Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1597805394Permutation City by Greg Egan
Date this lecture was recorded: August 11 &13, 1998
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna
“There is no closure. All ideology is now exposed as an adolescent response to being. If the 20th Century taught us anything, it taught us the toxic nature of ideology.”
“There is a need to abandon ideology, which is really a postmodern position, and it’s very uncomfortable. “The absence of closure is a post-juvenile stance toward being that few people in the past ever lived long enough to grow comfortable with.”
“Culture, as a con game, lasts long enough to keep you entranced up until sometime in midlife. If you live beyond midlife and you still are fascinated and entranced by culture chances are you’re an idiot of some sort.”
“I was passionate about ideology in my youth. I had most of them.”
Permutation City: A Novel by Greg Egan
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And I’m pleased to thank fellow salonners Mary P. and Samuel K.,
00:00:29 ►
both of whom made donations to the salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with producing these podcasts.
00:00:36 ►
And I’d also like to thank Kate and Timothy, who became the eighth andth patrons of my new writing project, which you can learn more about at www.patreon.com
00:00:50 ►
slash all one word lowercase Lorenzo Haggerty with one G.
00:00:56 ►
And I definitely want to thank you one and all for your great support.
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It means a lot to me.
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So today we will once again join Terrence McKenna in his August 1998 workshop for the staff at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
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As we pick up in the middle of where we left off with Terrence last week,
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I should warn you that he is talking about the plot of a Greg Egan science fiction novel and not about a real medical procedure.
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I’ll start it right now and you will understand in a moment what I mean.
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In years in the future, they had one of these very, very expensive medical insurance policies
00:01:39 ►
where they’re supposed to spare no effort to save you if something happens to you and this guy was in a
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train wreck and virtually nothing survived except his brain which was completely intact
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so they had a medical technology to grow him a new body they just took some cells and cloned them
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but of course that gives you an infant, not a mature person.
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They then used enzyme technologies
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to force-age this fetus,
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so it would take them two years
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to produce a body
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that could accept the transplant.
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So this was all fine.
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The insurance policy covered all of this,
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but there was a clause in the insurance policy
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which said that during the two years
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that the body was being grown and prepared for the transplant,
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the brain could be kept alive, should be kept alive,
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but that the insurance company had the right to choose
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the cheapest method of keeping the brain alive
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consistent with good medical practice.
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Well, the cheapest method of keeping the brain alive
00:02:59 ►
consistent with good medical practice
00:03:01 ►
was a direct implant into the body cavity
00:03:05 ►
of the other signatory on the insurance policy
00:03:09 ►
who was this guy’s wife.
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And so for two years,
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she carried the brain as an implant
00:03:17 ►
in her body cavity.
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And, you know, the psychological changes
00:03:24 ►
and the feeling of obligation and guilt
00:03:28 ►
and the way in which this twisted these people’s relationship is easily imagined none of us have
00:03:36 ►
ever you know would your girlfriend do that for you would you do that for your girlfriend? And how would you think of this person after
00:03:47 ►
you had been through that? That’s not a very far-fetched thing. I mean, that’s not as far-fetched
00:03:54 ►
really as, well, it involves cloning and forestaging, but a full understanding of the physiological
00:04:06 ►
a full understanding of the physiological and psychological functioning of the human organism will make these kinds of things child’s play.
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And then the moral questions, you know, is this a good thing?
00:04:14 ►
Should it be done?
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Our repugnance, immediate repugnance, or at least mine to this kind of thing,
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or at least mine to this kind of thing,
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is a repugnance that would probably extend to many medical procedures that are routine today.
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It’s just doctors don’t rub the nose of the public in this stuff,
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but they do outlandish procedures
00:04:41 ►
in the name of prolonging life and ameliorating pain.
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How we feel about this is, I think, probably one of the major issues of the next century
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will be, you know, how extraordinary should our efforts be to preserve and maintain life.
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to preserve and maintain life?
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And if we attain a perfect medical technology so that unless somebody’s stone-cold dead for six months,
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nothing can be done for them,
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then how are we to apply this?
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Is it immortality for the wealthy
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and prolonged life for the middle class
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and the devil takes the hindmost
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for the suffering proletariat?
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Or how will all that be worked out?
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What is the ethics of all that?
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Any comment on all of this or question?
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Is it all perfectly clear here what’s going on?
00:05:44 ►
Yeah, this is appalling stuff and and yet you know
00:05:51 ►
knowing human beings to be the creatures they are if if there are livers walking
00:06:00 ►
around in the poor sections of third world cities worth twenty thousand
00:06:05 ►
dollars a pop it’s asking a great deal to not believe that criminal syndicates
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will prey on these people I can remember my shock disbelief it was a growing
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moment for me when I was in india when i learned that all these
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extremely dramatically deformed people who were begging from me that these had been healthy
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children whose poor parents had saved up the family savings so these people could be taken to these surgical clinics as children
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and deliberately deformed in order to give them a profession you know it’s like here is my here is
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your mother and my gift to you you know blindness spinal deform, so forth and so on, so that you may now enter the begging union.
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This is the other thing you may not understand about India.
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These people begging on the street, everybody is in the union.
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You give somebody a dollar, that isn’t their dollar.
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Under fear of death, they turn that dollar in at the end of the day
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and they are given a percentage of death, they turn that dollar in at the end of the day, and they are given a percentage of it,
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and the rest is distributed to the other members of the begging union.
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So this is so counter to Western values
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that we don’t know where to begin or who to blame
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or who to condemn on a deal like that.
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And as Kathleen makes the point, we’re part of the problem.
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This trade in organs would not exist if it weren’t for people like you and I
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who have medical insurance policies that will pay for these outrageous
00:08:06 ►
procedures and pay these incredible amounts of money. And the logical extrapolation of this
00:08:16 ►
is, in fact, a society where the rich live forever. And this can be done. I mean, it can’t be done today, but in a way we’re experiencing
00:08:28 ►
it. I mean, if the average lifespan in Bangladesh is 33 and the average lifespan here in Big
00:08:34 ►
Sur is 78, you’ve got to figure money and a clean food supply and access to medical procedures is what’s making the difference. Why, for the elderly, for religious reasons, whatever, families are willing to allow doctors to step in and prolong life.
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When there is no quality of life left.
00:09:25 ►
And, of course, this is, you know, the doctors are getting richer,
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and families feel that this is what God wants.
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There’s no natural ending.
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Well… There’s no natural ending.
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Yeah, in a sense, science has forced the hand of religion.
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Because science, the religious impulse,
00:09:55 ►
care for the sick.
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We talked about this last night.
00:09:58 ►
This is a great moral obligation,
00:10:02 ►
a great moral teaching.
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We should feed the hungry,
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clothe the naked, bury the dead,
00:10:07 ►
care for the sick.
00:10:08 ►
But if caring for the sick means
00:10:11 ►
prolonging the agony
00:10:15 ►
of dying people
00:10:18 ►
for purposes of money,
00:10:21 ►
it doesn’t make any sense at all.
00:10:23 ►
People are afraid to touch this issue it relates to
00:10:27 ►
abortion it relates to what dr. Kevorkian is doing because it’s easy to say life in all circumstances
00:10:35 ►
should be preserved the problem is that’s an egghead dist rational. You’re not up to your elbows and guts when you make that statement.
00:10:49 ►
What really needs to be preserved is the quality of experience. And when the quality of experience
00:10:57 ►
sinks below a certain level, I don’t think we’re doing anybody a favor. Not the dying person,
00:11:03 ►
not their family, not the medical establishment is corrupted
00:11:07 ►
because it no longer knows what it’s doing.
00:11:10 ►
But again, as you point out,
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we are so factionalized by religious beliefs
00:11:20 ►
and other philosophical differences
00:11:23 ►
that we don’t want to look this in the face.
00:11:27 ►
We don’t want to kill people who don’t want to die,
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no matter how horrifying their circumstance is.
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And so the thing is not being handled at all.
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It’s being allowed to develop in extremely messy directions.
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And we should all have a great concern.
