesars and corrected by Popes,
01:26:13 ►
in other words, a fairly rational undertaking,
01:26:17 ►
a Jungian would argue that it just nevertheless
01:26:20 ►
danced the invisible fiddle of the unconscious mind
01:26:25 ►
that wanted to make the solsticeal coincidence
01:26:30 ►
with the heliacal rising of the galaxy the end point.
01:26:36 ►
And then people say, well, why?
01:26:38 ►
Why? Is there a deeper reason than simply
01:26:43 ►
that it’s the most convenient point in the sky to start and stop your cosmic cycle?
01:26:49 ►
And that’s brought a flurry of New Age speculation that some kind of energy can only be let in at these moments when the so-called gates stand open and which
01:27:07 ►
would be you know if you include the equinoctial points so you have two
01:27:14 ►
solstice points two equinoctial points then every six thousand five hundred
01:27:19 ►
years one of these doorways opens and and then it closes for another 6,500 years.
01:27:27 ►
If you only think the winter solstice is what matters,
01:27:32 ►
then the gate only opens once every roughly 26,000 years.
01:27:38 ►
And these are interesting time scales in the sense that,
01:27:42 ►
if we go back 6,500 years, that’s 4500 BC.
01:27:49 ►
That’s older than the pyramids, unless you use squirrely dating, which then this rap doesn’t work.
01:27:59 ►
The problem with squirrely dating is you have to know what you’re trying to preserve. With the dates as given by ordinary archaeology,
01:28:08 ►
it means that all of what we call human history
01:28:12 ►
has arisen in the last 6,500 years.
01:28:17 ►
I mean, there’s very little before that,
01:28:19 ►
and certainly little we can relate to
01:28:22 ►
in terms of our religious heritages our political
01:28:26 ►
systems our approach to jurisprudence and all that nothing is older than Old
01:28:32 ►
Kingdom Egypt and Old Kingdom Egypt is three four five thousand years old so
01:28:40 ►
you’ve got fifteen hundred years of wiggle room even on that scale if you go back 26 000 years
01:28:50 ►
you know this planet is locked in ice europe is buried under miles of ice the glaciers have
01:28:59 ►
reached as far south as balbek in lebanon the Himalayas are points of rock sticking out of an ocean
01:29:08 ►
of ice 10,000 feet thick. Everything, everything, everything, everything has happened in the
01:29:17 ►
last 26,000 years except for some, you know, cave painting and some rock chipping,
01:29:26 ►
but all ceramic, all weaving, all traces of writing,
01:29:33 ►
all traces of agriculture, all traces of astronomical knowledge,
01:29:40 ►
anything we can call shamanism,
01:29:42 ►
it all is locked within the confines of the last 26,000 years
01:29:49 ►
it’ll be very interesting to see how we ride through all this
01:29:54 ►
as a rational society
01:29:56 ►
of course the auguries are not good
01:30:00 ►
granted that this thing called the Y2K problem
01:30:04 ►
which could hardly be more mundane
01:30:06 ►
i mean this is basically a stale error in fortran seems to have sent our entire civilization into a
01:30:16 ►
tizzy of speculation preparation uncertainty and that’s what the rationalists are saying the guys with pen protectors in their
01:30:27 ►
pockets they worry about that apocalypse once you move deeper into you know unanchored speculation
01:30:37 ►
and that then you just have everything going you’ve got your aliens you’ve got your aliens, you’ve got your earth changes, you’ve got the Antarctic ice caps melting,
01:30:48 ►
you’ve got global warming, asteroid impact,
01:30:53 ►
always a favorite, always been a favorite of mine.
01:30:59 ►
And I, you know, it’s a real test of our Jungian theory.
01:31:09 ►
In other words, here we have practically every man, woman, and child
01:31:13 ►
with an intimation of the apocalypse,
01:31:17 ►
and yet reason would dictate that nothing terribly different
01:31:22 ►
from what happened last week or the week before will intrude to shake us up.
01:31:31 ►
Can an expectation become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
01:31:37 ►
We shall find out.
01:31:40 ►
It’s interesting that right before we go over this speed bump,
01:31:44 ►
we decommission all our nuclear arsenals and delivery systems.
01:31:49 ►
We were in a much better position to create an apocalypse ourselves 10 years ago.
01:31:56 ►
So it’s probably a good thing that our political systems have slightly toned down their rhetoric,
01:32:04 ►
even if there were no calendrical countdown occurring,
01:32:09 ►
I think from the discussions of technology in these groups,
01:32:14 ►
you can see that with or without the millennial countdown,
01:32:19 ►
we have an internal clock,
01:32:22 ►
an internal agenda of technical accomplishments that are transforming our
01:32:30 ►
psyches and our societies and our politics and our gender relations and everything else
01:32:38 ►
faster than anything else. I mean it isn’t earth changes that’s making us over, it’s technology
01:32:47 ►
that’s making us over. It isn’t even politics, you know, the major forms of
01:32:53 ►
political discourse have been on display for a hundred years. Marxism, fascism,
01:33:00 ►
democratic consumerism, so forth and so on where the change is
01:33:06 ►
is in the domain of technology
01:33:08 ►
which we self
01:33:10 ►
self generate
01:33:12 ►
all of that
01:33:14 ►
our medical
01:33:15 ►
the way we
01:33:19 ►
well projects like the human
01:33:22 ►
genome project
01:33:24 ►
and technologies like cloning
01:33:28 ►
and technologies that are brought to bear on problems of infertility or stuff
01:33:38 ►
like this are redefining what it is to be human more rapidly than most people realize because most people are
01:33:47 ►
pretty much at home in their body you know but if you aren’t at home in your body all kinds of
01:33:54 ►
options beckon you know you can change your gender you can uh augment yourself through prosthesis,
01:34:06 ►
silicon implants, all kinds of things.
01:34:09 ►
And we’re clearly at the beginning of all of this.
01:34:15 ►
And all kinds of things that can be done for noble purposes
01:34:19 ►
so that infertile couples can have children,
01:34:23 ►
so that people in terrible accidents and victims of burning and things like this can survive.
01:34:30 ►
The technologies which make those things possible
01:34:32 ►
also make possible all kinds of nightmarish and peculiar possibilities.
01:34:44 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives
01:34:49 ►
one thought at a time. It was interesting to hear how concerned Terrence was in 1998 about the
01:34:56 ►
upcoming Y2K issue that was then looming on the horizon. Doesn’t that make you wonder how he would
01:35:02 ►
feel today about the fact that there is a psychotic toddler who now has his tiny little fingers on the nuclear button?
01:35:09 ►
We most certainly live in strange times.
01:35:13 ►
But before I forget to tell you, if you want to listen to that trialogue that Terrence mentioned, where Rupert and Ralph gave him a hard time,
01:35:20 ►
you can hear it in my podcast number 228 that I posted way back on May 15th in 2010.
01:35:28 ►
And that’s the first of three podcasts featuring that June 6th, 1998 trialogue in Santa Cruz.
01:35:34 ►
And if I remember correctly, there were a few points in that conversation
01:35:38 ►
where Terrence was backed into a corner by his friends. In fact, I think I’m going to go back and listen to that series myself.
01:35:46 ►
And since today’s talk went a bit long,
01:35:49 ►
I’m going to get out of here and let you get back to the adventure of your own life.
01:35:53 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:35:58 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.