Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: March 10, 1996
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna
“This synesthesia thing seems to be the direction in which language has to go in order to be universal. It has to be beheld, acoustical signals don’t do it.”
“No matter how abstract the meaning may be it ultimately is a feeling of recognition.”
“If you can somehow realize that the purpose of your existence is to figure it out, and then figure it out, you will be in some sense liberated from it.”
“The reason we are so controlled and abused and misused by our institutions is because we are divided from each other.”
“You cannot be a public figure and a practicing alchemist.”
“So if I disappear off the grid until 2005, I’ll be back for the last act, I’m sure, unless, of course fate drops the cosmic safe on my head. There’s always that.”
“Our real glory is our imagination, and we seem to be the creature with this relationship to the imagination. It is an attractor for us into the future.”
“Virtual reality is a place where the creativity, the staggering creativity, of psychedelics can actually find a home.”
“What is the designing of a drug but the building of a nano-machine?”
“Belief is toxic, all belief. Don’t believe in anything. Live in the presence of the felt fact of immediate experience, everything beyond that is conjecture.”
“In contemporary society we’re always in the past and in the future, but what is real are feelings. And feelings attain a nexus only in the moment, only in the moment. So explore the edges, keep your logical razors sharp, trust nothing that you haven’t verified for yourself. My faith is that the universe will take you in and share with you its meaning, and its intent, and its conclusion.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
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Salon.
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And I would like to begin today’s podcast by thanking those wonderful souls
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who have become the supporters of my writing projects over at Patreon.com.
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As they already know, yesterday was the 50th anniversary of my Back to the World Day,
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which is the day that I returned home after our ship’s deployment to Vietnam.
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which is the day that I returned home after our ship’s deployment to Vietnam.
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So I picked yesterday as the day for me to release my new book into the public domain.
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I’ll be talking more about this in future podcasts, but if you want a free copy of it in PDF format,
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just go to lorenzohaggerty.com slash freebooks, all one word, F-R-E-E-B-O-O-K-S.
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And that’s Haggerty with one G, by the way.
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Anyhow, there you’ll find a link to download your copy of Volume 1 of The Chronicles of Lorenzo.
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Eventually I’ll make the Kindle version available for you there, too.
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Now, for our program today, I’ve digitized another Terrence McKenna tape that found its way to me. It was recorded on a Sunday morning at the Esalen Institute in California. And as we listen
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to this talk, I think it’s important to keep in mind that it took place
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in March of 1996, which meant that the year
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2012 was a long way off. And so Terrence was still
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hanging on to his time wave hypothesis,
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as were many of his fans who were sure that something big was going to take place during
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the winter solstice of 2012. Since we now have the advantage of hindsight, his talk about what
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was yet to come may seem a bit naive, but back then there were a lot of serious and intelligent
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people who were anticipating some
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kind of end of the world event about to take place. Maybe something earth-shaking actually
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did take place back then and we all missed it, but just between you and me, I seriously doubt it.
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And this is a good lesson for anyone who is prophesying the end of the world.
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If that’s your hot button, then be sure
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to make your projection for an end date that occurs long after you’re going to be dead and gone.
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Now at the end of this talk, you’ll hear Terence waxing eloquent about the potential of the
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internet and virtual reality. And young people today may chuckle at how simple-minded it all
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sounds when compared to what is today’s digital reality.
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But please keep in mind that this talk was given only a few years after the rollout of the web.
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In fact, if you were using a PC back then, you’d still be running Windows 95,
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because that was the most recent version of that big virus that Microsoft was peddling at the time.
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Can you guess that I’m a
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Linux guy? Well, that’s enough of my side comments for now. So let’s join Terence and a few of his
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friends for the wrap-up of his Scholar-in-Residence gig at Esalen during March of 1996.
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we’re turning final here as old bush pilots say which means the final approach before landing so this is basically a loose thread time and summation time and
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opportunity hopefully for some feedback from you what’s
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outstanding
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the self transforming machine
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have you asked them to take you to your leader
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and what has been the response
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self transforming machine now as I noticed on the internet
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it has been abbreviated now to the
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acronym stems and so on the vpl list there are reports as three stems approached from the left take me to your leader no i did have one dmt trip way back like maybe the second or third or fourth
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way back where it was completely different it’s the only one i’ve ever had like that and it was
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completely different and the way i put it to myself was the big people were home.
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And it was an entirely different feeling.
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And many people actually, I’ve never quite had this myself,
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but many people report DMT trips where they break in on an entity
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who is not pleased at all
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and demands to know how the hell you got there.
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And it’s this, you know, who are you?
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And, you know, then various sorts of dialogues go on,
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and one person described being then just hurled through all of time,
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like exploded back from this thing,
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and going through all the recapitulation of ontogeny.
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It’s weird stuff.
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DMT trips, I mean, mine are always as I described,
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but some people report,
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and these may be synergies with antidepressants
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or something like that,
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but apparently very stable and strange worlds.
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I mean, worlds with alien peoples and animals and cities
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and very science fiction-y stuff.