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I mean, it may seem abstract this evening
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because we all sit here.
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But, you know, you could drive out of here tomorrow
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and in a moment of mechanical failure
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have your life turned upside down
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and find yourself in a hospital in Monterey
00:12:09 ►
with people trying to decide, you know,
00:12:12 ►
what do you want, what should be done,
00:12:14 ►
what can be done, how much money do you have.
00:12:17 ►
They want to know how much money is in your bank account
00:12:20 ►
to figure out how much effort should be expended
00:12:23 ►
to try and save you.
00:12:25 ►
This doesn’t exactly sound to me like the Hippocratic Oath in action.
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But even if you leave instructions that you do not want your life prolonged under certain circumstances,
00:12:39 ►
that can be meaningless, depending.
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that can be meaningless depending it’s just a very kind of murky area even though the law may say that yes the instructions the person left
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there’s so many things that can happen I mean with the doctors and with the family and so on and so on.
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And it’s…
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That’s what…
00:13:13 ►
Yeah, it’s where the pedal meets the metal. Metal.
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And the person involved is really, that person is not even a factor anymore.
00:13:30 ►
You know, his wishes, his intentions, his now, his mental age.
00:13:38 ►
Well, it’s a very difficult question.
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I mean, you may recall in Brave New New World Aldous Huxley’s wonderful
00:13:47 ►
dystopia people there are genetically engineered they live to age 65 in the
00:13:56 ►
bodies of 25 year olds and then they die very suddenly well now that’s sort of a
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horrifying possibility too that’s the of a horrifying possibility, too.
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That’s the other end of the spectrum.
00:14:09 ►
Just cut through all of this
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and avoid the class distinctions
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and the technological differences
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and appoint a human lifespan
00:14:18 ►
and say, you know, we will do everything in our power
00:14:21 ►
to make sure you live to be 70 years old
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and you’ll be dancing on your 69th birthday
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and chasing young men all over the map and eating like a horse,
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but come age 71, you will be dead and we will make sure of it.
00:14:38 ►
That also freaks us out.
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So it’s one of these places where,
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though we do everything through collective decision,
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you know, our politics, our economics, our art,
00:14:51 ►
everything is achieved by consensus.
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About this, we have no consensus.
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And yet every single one of us is moving toward this weird domain
00:15:04 ►
where this will not be abstract, this will be all that will matter.
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And what instructions do we want carried out?
00:15:17 ►
Somewhat gloomy subject.
00:15:19 ►
I didn’t really mean to wander this way,
00:15:24 ►
but I do love the science fiction of Greg Egan,
00:15:30 ►
this new Australian science fiction writer,
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and his novels tend to more cosmic themes,
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but his short stories are just one scenario after another of these medical, near-term medical dilemmas that could involve quite ordinary people.
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And this is all with easily extrapolatable medical technology that we see taking shape all around us if you
00:16:07 ►
take the leap into more wild-eyed speculation then you have the
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possibility of and this is fully explored in Greg Egan’s fiction as well
00:16:20 ►
the possibility of digitizing human experience actually downloading consciousness
00:16:30 ►
out of bodies and into machines well everybody says well that’s a horrible idea i wouldn’t
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have that done to me well would you if you were 24 hours away from death if that were the option they were saying
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you know we’re either going to pull the plug or we’re going to download you and then pull the plug
00:16:53 ►
check which box you would prefer uh how many people would say well i don’t know i’ve always
00:17:00 ►
been skeptical about this download business but hey hey, at this point, why not?
00:17:08 ►
But the strange thing is digitizing a digital existence
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may turn out to be an eternity of experience.
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We operate at 100 hertz sitting here, 100 cycles a second.
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That’s about how the rate at which your body-mind system works.
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The PC sitting on the desk comes now,
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if it’s a good one, with two 400 megahertz processors in it.
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What is that?
00:17:51 ►
in it. What is that? 80,000 times more events can be packed by that computer into a second than you can pack into a second. An hour inside that computer is like 80,000 hours outside the computer. So right at the brink of death,
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you can suddenly opt for a strange new kind of eternal existence, not that different from being
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born. I mean, it involves a machine, of course, but maybe biological death will be something for mennonites and the amish and
00:18:27 ►
every all the rest of us will opt for of course digital existence and but then of course you know
00:18:37 ►
there have to be insurance policies to make sure your disc isn’t erased, and the electricity keeps running,
00:18:50 ►
and nobody rewrites your code, and nobody overwrites your code.
00:18:56 ►
Yes, they would have to be very careful up there. And then the question is, you know, whose obligation, after a few hundred years,
00:19:02 ►
whose obligation is it to keep these digital ghosts
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alive
00:19:08 ►
is it society’s
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obligation after your
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fortune has long been run out
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and your relatives have forgotten
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you and you’re still
00:19:18 ►
romping through the virtual
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fields of Elysium
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who of course maybe
00:19:23 ►
you can do useful work in there
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and be paid and deposit that salary into the account,
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which keeps the machine running.
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It all comes down to money.
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Isn’t that weird?
00:19:39 ►
Very interesting.
00:19:42 ►
I mean, it’s all money, you you know how much life you can buy how many
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indulgences your tithing can procure for you it’s all paying off somebody as william burroughs said
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it’s all some kind of a racket which doesn’t mean you want to
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throw down your cards
00:20:07 ►
and stomp off into the dark
00:20:09 ►
because it’s the only racket in town,
00:20:13 ►
so you have to be very careful
00:20:14 ►
about rejecting it.
00:20:16 ►
I wonder how many people…
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I mean, it seems to me
00:20:21 ►
these choices are now upon us.
00:20:24 ►
If we wait too long, if we think of it as science fiction,
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if we push it away from us,
00:20:31 ►
then those who didn’t behave as we do
00:20:34 ►
will make it their business to make the decisions.
00:20:39 ►
This is all being put in place right now,
00:20:42 ►
all kinds of other stuff.
00:20:44 ►
I don’t know how many of you
00:20:45 ►
read the New York Times today, but it was Science Tuesday, so there was a long article
00:20:51 ►
in the science section on these things called SNPs, the portion of the DNA that we differ differ from each other in regarding, and this is where all the genetic diseases
00:21:09 ►
and hereditary conditions that limit our functionability
00:21:14 ►
reside and all that.
00:21:16 ►
Well, long before people are deciding
00:21:19 ►
whether they want to be digitized
00:21:21 ►
and downloaded into circuitry,
00:21:24 ►
genes are going to be bought and sold like CD-ROMs.
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Do you want them?
00:21:33 ►
And what will be the moral arguments against them?
00:21:37 ►
They are like prostheses of a non-mechanical sort,
00:21:42 ►
but do you want the gene that makes you immune to liver cancer?
00:21:48 ►
Do you want the gene
00:21:50 ►
which prolongs sexual vitality?
00:21:53 ►
Do you want the gene
00:21:55 ►
which makes you immune
00:21:57 ►
to the malarial organism?
00:22:00 ►
Such genes exist
00:22:02 ►
and can be easily manufactured by the millions and presumably implanted fairly easily.
00:22:11 ►
Well, then are we going to produce, as in Brave New World, you remember,
00:22:15 ►
everybody was slightly fae, meaning gender expression had been kind of ameliorated.
00:22:24 ►
meaning gender expression had been kind of ameliorated.
00:22:27 ►
The women, everybody was bisexual,
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and everybody was photogenically perfect.
00:22:38 ►
Everybody had toned bodies, clear vision, quick reflexes, because that was just the optimizing of the human form.
00:22:44 ►
Well, to cling, to resist that, is that, to cling
00:22:49 ►
to your individuality, you know, your slightly crossed eyes, your vague stammer, your, is
00:22:56 ►
that some weird form of sentimentality? Or is it the last vestige of what makes you uniquely you?
00:23:05 ►
Do we want to become a society of tennis coaches, essentially?
00:23:12 ►
Then it becomes a question of freedom.
00:23:16 ►
What happens to freedom?