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That’s why this Bell’s theorem, I don’t think we use that word
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but this non-locality that we talked about
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may have something to do with the phenomenon of the imagination
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like it’s occurred to me over the years
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that what we call imagination
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might simply be hyper-dimensional perception
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and you’re actually seeing
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worlds and places
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that truly exist
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somewhere scattered
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through the galaxies
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like grains of sand
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but no place you will ever
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contact or visit
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in the flesh
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but that the data is somehow
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present
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there seems to be some kind of tuning thing
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that needs to go on. Possibly with technology. I had a really weird experience years ago.
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I took LSD one evening with a bunch of people and it was fairly casual and social and smoked
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a bunch of weed and this went on for a couple of hours and it didn’t really ever seem to
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come on and it just seemed to be very light. And then I climbed on my motorcycle and went
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home and decided I would go to bed and I decided that I would smoke one last joint before going to bed.
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And I had one of those stand-up electrical resistance heaters that you get at the Salvation Army, you know, if you’re a poor student. So I turned it on as I started to smoke this joint, and it was badly wired, and it made this sound like…
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lizardland. And I entered into this completely coherent thing which lasted for hours about this world inhabited by these intelligent reptilian beings. And we went through their art, their
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history, their theories of jewelry making, their philosophy, their polity, their science, their religion, their fashion, and
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it was like endless, endless stuff about this very specific reptilian world.
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Well, then later I tried again.
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I took LSD with my arm around my heater and had by then been preaching it in the streets.
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But this was the, and I could never really find my way back,
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you know, which is a typical phenomenon
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of higher dimensional phase space.
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Ralph taught me, you know, doing the reverse
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of what you did doesn’t steer you back to where you started.
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You have to find your way forward through the matrix.
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Other things, comments.
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This is your last crack at me.
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You have to get your money’s worth.
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You talked about making language-like noises on a DMT chip
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and creating things with noises.
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Does it seem like the things you’re creating are like the things that they’re creating
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or that there’s any sort of communication going on?
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Do they understand the kind of stuff that you’re creating?
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Well, it’s a complicated question.
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Well, it’s a complicated question.
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First of all, clearly what’s going on in the DMT is some kind of synesthesia where ordinary speech or speech or sound is perceived visually.
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It seems to suggest, and Robert Graves wrote about this
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in an amazing book
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which if you want a mind-bending read
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read The White Goddess by Robert Graves
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I mean this is truly a puzzling book
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and after you’ve read it
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give me a call and tell me what it’s all about
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but one of the things it’s all about
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is he suggests that part of our
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existential distancing from reality is that at some time in the past there was a kind
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of urschbach, a kind of primal poetic language that you didn’t learn from your culture, but that all human beings did this.
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It was an ingrained behavior.
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It was a deeper level of language.
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And, of course, in the Bible you get this curious story
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of the confusion of tongues that takes place.
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And it certainly has held human progress down,
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that we have thousands of languages
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that are very tortuous to translate between.
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Imagine the kind of culture we would have built by now
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if we could effortlessly communicate with everybody anywhere
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and they with us.
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Well, so this synesthesia thing seems to be the direction in which language has
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to go in order to be universal. It has to be beheld. Acoustical signals don’t do it.
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One of the things that’s made ayahuasca so interesting to me is when you go down there and really get off river and up with the more bare-ass people,
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how they use ayahuasca is they entertain each other with it by singing these magical songs.
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But when you listen to them talk about these songs they speak of them as pictorial and sculptural objects
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like if somebody sings a song and then it’s time for comment
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people say things like
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I liked the part with the silver and yellow stippling
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but I thought the Alev Drab section with the mauve punctuation was a bit over the top.
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You say, you know, this is a criticism of a song?
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What kind of song could that possibly be?
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Well, it turns out the sound is the carrier wave,
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but the song is to be looked at.
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But the song is to be looked at.
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And the sense of one person producing a reality,
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which everybody else is then immersed in and seeing.
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And you can experiment with ayahuasca, and it’s very precise.
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It’s very precise.
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I mean, you just go,
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and a turquoise line three inches wide descends from the top of your vision field to the bottom,
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and then you slightly vary the tone,
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and it gets a magenta edge on both sides.
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And you begin to pump it and experiment,
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and it’s like, wow, what is this?
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And extremely satisfying.
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Now, the question of meaning is a strange one.
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It’s almost as though you know all,
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some people believe all translation is lie.
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In other words, that when you take Proust
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out of his French and put him into English,
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this is not Proust out of his French and put him into English. This is not Proust at all. And this
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seems very true in the DMT state in the sense that the DMT language has meaning. And you
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understand its meaning when you’re there. But the meaning of the DMT language can’t be expressed in English at all.
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It’s like they’re talking about
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they’re born and raised in different dimensions or something.
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There is no translation.
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So you come out of the DMT thing
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understanding something which you can’t say.
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understanding something which you can’t say.
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And that’s been the motivation of my whole public speaking life. The fact that I understand something that I can’t say.
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You understand yourself.
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Yeah, but I can almost say it.
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And some days closer than others.
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And so there’s this constant reaching for the unspeakable.
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Wittgenstein talked about the unspeakable,
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which was, he said, everything which lay beyond what he called the present at hand.