00:23:19 ►
Well, yes, and who is going to tell somebody else,
00:23:22 ►
no, you may not have a breast implant
00:23:25 ►
or change your eye color or your gender
00:23:27 ►
or your intelligence or your preference
00:23:30 ►
for white wine over red.
00:23:33 ►
I mean…
00:23:34 ►
What are you saying?
00:23:38 ►
I think that the freedom of…
00:23:43 ►
I mean, I see with being able to pick every gene you can say I’m going
00:23:52 ►
to have a child and I want him to have an IQ of 180 and blue eyes and all of that, well, that is really not freedom,
00:24:06 ►
in my view,
00:24:08 ►
because it’s programming something.
00:24:12 ►
It’s like…
00:24:14 ►
Well, it’s that weird freedom
00:24:16 ►
that we’re so fond of in this society.
00:24:19 ►
It’s the freedom to choose.
00:24:23 ►
But it’s not really a freedom. If everyone decides to look like a tennis coach, then
00:24:29 ►
what happened to, how is this freedom?
00:24:33 ►
And how can we expect to get an Einstein and an Andy Warhol and a William Burroughs and
00:24:39 ►
a Mick Jagger and so forth out of a world where everybody is the same.
00:24:45 ►
Of course, celebrity jeans will be hugely popular and expensive.
00:24:52 ►
I mean, you can have Jagger’s lips.
00:24:56 ►
You can have these…
00:25:00 ►
So I don’t…
00:25:08 ►
Fortunately, we will each have to solve these problems only for ourselves.
00:25:11 ►
But how the whole thing comes out,
00:25:14 ►
what it comes out looking like, I’m not sure.
00:25:17 ►
I mean, if you go to Los Angeles,
00:25:19 ►
essentially this is a society that is testing the edge of this.
00:25:24 ►
Because there, you know, breasts are routinely redesigned,
00:25:30 ►
so are faces, so are lips, so are bottoms.
00:25:34 ►
People tan themselves, tone themselves,
00:25:38 ►
halt their aging process, switch their gender,
00:25:41 ►
and my God, you wouldn’t dare say a word against all this. You’d be denounced
00:25:46 ►
as some kind of recidivist reactionary, some kind of crypto-fascist of some sort, for sure.
00:25:54 ►
The problem is, I think, that there is a hellish marriage between market values and human
00:26:02 ►
decision-making in our culture.
00:26:05 ►
I mean, we think you have freedom of choice
00:26:07 ►
if there are 11 brands of soap confronting you
00:26:11 ►
when you go to the A&P.
00:26:15 ►
Well, is that real choice?
00:26:17 ►
Or is the real choice whether or not the A&P should exist. We confine ourselves in a in a in a neotenized
00:26:30 ►
environment of fetishized choice and the glamour of choice is driven by
00:26:38 ►
advertising. For instance, I was had this conversation with somebody in the last 24 hours,
00:26:47 ►
one of the genes very likely to be quickly isolated and understood
00:26:52 ►
is the gene for obesity.
00:26:57 ►
Well, does that mean that in a hundred years
00:27:00 ►
children will ask about a time when there were people walking around who didn’t
00:27:08 ►
weigh a perfect 145 and have a perfect body. But we can’t ask obese people to not avail
00:27:18 ►
themselves of this therapy if they feel psychologically imprisoned by their condition how do we
00:27:29 ►
view obesity do we view it the same way we view nearsightedness as a condition
00:27:36 ►
to be corrected by whatever means available or is are we as a species somehow enriched by having very obese people, very short people, very tall people, people who are different from ourselves?
00:27:57 ►
How do we value difference?
00:28:02 ►
And then when you move on into the mental domain it just becomes unmanageable
00:28:08 ►
the price of understanding is power not consequence as science seem to believe you know if we
00:28:17 ►
understand this we will control it no if we will understand it we will have no choice but to attempt to control
00:28:26 ►
it with the sure knowledge that we will fail I mean that that is more the real
00:28:33 ►
implication maybe what it means is that human history can’t be controlled by
00:28:40 ►
human beings that technologies have always,
00:28:51 ►
technologies and our flaws, like greed, like vanity, have always made hellish marriages with each other,
00:28:57 ►
and our best intent to be decent people, to raise our children well,
00:29:05 ►
to be present for our neighbors in times of pain and so forth and so on,
00:29:11 ►
are simply dragged along by the shadow
00:29:16 ►
and its obsessive relationship to the technologies which it produces.
00:29:24 ►
You know, McLuhan is famous for saying
00:29:26 ►
no technology in history has ever been put in place
00:29:29 ►
with even a partial understanding of what its consequences would be.
00:29:35 ►
Not the automobile, not the printing press,
00:29:39 ►
not the phonetic alphabet,
00:29:41 ►
and certainly not biotechnology and computers. And each one of these technologies
00:29:50 ►
has exalted and enriched the lives of a group of people and plunged other groups of people into hells previously unimagined. I mean the
00:30:07 ►
printing press creates the whole notion of literacy, literature, the class of
00:30:15 ►
intelligentsia, so forth and so on, but it also creates propaganda, advertising, the mechanisms that are used to support repressive forms of government and marketing.
00:30:33 ►
So, again, what I’ve said at various times in these talks is it’s easy to sketch out dilemmas. It’s almost impossible to bring
00:30:45 ►
to offer
00:30:47 ►
reassuring
00:30:48 ►
closure.
00:30:51 ►
Whitehead said it’s the business
00:30:53 ►
of the future to be
00:30:55 ►
dangerous. Of course, he said that
00:30:57 ►
in 1920, when it wasn’t
00:30:59 ►
nearly as dangerous as it
00:31:01 ►
is now, had he been staring
00:31:03 ►
down the barrel of atomic weapons,
00:31:07 ►
gene therapy, so forth and so on,
00:31:10 ►
he might have felt differently.
00:31:12 ►
For sure, there is no percentage in ignoring these issues
00:31:19 ►
or sweeping them under the rug
00:31:21 ►
or thinking it is not germane to our lives.
00:31:29 ►
We all live, I mean, I don’t know what your life is like,
00:31:33 ►
but I feel like I live far from the pinnacle of possibilities.
00:31:41 ►
I mean, I suppose if I were, you know, a professional in a science like brain surgery or implant design or something is that most of what they know about the world
00:32:06 ►
is randomly garnered information from unreliable sources.
00:32:17 ►
Very few people professionally deal with information in such a way as that they try to find out what is actually going on and what the limits of possibility are.
00:32:30 ►
Even in specialized fields of knowledge, like computer network design or research mathematics or gene sequencing or something like that,
00:32:41 ►
they don’t communicate across the face of the wave of
00:32:46 ►
knowledge. And so people in a given field may feel a kind of vertiginous thrill of their field
00:32:54 ►
reaching levels of power and understanding that it’s striven for for a long time, but they don’t
00:33:02 ►
understand this is happening simultaneously in so many
00:33:06 ►
fields of knowledge that it’s redefining the very nature of the enterprise of understanding
00:33:14 ►
and the very experience of being i mean a person who insisted on living as totally on the edge as they possibly could
00:33:28 ►
would be an object of discomfort for most of us, I think.
00:33:35 ►
I mean, I was at a conference a year or so ago in England
00:33:38 ►
that was sponsored by this thing in England called the ICA,
00:33:42 ►
which is a very pretentious kind of umbrella organization
00:33:47 ►
for contemporary artists. Well, I have a mild interest in contemporary art, have had for
00:33:56 ►
30 years, but when I sat down with those people, I realized, you know, if you are not halfway through your gender switching operation if you have not
00:34:08 ►
hung yourself by hooks from your pectorals in the sun if you have not integrated machines into your
00:34:17 ►
body if you if you don’t speak this language of deconstructionism and crypto-sado-masochism and so forth and so on,
00:34:28 ►
nobody wants to talk to you. You have nothing to contribute to the dialogue at this point. The
00:34:35 ►
dialogue and art, we’re told, is always the torchbearer at the edge of the human enterprise.