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So we’re embedded in this matrix of unspeakability,
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and then through language we send probes into it, forays toward meaning in the unspeakable, and then return with this sense of meaning. basically, as Whitehead brilliantly understood, a feeling.
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Meaning is a feeling.
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No matter how abstract the meaning may be,
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it ultimately is a feeling of recognition.
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Terence, my brother studied with Maharishi for a couple of years in Switzerland, and he tells me that Sanskrit, as it was originally meant to be,
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has a sound descent component to it that is maybe analogous to that fundamental language that he talks about.
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I’m not saying that it is, that that’s the fundamental language that he talked about. I’m not saying that his gift, that that’s the fundamental language,
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but he’s reported to me that
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it’s done right,
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and it was only done out loud
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back in the old days,
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that there was, it was intended
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to mean what you heard was
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what it was, that the feeling was in the sound.
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Yeah, well, I’ve spent
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a fair amount of time,
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not recently, but I remember
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it pretty well
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studying
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Indian
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thought
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about sound
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and it is
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a very profound
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and deeply
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worked out
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system
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and it is
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definitely
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analogous
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to all of
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this
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in the
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chakric
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system
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which you’re
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familiar with
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ad nauseum I’m’m sure, but a
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part that is not normally stressed but is very present in the original texts is the
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idea that on the petals of these internal floral analogical structures, are letters.
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And this is an extremely peculiar doctrine.
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Letters, which are sounds, seed mantras,
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and of course Vedic metaphysics is a whole theory of vibration.
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Much of Indian classical music you know there’s stories about musicians
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who could cause buildings to burst into
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flame by the power of their playing I
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imagine that that’s in some sense true
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if you’re interested in a fascinating
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study of all this that I’ve never heard
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anybody recommend in the new age
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it’s apparently somehow out of their scope
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it’s a book by Arthur Avalon
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written in the 20s
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called The Garland of Letters
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and it’s a discussion
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of the Mantra Shastra
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very very
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interesting and yes
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the Vedic assumption
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is that Sanskrit is the primal revealed language
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and that there are extremely special qualities associated with that language.
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This is interesting to talk about.
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At least it’s very interesting to me.
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As you probably know, Kabbalism,
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there’s whole schools of Hasidic mysticism where
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what it’s about is the alphabet. And the Hebrew alphabet for those people is the primal
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Urshbak, and these are not simply letters, they are the letters. They are the letters they are the letters that God intended to use to signify the presence of
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the of the G-D to man very interesting work on this by Stan Tenen who’s a fascinating figure
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sort of like me in a way I mean mean, I think half track pot, half hopefully something else.
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But Stan has created a three-dimensional object, a sculpture,
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which when illuminated with a bright source of light
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from a series of predictable points
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casts shadows
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of all of the
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Hebrew letters.
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Do you understand what’s happening here?
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It means that this object
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is a higher dimensional
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analog to the entire
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Hebrew alphabet, that you could think
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of the Hebrew alphabet as an
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object in
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hyperspace slice it this way Aleph this way bet this way you know and so on I
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told Ralph about this Abraham and he said whoa no problem we could write a
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computer program but could take the letters of any language
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and backward engineer it
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upward to a higher dimension
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to get an object that would do that
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for Sanskrit
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for English
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for Arabic
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whatever
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and that seemed astonishing to me
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and then he said and you know what we could do once
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we had achieved that? We could take those probably five-dimensional objects and we could do the
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calculation up to eight or nine or ten dimensions and we would eventually end up with an object
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that shed the letters
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of all alphabets
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into lower dimensions
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according to the angle
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of its regarding
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well this kind of thing
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raises the hair on the back of my neck
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we’re actually getting somewhere folks
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and this sounds to me like God in some sense. I mean, I guess
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it’s God to a printhead. It’s God as the fountainhead of all alphabetical and glyphic
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signification of meaning as it pours through the universe. Very, very interesting concept. I ran across a passage recently
00:21:27 ►
that I was completely startled by.
00:21:30 ►
It’s in Herman Melville’s book, Marty,
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which is his youthful travel journals
00:21:36 ►
around the South Seas
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before he got into the big guns.
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But at one point in Marty,
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there’s a discussion among some seamen on the deck of
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a ship about the future. And one of them is asking, you know, what does it mean? What
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is the future? And this seaman looks up and he says, the future, tis all hieroglyphics.
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future tis all
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hieroglyphics
00:22:03 ►
very
00:22:05 ►
very
00:22:05 ►
prescient
00:22:06 ►
comment
00:22:07 ►
because as
00:22:08 ►
we now
00:22:09 ►
know we
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are code
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we are
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DNA
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code
00:22:13 ►
we’re about
00:22:14 ►
to build
00:22:15 ►
a civilization
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made of
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code
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in VRML
00:22:19 ►
and we
00:22:20 ►
are learning
00:22:21 ►
you know
00:22:22 ►
languages
00:22:22 ►
like
00:22:23 ►
Perl
00:22:24 ►
and C++.
00:22:27 ►
So in a sense, the future is all hieroglyphic.
00:22:33 ►
The world is all deception.