00:34:47 ►
the edge of the human enterprise. Well, if that’s what’s going on among the torchbearers, then we all need to prepare ourselves for a nearly unimaginable future. Some of you may have read
00:34:54 ►
that essay a few years ago, I think it was in Atlantic Monthly by Norman Mailer, about the future of psychosis and he said he was basically he was
00:35:07 ►
reflecting on the Jeffrey Dahmer murder case and he said you know we must
00:35:14 ►
struggle to avoid the future where most of us keep human body parts in our
00:35:20 ►
refrigerators and for us this like, you must be kidding,
00:35:26 ►
but, you know, I don’t think so.
00:35:29 ►
I think the preservation of humanness
00:35:32 ►
and of human values in the presence of technology
00:35:36 ►
has been a battle that we have been losing so far
00:35:41 ►
because we weren’t conscious of the rules
00:35:44 ►
and the parameters of the game,
00:35:47 ►
but that we should quickly awaken and realize, and I don’t have any set of rules or an agenda,
00:35:55 ►
but this needs to be talked about. What is a human being and how, therefore, once we figure that out or have a committee form an impression or something,
00:36:09 ►
once we decide what a human being is, how can we build societies which honor that?
00:36:17 ►
Right now we have a society that is completely dehumanizing.
00:36:21 ►
I mean, we are not people in the eyes of our society
00:36:26 ►
in the eyes of our society
00:36:28 ►
we are workers and customers
00:36:30 ►
that’s the only part
00:36:32 ►
that now matters
00:36:34 ►
to the over structure
00:36:35 ►
I mean yes you may go sit under a tree
00:36:38 ►
and write a poem or smell the roses
00:36:40 ►
but you are not
00:36:42 ►
contributing
00:36:43 ►
you have to argue that you’re contributing. What
00:36:49 ►
they really want you to do is, why don’t you go to work, or why don’t you relax and go
00:36:54 ►
shop? You may shop, you may work. So we are defined economically, and we find that pretty horrifying
00:37:06 ►
but wait until we are further restricted
00:37:10 ►
in the mass definitions that we reflect
00:37:13 ►
back upon ourselves
00:37:15 ►
and places
00:37:19 ►
you know, I mean Esalen is known as
00:37:22 ►
the foundation of the human potential movement.
00:37:26 ►
Well, if there were ever an enemy poised at human potential, it’s this.
00:37:32 ►
And by this, I don’t mean technology, I don’t mean computers, I don’t mean gene therapy.
00:37:38 ►
I mean our unwillingness and inability to get hold of these things
00:37:45 ►
and make them serve a human agenda.
00:37:50 ►
Every time we isolate a new physical principle or something like that,
00:37:57 ►
the least among us rush forward with the question,
00:38:02 ►
how can we construe this into a military technology?
00:38:06 ►
In other words, how can we use this to kill people we disagree with? Well, this tells
00:38:13 ►
you that we have been perverted by our technologies and that our essential humanness has been severely undermined.
00:38:26 ►
How to reclaim this?
00:38:27 ►
Well, probably beginning by talking about it.
00:38:31 ►
It’s not pleasant. It’s not pleasant.
00:38:34 ►
I mean, we tend to avert our gaze.
00:38:37 ►
We would rather be lulled into foolish and undeep visions of the future,
00:38:47 ►
visions of abundance or virtual hedonism
00:38:53 ►
or informational overload.
00:38:57 ►
But these are trivial and easily dealt with matters
00:39:02 ►
contrasted with the basic question which hovers over us at this
00:39:09 ►
point in our history which is what is it to be a human being and how much worth is there in it
00:39:21 ►
and if there is worth in it then how can we act to preserve it you know there’s a lot of
00:39:29 ►
hand-wringing and worrying about the extinction of species on this planet and yes you know the
00:39:38 ►
gray parrot the snail darter the orangutan they’re all in great danger. But I’ve got news for you.
00:39:46 ►
None of them are as endangered as humanity is.
00:39:52 ►
And it’s humanity that has its hand on the button.
00:39:56 ►
So it’s a wake-up call, I think.
00:40:00 ►
Somebody asked me in the course of my being here,
00:40:04 ►
somebody asked me in the course of my being here they said
00:40:06 ►
it’s harder for me to take psychedelics
00:40:11 ►
than it used to be
00:40:12 ►
do you think it’s because I’m getting old
00:40:15 ►
and I said no I don’t think it’s because you’re getting old
00:40:19 ►
I think it’s because the world you’re living in
00:40:23 ►
is becoming more dangerous.
00:40:26 ►
And if psychedelics mean consciousness expansion,
00:40:30 ►
you cannot take them without encountering what you might superficially define as a bad trip,
00:40:38 ►
meaning you feel bad, you have strange images of alienation,
00:40:43 ►
of tormented flesh, of machine penetration,
00:40:47 ►
of the human world, so forth and so on. This is not a bad trip. This is the last warning
00:40:54 ►
you may have before these things are set in adamantine. Who is going to pull our chestnuts
00:41:01 ►
out of the fire if it is not us? And who are we pulling these chestnuts out of the fire if it is not us? And who are we pulling these chestnuts out
00:41:08 ►
of the fire for if not for our children? And we do not want, I believe, our children to become
00:41:17 ►
unrecognizable to us. The continuity of life and being depends on there being a shared continuum,
00:41:30 ►
not only of flesh, but of hope and love and a sense of value
00:41:38 ►
projected onto nature and onto our relationships.
00:41:44 ►
onto nature and onto our relationships.
00:41:51 ►
Well, that’s the party, folks.
00:41:54 ►
I know it wasn’t much fun.
00:41:56 ►
I hope it was interesting.
00:41:58 ►
It felt useful.
00:42:03 ►
But whoever it was who was marveling over my depth of humor and command of
00:42:06 ►
comedy earlier in the evening you can now meditate on this talk
00:42:17 ►
thank you very much one more meeting and it will be Thursday night here. Well, people always come late.
00:42:27 ►
I don’t mind people coming late.
00:42:30 ►
What I really hate is the fact that I always start on time.
00:42:35 ►
There’s not much I can do about it.
00:42:39 ►
It was said of Immanuel Kant, you could set your clock by him on his morning walk,
00:42:47 ►
which is the most powerful argument against Kantian idealism I’ve ever heard.
00:42:55 ►
Who cares what this guy thought?
00:42:58 ►
He had to stick up his ass.
00:43:03 ►
Of course, it a some time ago
00:43:05 ►
oh details details i don’t know when did he live uh sometime in the early 18th century i think
00:43:20 ►
middle 18th century german idealism he was preceded Schopenhauer and came after Hegel.
00:43:28 ►
Is that right?
00:43:30 ►
In the absence of knowing whether that’s right or not,
00:43:33 ►
I offer the factoid that Rudi Rucker is Hegel’s great-grandson,
00:43:39 ►
a fact you learn from Rudi within 30 seconds of meeting him in most situations.
00:43:48 ►
What? Who is Rudy Rucker?
00:43:52 ►
If only he were here to hear you ask the question.
00:44:01 ►
Rudy Rucker is one of an expanding number of science fiction writers
00:44:05 ►
who are running harder than usual to stay in place,
00:44:09 ►
thanks to Greg Egan,
00:44:11 ►
who has raised the bar of science fiction
00:44:15 ►
higher than I thought it would rise before the close of the millennium.
00:44:20 ►
I don’t know if I’ve directly pitched Greg Egan to you.
00:44:24 ►
I’ve mentioned him several times,
00:44:26 ►
but if you only bother to read one science fiction author a year, you might give this one
00:44:33 ►
a go. All of it’s worthwhile. Permutation City is probably the most alarming and short-term enlightening.
00:44:46 ►
It’s basically set 20 or 30 years in the future
00:44:50 ►
and works out the implications of something which we’ve discussed here,
00:44:56 ►
which is the possibility that might flow from being able to upload or download,
00:45:07 ►
as the case may be, yourself into a machine as digital code.
00:45:13 ►
And basically what Permutation City is,
00:45:16 ►
is a museum of all possible plots that that might permit.
00:45:23 ►
You follow a number of people
00:45:25 ►
through a number of twists and turns.
00:45:30 ►
Well, this is the last
00:45:32 ►
of the staff-oriented
00:45:34 ►
evening get-togethers.
00:45:37 ►
I’m doing a weekend with
00:45:40 ►
Mark Pesci this weekend
00:45:43 ►
for the public.
00:45:45 ►
I’ve arranged for you to gaze upon Mark this evening.
00:45:50 ►
There he is.
00:45:52 ►
How often do you get to see
00:45:54 ►
the true dimensions of a real giant?
00:46:01 ►
Yes, and then after that’s over with,
00:46:04 ►
I will go home Monday morning.
00:46:07 ►
Sometime shortly after nine, flight UA41 will pull up off runway 29er at SFO,
00:46:17 ►
go wheels up, bank sharply left, and I’ll fly west with the sun at my back.
00:46:28 ►
and I’ll fly west with the Sun at my back so in my cannabis clouded memory I can barely reach back to the dim beginnings 13 days ago to what we
00:46:36 ►
actually went over and over went in in these meetings but I’m relying on you to correct that problem.
00:46:50 ►
Is there anything anybody has on their mind, either derivative of what has been said or
00:46:56 ►
feel free, don’t be shy, this is your last crack at me, if I’ve arranged things the way I think I
00:47:06 ►
have I woke up this morning and now and the other people it’s all my things
00:47:13 ►
exactly and how could you tell you mean a slight existential discontinuity between you and reality?
00:47:27 ►
Well, I was just reading, I can’t remember who it was, but somebody was talking,
00:47:32 ►
oh, the guy who wrote that book, Virtual Reality, I think that’s all it’s called,
00:47:38 ►
not Rheingold, whose name begins with an H, is it I’m, M?
00:47:43 ►
Michael Hine. Yes, exactly. He mentions in there that after hours and hours in these simulated worlds, when you take off the goggles, there seems to be a strange film over ordinary reality, existential distancing who knows you know maybe just the knife edge
00:48:08 ►
of paranoia because what the VR immersion establishes for you is things
00:48:16 ►
are definitely not what they appear I don’t know why this is such a hard point to drive home.
00:48:33 ►
You don’t have to be Immanuel Kant to figure out that nothing is what it appears to be.
00:48:42 ►
One of the strange things about modern dialogue, about the crack-up of consensus culture,
00:48:48 ►
is we all know nothing is what it appears to be, and yet the most extraordinary claims and tales are granted a veracity that we don’t even extend
00:48:57 ►
to what we’re hearing across the breakfast table. And by that I mean alien abductions,
00:49:11 ►
table and by that I mean alien abductions melting ice caps planetesimal bodies hurtling toward earth the we live in a level of of rumor anticipation projection, paranoia, that not only makes bedrock hard to find, it seems to cast
00:49:29 ►
doubt on the very concept itself. Everything seems mutable. To me, this means we’re living in a kind
00:49:38 ►
of alchemical universe, where the momentum of positivist matter has been replaced by magical stuff,
00:49:50 ►
which is part mind, part matter, part physics, part dream. And we make of this what we will.
00:50:02 ►
I had an extremely minor epiphany this morning, more like a speed bump than an epiphany,
00:50:10 ►
but I was realizing, you know, one of the things that I bitch about in these meetings is this,
00:50:17 ►
what I called the balkanization of epistemology, meaning the breakdown of consensus reality.
00:50:27 ►
Everybody believes whatever they want to believe.
00:50:30 ►
In thinking about this this morning,
00:50:34 ►
I sort of glimpsed a different take on it,
00:50:38 ►
which is, you know, I, as well as many other people,
00:50:43 ►
have talked about how the only way out of the historical dilemma is back into some kind of atavistic tribal arrangement of society.
00:50:57 ►
I’ve called it the archaic revival, McLuhan called it the global village, electronic feudalism, so forth and so on.
00:51:05 ►
It’s been called many different things.
00:51:08 ►
But I realized in thinking about it this morning,
00:51:11 ►
this process which I have preached, anticipated, delineated,
00:51:18 ►
is the explanation for my own discomfort
00:51:22 ►
with the impossibility of achieving consensus. What’s happening is
00:51:29 ►
everything is tribalizing, meaning fragmenting, and there is no overarching overarching metaphor of unitary truth.
00:51:45 ►
Truth is basically now conferred by numerical consensus.
00:51:54 ►
You know, I remember the weekend that the Heaven’s Gate people made their exit.
00:52:02 ►
It was Easter weekend.
00:52:08 ►
And topic A in Christian America was how could people believe something so absurd?
00:52:12 ►
And people asked themselves this question
00:52:15 ►
as they dressed for midnight mass
00:52:18 ►
and prepared for Easter egg hunts.
00:52:22 ►
So I think, you know,
00:52:22 ►
for Easter egg hunts.
00:52:24 ►
So I think, you know,
00:52:30 ►
what is absurd and what is creditable seems to have become a matter of democratic consensus,
00:52:36 ►
which is a very strange way to do intellectual business
00:52:39 ►
if you’re out of an empirical tradition.
00:52:43 ►
if you’re out of an empirical tradition.
00:52:50 ►
However, it may be how business is done in the future.
00:52:53 ►
I think this thing that I’m lamenting actually brands me as somewhat retro.
00:53:01 ►
I think what I’m lamenting is the disappearance of the vanishing point.
00:53:08 ►
You know, the discovery of perspective in the Renaissance
00:53:11 ►
created over what had previously been a jumble of what I guess you would call psychologically weighted space, was replaced with this idea of all points of view becoming tangential
00:53:31 ►
at a single point of view, which was the vanishing point.
00:53:36 ►
For us, it’s hard to talk about this
00:53:38 ►
because we have integrated this into our worldview so thoroughly
00:53:45 ►
that we now believe it to actually be part of reality.
00:53:49 ►
It’s very hard for us to imagine how the discovery of perspective
00:53:55 ►
could have been a breakthrough,
00:53:58 ►
since it seems to us given by our perceptual apparatus.
00:54:04 ►
given by our perceptual apparatus.
00:54:10 ►
McLuhan wrote an essay or one of his minor books called Through the Vanishing Point.
00:54:14 ►
And the point that he was making there
00:54:17 ►
was that the new electronic media,
00:54:21 ►
and for McLuhan that didn’t even mean virtual reality or the
00:54:25 ►
Internet and for him it meant television movies radio the electric light so forth
00:54:32 ►
and so on but that all these forms of media propelled us through the vanishing
00:54:37 ►
point and into this electronically tribalized world of relativistic values
00:54:46 ►
where those who shout the loudest garner the largest headlines
00:54:50 ►
and people believe whatever they want
00:54:54 ►
and experience a state of high dudgeon
00:54:57 ►
if you suggest that this is not a reasonable way to build a worldview.
00:55:09 ►
But so, nevertheless, this is where we’re going and this is where we are actually we are in this place the future has
00:55:16 ►
arrived the question is have you arrived have you arrived have you arrived have i arrived the future is here in the sense of
00:55:28 ►
a mysterious dimension of infinite depth that as it is learned it changes
00:55:38 ►
the person who is doing the learning for example i, I could spend all my time, every waking minute
00:55:47 ►
of my time, doing nothing but learning software and implementing various tools. I don’t do
00:55:56 ►
that. Nobody does that. But to the degree that I am incompetent in a world where tools that would confer competency exist, my inadequacy is
00:56:10 ►
self-chosen. And I talk about all these things with more passion here than in most places, places because at times I’ve seen Esalen as somewhat retro in that it had a
00:56:29 ►
resistance to technology and at other times I’ve seen it as a kind of island
00:56:37 ►
of sanity and all of that because what it has throughout its history, and I’m now talking about Esalen,
00:56:45 ►
attempted to celebrate and make cogent is the body.
00:56:52 ►
I mean, if there is no longer a vanishing point
00:56:58 ►
that finds its nexus in the abstract idea of the coordinating I,
00:57:04 ►
there is still, though for how much longer
00:57:08 ►
who can say, a kind of nexus of coordination in the body.