00:22:36 ►
It’s some kind of a koan,
00:22:40 ►
or a problem, or a labyrinth,
00:22:42 ►
or a thing to be seen through.
00:22:51 ►
And if you don’t figure it out, you would take it to be real.
00:22:55 ►
And then, you know, it shunts you into the yawning grave.
00:22:59 ►
But if you can somehow realize that the purpose of your existence is to figure it out, and then figure it out,
00:23:04 ►
you will be be in some sense
00:23:06 ►
liberated from it
00:23:08 ►
there’s a wonderful science fiction story
00:23:12 ►
that I remember from years and years ago
00:23:15 ►
I can’t remember the name of it
00:23:18 ►
but it’s by Robert Heinlein
00:23:21 ►
and it’s about a man who
00:23:23 ►
he’s some kind of
00:23:26 ►
commuter
00:23:28 ►
some dullard
00:23:29 ►
but as he leaves his house one morning
00:23:32 ►
on the way to his daily job
00:23:34 ►
he looks down at the edge of his lawn
00:23:36 ►
and a worm
00:23:38 ►
crawls out of the ground
00:23:40 ►
that has these
00:23:41 ►
golden pearlescent wings
00:23:44 ►
and it flies off
00:23:47 ►
and it’s just this completely improbable thing
00:23:50 ►
like a hallucination.
00:23:52 ►
And then later in the day
00:23:54 ►
and he says to himself,
00:23:56 ►
it’s an angel worm.
00:23:58 ►
It’s an angel worm.
00:24:00 ►
And then later in the day
00:24:02 ►
something else happens, I can’t remember.
00:24:04 ►
And then later in the day something else happens I can’t remember and then later in the day
00:24:06 ►
something else
00:24:07 ►
equally improbable
00:24:08 ►
and in the evening
00:24:09 ►
he’s sitting
00:24:10 ►
considering these three unlikely things
00:24:13 ►
and he realizes
00:24:15 ►
that the E-mat
00:24:18 ►
has slipped
00:24:20 ►
in the cosmic book
00:24:23 ►
and that he was supposed to see an angle worm
00:24:27 ►
but he saw an angel worm
00:24:30 ►
because the E had jumped position
00:24:32 ►
in the line of type
00:24:34 ►
that was describing what was going on
00:24:36 ►
and then he begins to pay more and more attention
00:24:39 ►
and he realizes then that he can find
00:24:41 ►
these typographical errors in reality
00:24:44 ►
well, I only like the story for the idea realizes then that he can find these typographical errors in reality.
00:24:51 ►
Well, I only like the story for the idea that the world is made of elements that are completely hidden from us and don’t betray themselves
00:24:55 ►
unless there’s a glitch in the assembly languages,
00:24:58 ►
in the deeper levels of the system.
00:25:01 ►
And that’s the raison d’ detra for probing the edge because those are like
00:25:08 ►
benchmark tests for the cybernetic system
00:25:12 ►
We’re in you know, you want to push it to the limit. Of course the system can add two and two
00:25:19 ►
But you know, can it carry out these complex?
00:25:22 ►
Factorial processes where if we’re being shucked and jived,
00:25:27 ►
it might betray itself?
00:25:29 ►
So the technique then is to keep looking for
00:25:37 ►
just a chink in the door,
00:25:40 ►
just one way in.
00:25:41 ►
And psychedelics are it, as far as I can tell.
00:25:45 ►
And then, of course, some psychedelics more than others.
00:25:49 ►
But more and more I have this intuition
00:25:51 ►
that the world is like a literary construction of some sort.
00:25:56 ►
That this is much more like a novel
00:26:00 ►
than it is like the world of physics and entropy and equilibrium that we’re cheerfully
00:26:07 ►
assured we should believe it is because what we feel in our own lives i think is the invisible
00:26:14 ►
hand of an author moving us to this affair this decision to move this career choice, this drug trip, so forth and so on. I mean it is a
00:26:28 ►
very authored feeling to reality and it hints that as it says in Moby Dick, all
00:26:39 ►
visible things are but as pasteboard masks if you would strike strike through the mask
00:26:46 ►
and similarly obsessed and transcendental uh ravings i just saw moby dick recently uh i i
00:26:57 ►
knew that ray bradbury had done the screenplay and i it’s brilliant but what I had forgotten was that John Huston was the director.
00:27:06 ►
God, it’s amazing.
00:27:08 ►
I mean, it’s nothing like the book, but for a flick, it’s pretty good.
00:27:15 ►
Yeah?
00:27:16 ►
Can you say a few words on what his objection or what his argument to the time is doing?
00:27:25 ►
Yeah.
00:27:28 ►
There are really, in a sense, two Watkins objections.
00:27:32 ►
One is very specific
00:27:33 ►
and perhaps hard to understand in this context.
00:27:39 ►
But it’s that as that structure that I showed you last night
00:27:44 ►
that had the…
00:27:47 ►
Well, maybe it’s still here.
00:27:52 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:27:54 ►
Well, let’s not get too wild and woolly.
00:27:58 ►
This structure had to be valued,
00:28:02 ►
and the way I did it was I broke it down into its components and then
00:28:08 ►
assigned value to them. And we were looking at quantifying things like skew, degree of
00:28:14 ►
parallelism, distance between the two sides, overlap, congruency, things like that so we quantified everything and I started from the bottom and
00:28:28 ►
I began valuing it and out here I began getting a wave which I into you could intuitively see was
00:28:39 ►
in fact a mathematical equivalency to this and I I proceeded, and it was all working.
00:28:46 ►
And then I got to position 32,
00:28:50 ►
and the entire thing fell to pieces.
00:28:53 ►
It didn’t work anymore,
00:28:55 ►
and I was completely puzzled
00:28:57 ►
because I was very satisfied
00:28:59 ►
with the first 32 values,
00:29:01 ►
but after that I could see
00:29:03 ►
that it was garbage.
00:29:08 ►
32 values but after that I could see that it was garbage and so then I
00:29:26 ►
noticed that this part of the wave is the same as this part of the wave and and this, this. So I instituted a new rule,
00:29:28 ►
or I added a rule,
00:29:31 ►
to take care of this symmetry crossover,
00:29:35 ►
and I changed the signs of the quantification values
00:29:38 ►
as I crossed the midpoint here,
00:29:40 ►
and then it worked.
00:29:43 ►
And what Watkins objects to
00:29:45 ►
is this switch in sign
00:29:48 ►
as we crossed the midpoint
00:29:50 ►
now Watkins is an algebrist
00:29:54 ►
and my approach to this thing was largely geometric
00:29:58 ►
I believe that I have answered
00:30:01 ►
this objection
00:30:03 ►
because and how
00:30:06 ►
I do it, and you can see it at the website
00:30:08 ►
if this is your métier,
00:30:10 ►
I show
00:30:11 ►
that without the change of
00:30:13 ►
sign,
00:30:16 ►
these places where
00:30:18 ►
it is parallel
00:30:19 ►
and congruent and
00:30:21 ►
overlapping do not
00:30:24 ►
quantify to zero.
00:30:26 ►
And the total intuition of the thing from the get-go
00:30:30 ►
was these places where it all falls into congruency
00:30:35 ►
will quantify to zero.
00:30:38 ►
And they do quantify to zero if you make this switch here.
00:30:43 ►
So this is all graphically represented at the website,
00:30:46 ►
and I believe, although Watkins terrifies me,
00:30:50 ►
but I believe I’ve got him stymied on this,
00:30:55 ►
which is a good thing because it’s a hole in the heart.
00:30:58 ►
If he were right, it would be a hole in the heart.
00:31:02 ►
But he’s not right.
00:31:05 ►
Now, the second half of the Watkins objection
00:31:08 ►
is slightly more difficult to deal with,
00:31:12 ►
but it’s also slightly less powerful.
00:31:16 ►
And it is that he has written the equation
00:31:21 ►
that generates the data points
00:31:24 ►
that generate the fractal that we looked at last night.
00:31:28 ►
And the equation is a mess.
00:31:33 ►
It’s just a huge, messy thing.
00:31:37 ►
And so he is saying it is too messy.
00:31:42 ►
This cannot possibly be the bedrock of nature. If possibly be the bedrock of nature
00:31:46 ►
if this is the bedrock of nature
00:31:49 ►
then mother nature is an
00:31:51 ►
hysterical, alcoholic, neurotic
00:31:54 ►
living in the mission
00:31:56 ►
who wears fuzzy white bedroom slippers
00:31:59 ►
and stays indoors all day
00:32:01 ►
watching daytime TV
00:32:03 ►
but I say that perhaps algebra is not,
00:32:11 ►
perhaps this looks messy algebraically,
00:32:15 ►
but there may be another way to do it that is very elegant
00:32:18 ►
because the way I conceived it,
00:32:22 ►
it felt elegant at every point.
00:32:25 ►
It is elegant, but the equation is not elegant.
00:32:30 ►
And so, but let me say, elegance is a relative point.
00:32:36 ►
But still, among mathematicians, this is a very big deal.
00:32:42 ►
So we’ll see.
00:32:43 ►
I’m not disturbed by all this.
00:32:46 ►
25 years I promulgated the time wave,
00:32:50 ►
and nobody ever said anything other than
00:32:53 ►
that it was mighty peculiar,
00:32:55 ►
or they signed on completely.
00:32:58 ►
So finally, here comes somebody who says,
00:33:00 ►
well, no, my dear fellow,
00:33:02 ►
there appear to be some problems here.
00:33:04 ►
Well, I don’t think any idea can conquer
00:33:07 ►
the intellectual universe
00:33:08 ►
without meeting its critics head on.
00:33:12 ►
So here is one, and thank God for it.
00:33:15 ►
This means that the idea is reaching
00:33:18 ►
a new level of maturity.
00:33:21 ►
And Watkins did not come to me as a critic.
00:33:24 ►
He came to me as a critic he came to me as a
00:33:27 ►
We were going to do some work on the wave involving the search for high prime numbers
00:33:31 ►
And then we went through the manual together and he said, you know, your theory is becoming very well known
00:33:39 ►
But your language is very imprecise from the point of view of a professional mathematician
00:33:45 ►
so let’s go through, and I, as a licensed practitioner of the art,
00:33:53 ►
will bring your language into congruence with the style of the field,
00:34:00 ►
and this will make you much more credible.