00:57:13 ►
And Whitehead made this point presciently clear back in the 30s in Process and Reality.
00:57:23 ►
process and reality is this the answer to a question
00:57:29 ►
or am I now giving the evening lecture
00:57:32 ►
nodding yes
00:57:35 ►
doesn’t tell me which
00:57:37 ►
this is the lecture
00:57:39 ►
I’d rather answer a question
00:57:41 ►
is there one
00:57:42 ►
or an observation
00:57:44 ►
I mean how do you people
00:57:45 ►
relate to this you are Californians which means you have more feet in the
00:57:52 ►
technical domain than most people but you are except for those of you who
00:57:58 ►
snuck in under some special dictum or decree, a staff here.
00:58:06 ►
And so, you know, how do you, do you feel these contradictions as poignantly as I do?
00:58:13 ►
Or are you so one or the other that you don’t even feel yourself on the horns of a dilemma?
00:58:22 ►
I, well, you want to take a crack at that
00:58:32 ►
well how poignantly do people feel the dilemma between the obvious
00:58:40 ►
decorporealization of the body through electronic culture and the effort on the part of the many
00:58:49 ►
schools of of human potential psychology that have grown up here to make the body the
00:58:56 ►
the bottom line and the final arbiter of value that’s what i’m asking i don’t see any reason not value to use the right facilities at office but i still make my business involved with bodies
00:59:29 ►
and at the interface between technology and body there is something called the mind
00:59:37 ►
which has been modeled variously throughout history and with greater
00:59:47 ►
throughout history and with greater intensity and variety in the 20th century,
00:59:54 ►
do you image yourself clearly and unambiguously when you think of yourself as a mind?
01:00:02 ►
And do you coextensively map the idea of mind to the idea of conscious ego,
01:00:04 ►
or is it more complicated than that well in other words we know freud had a
01:00:08 ►
notion of how the personality was constructed jung brought another vocabulary to bear are these
01:00:15 ►
meaningful vocabularies is there still a place for the id the superego the collective unconscious
01:00:21 ►
the collective unconscious,
01:00:26 ►
Reiki and notions of body armoring.
01:00:31 ►
We know that gender definition is flying apart.
01:00:34 ►
We know that multiple personality, maybe, maybe not disorder, is on the rise.
01:00:38 ►
How do all these symptoms
01:00:41 ►
of a shifting set of body-mind definitions parsed with your own feeling
01:00:49 ►
about who you are and what you’re doing or does am I the only one who walks
01:00:54 ►
around scratching my head about this all the time it may be my extreme alienation, yeah. What I find interesting is where our…
01:01:07 ►
What was once our mind having incorporated
01:01:11 ►
in what I experience is now extended
01:01:14 ►
to, like, my boundaries have become much greater.
01:01:18 ►
So part of me, because it’s my memory,
01:01:22 ►
even the notepad that I have,
01:01:24 ►
that I find interesting and contrasting.
01:01:27 ►
You mean that part of what was conventionally held in biology, although we don’t want to
01:01:35 ►
get into a discussion of where memories really are, but let’s assume conventionally they
01:01:39 ►
were part of the body-mind system, they now, there’s a technological cheat in the loop, and it binds time, and
01:01:49 ►
the effect of binding time is to dissolve boundaries. And are you comfortable with that?
01:01:57 ►
Right. I think it’s not much articulated here probably because
01:02:05 ►
this is
01:02:06 ►
on a Greek metaphor
01:02:10 ►
this is a kind of Sparta
01:02:13 ►
we’re forever exercising in the nude
01:02:17 ►
and putting mud on ourselves
01:02:19 ►
and glorifying the body
01:02:21 ►
but I suppose we could then say
01:02:25 ►
Cupertino is a horrifyingly distorted version of Athens,
01:02:31 ►
where, you know, Platonists hold sway
01:02:34 ►
in moving effortlessly in mental castles
01:02:39 ►
of their own construction.
01:02:42 ►
The Greek solution to this dilemma was constant
01:02:46 ►
warfare and political struggle
01:02:48 ►
between these two
01:02:49 ►
points of view.
01:02:52 ►
I’m not suggesting that we
01:02:54 ►
polish up our broadswords
01:02:56 ►
and march on Los Gatos
01:02:58 ►
with blood in our eye.
01:03:02 ►
In fact, I don’t
01:03:04 ►
advocate anything at all
01:03:05 ►
I just feel more and more intensely
01:03:10 ►
the poles of the dilemma
01:03:16 ►
and as I talk to people I realize
01:03:18 ►
this is more and more people’s dilemma
01:03:22 ►
they couch it in different terms
01:03:24 ►
they deal with it on different levels of sophistication.
01:03:29 ►
People who can talk for an hour
01:03:34 ►
with serious Luddite arguments against high technology
01:03:39 ►
when closely questioned
01:03:41 ►
turn out to have failed touch typing.
01:03:46 ►
And that’s the real foundation of their technophobia,
01:03:51 ►
not all these high-flown excuses which are being pushed.
01:03:57 ►
On the other hand, people who glorify the physical,
01:04:06 ►
who glorify the physical if they are professional in the sense of athletes or teachers or doctors of great reputation
01:04:15 ►
find themselves more and more dependent on technical prosthesis
01:04:20 ►
to convey their message.
01:04:23 ►
I mean, we are the most sport-loving society perhaps ever in history,
01:04:29 ►
certainly in hundreds and hundreds of years, but for most of us what that means is we watch
01:04:35 ►
televised sporting events. We watch Wimbledon. We watch the Olympics. We watch the Grand Prix.
01:04:52 ►
the Olympics, we watch the Grand Prix. Vicarious physicality, if you indulge in it, gives you very little philosophical room to rail against virtual reality.
01:04:59 ►
Six to eight hours, four days a week, besides in people.
01:05:07 ►
Six to twelve hours a week, yoga, eating and dancing people. And then I go home to a computer. And sometimes I don’t want to wrap my brain
01:05:17 ►
around a computer after that. You know, I’ve been in a certain vibe all day. And to do what it takes to get into the computer
01:05:28 ►
is not something I want to do.
01:05:30 ►
And in other times, I’m perfectly willing to sit down
01:05:33 ►
and spend several hours.
01:05:37 ►
So I wouldn’t want to have all of either.
01:05:40 ►
That’s what I’ve discovered.
01:05:41 ►
What do you think makes the difference in your attitude?
01:05:41 ►
is what I discovered.
01:05:44 ►
What do you think makes the difference in your attitude?
01:05:50 ►
Well, sometimes just the amount of physicality.
01:05:53 ►
You know, I have, for eight to ten hours,
01:05:55 ►
really been being physical.
01:05:59 ►
I don’t want to go do anything else. I wouldn’t want to do more physical work either.
01:06:02 ►
Drugs are good.
01:06:01 ►
to do more physical work, even.
01:06:03 ►
Drugs are good.
01:06:12 ►
I mean, to the point of the six-pack of beer,
01:06:15 ►
we’re talking, you know, whatever your drugs are,
01:06:17 ►
whatever floats your boat.
01:06:23 ►
Yeah, well, I live, I’m not a masseuse, I don’t do that,
01:06:25 ►
but I do live in a place startlingly remote and wild
01:06:31 ►
that is 15 seconds walk from my one megabyte connection.
01:06:37 ►
So I can be surfing the internet and within 30 seconds walk away from it
01:06:43 ►
and be in a in a Hawaiian
01:06:46 ►
rainforest I find that extremely liberating and and but I can imagine you
01:06:57 ►
know I have neighbors who think I’m crazy for one half of the equation or the other.
01:07:06 ►
They may differ.
01:07:15 ►
Am I living paradox or am I melding contradiction into a coincidencia positorum,
01:07:19 ►
a now chemical union of opposites?
01:07:21 ►
That’s what I would like to believe.
01:07:23 ►
Mark and I were talking today about
01:07:26 ►
the weird fact that a given era articulates a given ideal. For instance, the Renaissance
01:07:34 ►
magical hermeticists articulated a magical ideal that couldn’t possibly be realized until their epistemological naivete was swept away by modern science,
01:07:49 ►
then modern science could create longevity, vision at a distance, near telepathy, prosthesis, extension of memory, so forth and so on.