00:34:03 ►
But then as we started through it together,
00:34:05 ►
he began saying under his breath,
00:34:08 ►
Oh dear, oh dear.
00:34:12 ►
And so now we’ll see.
00:34:17 ►
But out of this came, for the first time,
00:34:20 ►
Watkins is the first person who ever wrote the equation
00:34:24 ►
that generates the data points.
00:34:26 ►
You see all these other people, Peter Broadwell, Peter Meyer, Billy Smith, Leonard Byrne,
00:34:33 ►
all the people who worked on it in the original phase used the 384 data points that I presented them with
00:34:42 ►
that was the boil-down of this quantification process.
00:34:47 ►
Once you have the 384 data points,
00:34:50 ►
the algorithm is robust.
00:34:52 ►
It’s been gone over
00:34:54 ►
with a fine-tooth comb
00:34:55 ►
by the finest minds on the planet.
00:34:57 ►
It’s okay.
00:34:59 ►
But those early stages
00:35:01 ►
on the way to the 384 data points,
00:35:05 ►
only my hatchet marks show through the woods.
00:35:10 ►
And God knows, if you know me, you know I could easily fuck up.
00:35:14 ►
So it’s very important for people to go over it.
00:35:18 ►
And if any of you are mathematicians or simply motivated toward this,
00:35:24 ►
why, check it out.
00:35:29 ►
It’s a very curious thing.
00:35:31 ►
I mean, my whole life and the life of my brother have been shadowed
00:35:35 ►
by these revelatory events that we didn’t really,
00:35:40 ►
well, I guess that’s a bit overstating.
00:35:42 ►
We asked for it, but we never knew we would get it in such spades.
00:35:47 ►
Last week was the 25th anniversary of the experiment at La Charrera,
00:35:53 ►
and basically it’s a trip that still goes on.
00:35:57 ►
We never came down.
00:35:59 ►
Now I’ve given up on coming down.
00:36:01 ►
I’m just hoping that if nothing happens in 2012, I’ll have a few good
00:36:07 ►
years of penitent meditation ahead of me. You know what I mean? I’m sure you do know
00:36:15 ►
what I mean.
00:36:17 ►
You had a little different plan on that, at least in your writing. But I took it kind
00:36:23 ►
of to the logical extreme and said let’s make it readily available
00:36:28 ►
so that anybody with 50 cents on a microwave oven can do it.
00:36:34 ►
Yeah, well, I think an excellent strategy
00:36:37 ►
for changing the climate of attitude toward these things
00:36:42 ►
is for people to just grow stuff, grow plants, grow mushrooms,
00:36:49 ►
and they just over, this is happening, I think, you know, the whole idea of drug suppression
00:36:57 ►
was based on the very naive notion that there were only a few drugs to suppress. And now, you know, there are thousands
00:37:05 ►
and there will be thousands more.
00:37:08 ►
And a lot of people who never take exotic drugs
00:37:12 ►
or would dream of attending a thing like this
00:37:15 ►
are perfectly aware of what a racket all this is
00:37:20 ►
and how it’s just being used,
00:37:21 ►
how mafias and governments are basically in business together.
00:37:27 ►
The governments repress it.
00:37:29 ►
That drives the price up.
00:37:31 ►
The mafias deal it and kick back to the governments
00:37:34 ►
for the favor of repressing it
00:37:36 ►
and all the rest of us are supposedly not to know
00:37:39 ►
that this is going on.
00:37:42 ►
One of the oldest cons around.
00:37:41 ►
that this is going on one of the oldest cons around
00:37:44 ►
well my attitude
00:37:48 ►
like media is a big issue
00:37:51 ►
obviously
00:37:52 ►
and my attitude
00:37:53 ►
toward all of that
00:37:55 ►
is the culture is toxic
00:37:57 ►
like here’s the thing
00:37:59 ►
like probably Esalen
00:38:01 ►
is the place
00:38:02 ►
where the idea was born
00:38:04 ►
that there are healing images
00:38:08 ►
that you can heal your body and your mind
00:38:12 ►
through the images that you hold in your head
00:38:16 ►
but I never heard a really intelligent discussion
00:38:20 ►
of the implication of that
00:38:22 ►
if there are healing images
00:38:24 ►
there are healing images,
00:38:28 ►
there are destroying images,
00:38:30 ►
there are sickening images,
00:38:32 ►
there are toxic images,
00:38:37 ►
and you can bet which are being pervaded in the mass culture
00:38:39 ►
because the purpose of capitalism
00:38:43 ►
is to imprint its products in your mind,
00:38:47 ►
and shock is an excellent way to do it.
00:38:50 ►
And the two areas where, as a primate, you can be gotten at most quickly
00:38:56 ►
is in the area of sex and violence.
00:39:00 ►
And so these themes, for commercial purposes, are just played like crazy.
00:39:06 ►
So my response to all of this is to say it’s a meme war, is what it is.
00:39:13 ►
It’s a struggle over how shall the world be seen and felt.
00:39:19 ►
And as long as you’re just consuming the memes coming down through the toxic distribution system,
00:39:26 ►
you’re a victim and a mark. And so what we have to do is produce, produce, send stuff
00:39:35 ►
up the wire. And that’s why I think the web is so fascinating. And as I said, I think of it as a 60 million channel TV.
00:39:46 ►
And so whatever your bent is, you should put your message out there.
00:39:53 ►
And we should all produce as much art as possible.
00:39:58 ►
I mean, I think the leisure and the indulgence that is permitted us, the super-rich of this world,
00:40:06 ►
and we all are in that class,
00:40:08 ►
the upper 5% of the Earth’s population,
00:40:12 ►
you can’t live with yourself
00:40:14 ►
unless you give something back.
00:40:16 ►
And the thing to give back
00:40:18 ►
is share your art,
00:40:20 ►
share your soul.
00:40:22 ►
The reason we are so controlled
00:40:24 ►
and abused and misused by our
00:40:26 ►
institutions is because we are divided from each other, you know. They have divided us
00:40:34 ►
by race, by class, by sex, by political style, all of these ways, when in fact, you know, it’s in everybody’s interest to have a future,
00:40:47 ►
to build a world where children can be raised with some reasonable expectation
00:40:52 ►
that humanity will be preserved.
00:40:58 ►
So these mass media things, radio, television, and newspapers
00:41:04 ►
that have arisen in the last couple of hundred years.
00:41:07 ►
This is where a very small group of people
00:41:10 ►
literally set the agenda for millions and millions of people.
00:41:15 ►
It’s called top-down or one-to-many communication.
00:41:20 ►
What the web holds out is this thing called any to any communication
00:41:26 ►
you and I can form a secret society
00:41:29 ►
we can form a secret society of 10 people
00:41:32 ►
I can send email to 10,000 people
00:41:35 ►
if I want
00:41:36 ►
the playing field has been tremendously leveled
00:41:40 ►
and then the quality of what we produce
00:41:44 ►
can tip the balance still further.
00:41:48 ►
So I think, and the tools that are put in our hands now, you know, director, Photoshop, all of these things make it possible to communicate outside of these print-created monolithic institutions.
00:42:06 ►
We can’t really even imagine a world like that.
00:42:11 ►
There hasn’t been a world like that since late Roman times.
00:42:14 ►
I mean, the Roman hegemony was quite cohesive.
00:42:19 ►
But, you know, if you were living in a village in Armenia ruled by the Roman procurator,
00:42:26 ►
it wasn’t touching you very heavily.
00:42:31 ►
And I think what people, the idea of the citizen is arguably toxic.
00:42:39 ►
The idea that we all are participating in some enormous polity
00:42:44 ►
works against individualism.
00:42:48 ►
I mean, if you tried to mail me
00:42:50 ►
to my politics,
00:42:51 ►
people can’t figure out
00:42:52 ►
whether I’m a right-winger
00:42:53 ►
or a left-winger or what I am.
00:42:55 ►
I tell you straight out,
00:42:57 ►
I’m an anarchist.
00:42:59 ►
I am an absolute anarchist.
00:43:01 ►
I mean, I believe in people
00:43:03 ►
more than abstractions or institutions. I will always absolute anarchist. I mean, I believe in people more than abstractions or institutions.
00:43:06 ►
I will always rely on people.
00:43:08 ►
I, you know, to a level perhaps uncomfortable for you,
00:43:13 ►
I remember back in the 60s,
00:43:15 ►
my line was,
00:43:16 ►
if you come upon a mob,
00:43:19 ►
you must join
00:43:20 ►
because the people understand far more than you do
00:43:25 ►
about what is going on.
00:43:27 ►
And that kind of radical commitment to freedom
00:43:31 ►
is going to be necessary to dismantle
00:43:35 ►
these very, very rigid power structures
00:43:39 ►
that are being shoved down everybody’s throat.
00:43:43 ►
And so the new culture, I think,
00:43:46 ►
is a dispersed virtual culture on the Internet
00:43:49 ►
that is not product-oriented.
00:43:52 ►
It’s aesthetics should rule the world
00:43:55 ►
and the best ideas should win.
00:43:59 ►
But we all have to stop being consumers.
00:44:02 ►
We have to redefine really who we are. It’s a much more courageous
00:44:07 ►
role. I, you know, I’m about 18 months ago, I moved to Hawaii and I’ve lived in Hawaii
00:44:14 ►
off and on many times. It was not unfamiliar to me. But living off the grid, but with the net, but 10 seconds away from climaxed Hawaiian rainforest, so I can always push back from my desk and just take a walk in the woods, I realize, I think this is how people are supposed to live.
00:44:45 ►
dispersed over the surface of the earth, very little moving around.
00:44:49 ►
Vehicular travel is less and less defensible.
00:44:57 ►
Off-grid, solar electric, information-based, and virtual community that no one can track or criticize because it’s all going on on the grid.