01:08:06 ►
But in the act of creating it,
01:08:09 ►
it undercut the spiritual impulse for it.
01:08:13 ►
All these things once achieved
01:08:15 ►
from the spiritual point of view
01:08:17 ►
had a kind of ersatz quality.
01:08:19 ►
They’re not quite real.
01:08:23 ►
And some of you may have experienced, as I have,
01:08:26 ►
you’ll read a description of some marvelous material
01:08:31 ►
that confounds reality, like aerogels or something,
01:08:37 ►
slightly denser than smoke, nearly weightless,
01:08:42 ►
can be milled like metal, so forth and so on.
01:08:45 ►
Sounds fascinating.
01:08:47 ►
Well, then when somebody hands you a cubic foot of aerogel,
01:08:52 ►
within 30 seconds you have completely assimilated what it is as an object in the world,
01:08:58 ►
and you see, oh yes, it is everything I was told it is,
01:09:02 ►
and yet somehow the thing which excited me about imagining its
01:09:09 ►
existence has now been stripped from it by the act of confronting it. Most things are like that.
01:09:17 ►
I guess what I’m saying there is, you know, who was it who said, we don’t sell bacon, we sell the sizzle?
01:09:32 ►
But bacon is sustenance, sizzle is flash.
01:09:41 ►
The only thing I found, well, no, two things seem to exceed this equation.
01:09:47 ►
One is sex, and I hope I don’t have to preach the merits of that to you, and the other is psychedelic drugs. And these two things seem weirder than advertised, more interesting than
01:09:57 ►
advertised, and God knows both are being constantly advertised at high volume all the time in very flashy terms and yet
01:10:06 ►
each exceeds the marketers ability to interest you in them that that’s
01:10:14 ►
interesting death may be the third one but I did death the other night I think
01:10:20 ►
we’ll one of those is enough well how do any of the rest of
01:10:27 ►
you feel about all of this do you come here to this evening to be with people
01:10:35 ►
who think like you do or do you come to see how weird the tech heads are as they parade their strange conceptions before you.
01:10:49 ►
I don’t know, because I don’t grill you
01:10:52 ►
on where you come from this organization.
01:10:57 ►
Well, yeah, I think that’s how most people operate with it.
01:11:02 ►
Most people have almost, you know, Ward Cleaver type
01:11:09 ►
values and worlds that they move in very comfortably. Cyberspace, gene therapy,
01:11:18 ►
virtual reality, nanotechnology, interstellar travel, life extension. These things enliven the experience of reading the newspaper,
01:11:28 ►
but they don’t come tangential to most people’s lives.
01:11:34 ►
On the other hand, some people,
01:11:37 ►
the technical community that’s creating these things,
01:11:40 ►
the cadres of media people who must understand and re-explain this stuff back
01:11:47 ►
to the general public, they breathe and eat this stuff. And some people, like myself I guess are ambivalent go-betweens between it what’s you know human beings have always existed
01:12:12 ►
sociologically and aesthetically and conventionally over a much broader spectrum of behaviors and attitudes than any other species we’re familiar with but that
01:12:29 ►
difference has undergone like a hyperinflationary explosion in the last 15 years
01:12:39 ►
largely because well no there are so many reasons, you know, gender redefinition, the rise of
01:12:47 ►
the internet, the emergence of the super rich, the emergence of the super poor, the emergence
01:12:54 ►
of the totally wired, the emergence of the of propaganda, which makes all honest efforts
01:13:09 ►
to establish a level playing field of discourse, easily subverted. I mean, every time you think
01:13:17 ►
you’re having an honest discussion or making an honest appraisal of a situation, if you pull back one level,
01:13:26 ►
you discover you’re embedded in other people’s agendas
01:13:31 ►
and other people’s and institutions’ styles of manipulating reality.
01:13:39 ►
I mentioned to you Eric Davis’s book.
01:13:43 ►
It hasn’t come out yet, Technosis.
01:13:46 ►
When it does come out, I urge you to read it for all kinds of reasons.
01:13:53 ►
The one I would mention here is that it showed me that everyone, including myself,
01:14:02 ►
and that was the big shock for me, is a creature of their time, and that it’s very hard not to serve invisible agendas, where, you know, you don’t realize that you think the way you think for reasons entirely divorced from who you are, where you are,
01:14:26 ►
and what’s good for you. For example, you know, in the Middle Ages, Christian piety permeated
01:14:34 ►
every level of society and every act and every thought, even of the critics of Christian piety. It wasn’t that there were people who stood apart from it.
01:14:46 ►
If you defined yourself by attacking it, you nevertheless were defined by it. I think I
01:14:54 ►
mentioned recently or somewhere, sometime, that back when I was a student at Berkeley. Once, during a riot, people dropped a banner off a third-floor dorm balcony
01:15:10 ►
that said, it was a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre,
01:15:15 ►
we cannot transcend Marxism until we transcend the conditions that have created it.
01:15:22 ►
that have created it.
01:15:30 ►
And in a way, we cannot transcend the social, political, and philosophical reality that we are now very uncomfortably situated in
01:15:36 ►
until we transcend the conditions that create it.
01:15:40 ►
But we are those conditions.
01:15:42 ►
The momentum of our ideologies is the main thing
01:15:47 ►
holding together the illusion of any coherency at all.
01:15:52 ►
I mean, the people who are really with it
01:15:56 ►
are really difficult to understand,
01:16:00 ►
and their effort to communicate
01:16:04 ►
is maddeningly unsuccessful, I think, for them and for us. the generation of unstated professional assumptions,
01:16:27 ►
the we-all-know kind of sense of reality
01:16:33 ►
out of which then statements can be made,
01:16:36 ►
tends to island discourse.
01:16:41 ►
And yet if discourse is islanded,
01:16:44 ►
if community becomes nearly impossible. Well,
01:16:50 ►
is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know. It seems to me, you know, the conclusions
01:16:58 ►
that we’ve drawn from these meetings that we’ve had,
01:17:05 ►
which themselves have been plagued
01:17:07 ►
by this kind of fragmentation and dissipation.
01:17:11 ►
I mean, people have Feldenkrais things to do,
01:17:13 ►
they have processing to do,
01:17:16 ►
they have to meet their connection,
01:17:18 ►
they have something else to do
01:17:20 ►
that busts up their loyalty
01:17:23 ►
to even the idea of six consecutive meetings on the subject of chaos.
01:17:32 ►
You’re living it.
01:17:33 ►
Yes, no, we’re living it, but the important thing is to realize that you’re living it
01:17:39 ►
and that that’s what it is.
01:17:47 ►
what it is you know what I might what I come away from all this with is that looking at the future much of which is already in place I mean don’t imagine
01:17:54 ►
that you know the world will look greatly different in five or ten years
01:18:02 ►
it may look slightly different this world we’re living in,
01:18:06 ►
the world of 1998, to the camera’s eye is indistinguishable from the world of 1990.
01:18:15 ►
And yet, you know, the most elaborate and sophisticated technical artifact in the history of mankind has been put in place in those
01:18:26 ►
eight years the rise of the Internet but you know who runs into it who stumbles
01:18:33 ►
over it who sees it it’s odorless tasteless invisible we all had computers
01:18:40 ►
in 1990 it’s simply that they were large paperweights.
01:18:48 ►
Now they have become telepathic creatures.
01:18:53 ►
And while we natter over the implications of all of this,
01:18:58 ►
they freely converse with each other in a planetary-wide environment and evolve themselves, whatever destiny lies in wait for the machine logos that we
01:19:09 ►
have pulled into existence.
01:19:12 ►
So, this future which is already here has implications that few of us have fully grokked,
01:19:22 ►
I think.
01:19:23 ►
And I listed three of them just as a crib to help
01:19:28 ►
me through this. First of all, that there is no closure. All ideology is now exposed
01:19:37 ►
as an adolescent response to being. You know, if the 20th century taught us
01:19:46 ►
anything, it taught us the toxic
01:19:48 ►
nature of ideology.
01:19:50 ►
The excesses of the left
01:19:52 ►
led to the Holocaust.
01:19:55 ►
The excesses
01:19:56 ►
of the right led to
01:19:58 ►
the
01:20:00 ►
pogroms and mass trials
01:20:02 ►
of Stalinist Russia,
01:20:04 ►
the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China,
01:20:07 ►
the suppression of dissent in many parts of the world.
01:20:18 ►
So there is a need to abandon ideology,
01:20:23 ►
which is really a postmodern position,
01:20:27 ►
and it’s very uncomfortable.
01:20:30 ►
The absence of closure
01:20:32 ►
is a post-juvenile stance
01:20:36 ►
toward being that few people in the past
01:20:40 ►
ever lived long enough
01:20:42 ►
to grow comfortable with.
01:20:46 ►
You know, if you died at age 40, culture as a con game lasts long enough to keep you entranced
01:20:54 ►
up until sometime in midlife.
01:20:58 ►
If you live beyond midlife and you still are fascinated and entranced by culture chances are you’re
01:21:06 ►
an idiot I mean is this not obvious you know I mean after this this is why I
01:21:21 ►
mean marketing has shrewdly understood this this is why we
01:21:26 ►
are folded back toward the idolization of youth because it’s an idolization of
01:21:32 ►
cluelessness you know it’s not the firm body and the quick step that the
01:21:38 ►
marketers are interested to sell you it It’s innocence. But innocents are people you love to play poker
01:21:48 ►
with if you are sufficiently cynical. And believe me, the market forces are sufficiently
01:21:55 ►
cynical. So assimilating to the future means living with no ideology whatsoever.
01:22:06 ►
And people say, well, can one live without ideologies?
01:22:11 ►
Isn’t the belief we should strive for peace and justice and ideology?
01:22:19 ►
I don’t think so.
01:22:20 ►
I think these are provisional models of behaviors
01:22:24 ►
that derive from immediate practical concerns
01:22:28 ►
that can be revised in real time,
01:22:32 ►
constantly held up to the incoming flow of data and adjusted.
01:22:37 ►
That’s why the concept model is so much…
01:22:41 ►
If Lenin had said he had a model,
01:22:44 ►
if Hitler had said he had a model, if Hitler had said he had a model,
01:22:47 ►
I think it would have played out with a little more soft conclusions
01:22:51 ►
than to say, you know, a new truth is proclaimed
01:22:55 ►
and the behaviors which derive from it are incontrovertible.
01:23:04 ►
So no ideological closure.
01:23:09 ►
And I don’t know how you feel about this.
01:23:11 ►
I’m very comfortable with it.
01:23:14 ►
I was passionate about ideology in my youth.
01:23:19 ►
I’ve had most of them.
01:23:22 ►
You know, at 11 11 I was reading Mein Kampf and Festung Europa
01:23:28 ►
sound like a very good idea I loved all that pseudo Egyptian overscale tasteless
01:23:37 ►
architecture and all that stuff folk dancing and summer camping sounded attractive at 17 I was a Marxist
01:23:49 ►
you know ready to go to the barricades for the workers state at 22 we marched
01:23:56 ►
under the black flag of anarchy used to bust up meetings of Trotskyites and
01:24:03 ►
write graffiti on their front doors
01:24:05 ►
and make life hell for those people.
01:24:08 ►
Now I don’t give a shit, and I feel much better about it.
01:24:14 ►
Thank you.
01:24:15 ►
I mean, I think we should strive for a sane and caring world
01:24:21 ►
that gives as many people as much choice to express themselves as possible.
01:24:27 ►
Beyond that, I don’t feel any kind of an imperative. Going along with this idea of living without
01:24:36 ►
ideology is the idea that there is no longer any consensus reality.
01:24:46 ►
And this one is maybe more important to me than to you,
01:24:50 ►
because as an intellectual with an agenda, an idea, a revelation,
01:24:58 ►
at times in my career it seemed to me that what I was supposed to do
01:25:03 ►
was convert everyone to my viewpoint.
01:25:07 ►
Of course, this is preposterous.
01:25:09 ►
Very few people are able to do that.
01:25:12 ►
No one is ever able to entirely succeed with that.
01:25:16 ►
Now I see that we all live in our own private Idaho,
01:25:21 ►
and all you can really do is ride the range
01:25:26 ►
and mend the fences,
01:25:27 ►
but you’re not going to push the ranch out to both coastlines.
01:25:35 ►
So, and then how to view other people’s realities.
01:25:41 ►
Well, I view it as private property,
01:25:44 ►
not to be violated by me. I’m a trespasser.
01:25:48 ►
If I go and sit with those who are visited by pro bono proctologists from nearby star systems,
01:25:57 ►
I feel I’m violating, I’m trespassing on someone else’s turf.
01:26:12 ►
When I’m in the presence of people who insist on soy protein with every meal,
01:26:16 ►
I feel, you know, I’m trespassing on someone else’s turf.
01:26:18 ►
I’m an invited guest. I behave myself, and then I go home and scratch my head about the neighbors and what they’re into.
01:26:31 ►
You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a
01:26:37 ►
time. And my guess is that Terrence is right on the money there where he says that ultimately we are all living in our own private Idaho.
01:26:49 ►
I know that it isn’t all that popular to talk and think about the fact that even though we may be living among people that we love,
01:26:57 ►
well, when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep,
01:27:01 ►
there is really no question about the fact that ultimately you are all alone
01:27:05 ►
in this world. Now that doesn’t mean that it’s not important to have and to be with friends.
01:27:10 ►
It just means that the sooner you realize that you need to be your own best friend, well then
01:27:16 ►
the smoother your emotional life is going to be. I know that this isn’t exactly coming out the way
01:27:22 ►
I mean it to, but I hope that you catch my drift.
01:27:26 ►
So, what do you think about Terence’s position on ideologies?
01:27:31 ►
Personally, I agree with him.
01:27:33 ►
The one that I was most steeped in as a child was Christianity.
01:27:37 ►
But when I learned that the troubles in Ireland, while actually political in nature,
01:27:41 ►
were fueled by the conflict between two branches of Christianity,
01:27:46 ►
Protestantism and Catholicism, well, I began to question the tall tales that were being forced
01:27:53 ►
into my young mind at the time. The basic spiritual beliefs of these two Christian denominations were
01:27:59 ►
much the same. Nonetheless, they’ve been warring over the details for centuries.
01:28:06 ►
same. Nonetheless, they’ve been warring over the details for centuries. And while I know very little about it, from what I’ve read, the split between the two major sects of Islam seems to me to be of
01:28:13 ►
a similar nature. So I finally came to the conclusion that I don’t want anything to do with
01:28:19 ►
the ideologies of any of the human religions. And by the way, did you know that there are over 4,000
01:28:26 ►
different religions yet today? And that’s not even counting the Universal Worldwide Church of Cash,
01:28:33 ►
which seems to have a grip on many minds right now. So how do we live without ideology?
01:28:40 ►
Well, I’ve found my own way, and my guess is that, well, you’re going to have to do the same for yourself.
01:28:46 ►
Because if I were to outline my way of living, living without any formal ideology,
01:28:52 ►
well, it seems to me that I would then be creating yet another one for people to follow.
01:28:57 ►
On the wall here in my office is a drawing that my gran did in her third grade art appreciation class.
01:29:04 ►
is a drawing that my gran did in her third grade art appreciation class.
01:29:10 ►
They were studying Picasso, and, well, her interpretation of his style I found to be worth framing.
01:29:14 ►
Of course, us grandparents think that all of our grandchildren’s art should be framed.
01:29:17 ►
But this one of hers is particularly well done.
01:29:20 ►
And at the bottom of her drawing she wrote,
01:29:22 ►
Go your own way.
01:29:26 ►
I sure hope that she remembers that as her life progresses,
01:29:31 ►
and I hope that she can pass that good advice on to her own descendants one day.
01:29:54 ►
But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.