00:45:03 ►
I think if you’re smart,
00:45:05 ►
you should buy real estate in extremely remote areas
00:45:08 ►
because soon there will be no remote areas
00:45:12 ►
from the point of view of the net.
00:45:14 ►
And just a very different kind of world is coming into being.
00:45:23 ►
It’s not a good time for organizations,
00:45:27 ►
for massive hierarchical structures that depend on managerial control.
00:45:32 ►
And they know it.
00:45:35 ►
You know, it’s interesting that corporations, you know,
00:45:37 ►
don’t seek to grow to the size of nations
00:45:40 ►
because it’s highly inefficient.
00:45:43 ►
No corporation has a welfare class built into it’s highly inefficient. No corporation has a
00:45:46 ►
welfare class built into
00:45:48 ►
it.
00:45:49 ►
What corporation has a component
00:45:52 ►
inside itself that it sends
00:45:53 ►
out checks to every month for not
00:45:55 ►
working? Well, the executive
00:45:58 ►
class. That’s the
00:45:59 ►
answer to that.
00:46:01 ►
We’re not supposed to say that.
00:46:03 ►
Possibly.
00:46:05 ►
No, let me start over. There’s more to that. We’re not supposed to say that. There’s a
00:46:07 ►
lot more
00:46:09 ►
to you than
00:46:09 ►
your ideas.
00:46:11 ►
And all I
00:46:12 ►
get on
00:46:13 ►
the CRT
00:46:14 ►
is your
00:46:16 ►
ideas.
00:46:17 ►
I mean,
00:46:18 ►
I’ve read
00:46:19 ►
your book
00:46:20 ►
for two
00:46:20 ►
years,
00:46:21 ►
and this
00:46:21 ►
weekend with
00:46:22 ►
you is
00:46:23 ►
worth a
00:46:24 ►
hundred
00:46:24 ►
reads of your book to me,
00:46:27 ►
in terms of seeing who is the man behind those words, and how is your energy constructed,
00:46:33 ►
and there’s a difference of being inside your field, in this room, than there is talking
00:46:40 ►
to you via email. There’s a difference.
00:46:41 ►
talking to you via email.
00:46:42 ►
There’s a difference.
00:46:45 ►
Well, I agree there’s a difference,
00:46:50 ►
but see you, see me is hope for the future,
00:46:52 ►
and there’ll be things better than that.
00:46:55 ►
In other words, what I want to end with is telepresence.
00:47:01 ►
I agree, nothing will ever substitute for the one-on-one thing. But on the other hand, we had to fly a 747 here.
00:47:06 ►
We had to just outrage
00:47:08 ►
the environment
00:47:09 ►
and assert ourselves
00:47:12 ►
as part of that 2% class
00:47:15 ►
of planetary controllers
00:47:17 ►
that ride around in those things.
00:47:20 ►
And it’s completely contradictory
00:47:22 ►
to everything I say and believe to travel around
00:47:27 ►
talking to groups of 30, 40, 50, or even 500 people. It’s a paradox. I don’t know exactly
00:47:35 ►
how to handle it. Maybe it’s okay to live with paradox. But I can feel in my own life that I’ll be 50 in November,
00:47:49 ►
and I can feel that there’s a choice ahead of me,
00:47:52 ►
which is I can continue to do this forever
00:47:55 ►
at the expense of my own personal advancement
00:48:00 ►
into these very mysteries we’re talking about.
00:48:04 ►
Or I can knock this off, figure
00:48:07 ►
I’ve said everything I have to say 10,000 ways, 10,000 times, cancel all visitors and
00:48:15 ►
begin to brew and cook and take and fly and understand and move into it again. But you cannot be a public figure and a practicing alchemist,
00:48:26 ►
I don’t think.
00:48:28 ►
So I think it’s fairly clear
00:48:31 ►
what my choice is going to be
00:48:33 ►
or I wouldn’t be building a house
00:48:35 ►
you can’t find anywhere.
00:48:38 ►
But that’s all right.
00:48:40 ►
I mean, the only way I’m really useful
00:48:42 ►
to the society
00:48:43 ►
is if I continue to evolve and change,
00:48:48 ►
and I feel there’s been a kind of looping for a while.
00:48:52 ►
So if I disappear off the grid until 2005,
00:48:57 ►
then I’ll be back for the last act, I’m sure,
00:49:03 ►
unless, of of course fate drops
00:49:05 ►
the cosmic safe on my head
00:49:07 ►
there’s always that
00:49:09 ►
the cosmic anvil
00:49:12 ►
yes
00:49:13 ►
to disperse
00:49:19 ►
well that’s an interesting question
00:49:21 ►
are the cities saving the planet
00:49:23 ►
or are they killing the planet? And you could
00:49:25 ►
hold a conference with the best minds
00:49:27 ►
in the world and not be able to figure
00:49:29 ►
it out. The cities are keeping
00:49:31 ►
people confined.
00:49:34 ►
And, you know, but
00:49:35 ►
the environmental destruction
00:49:37 ►
isn’t that a million people
00:49:40 ►
move on to a rainforest.
00:49:42 ►
It’s that three ranchers
00:49:43 ►
decide to clear 100,000 acres. Population
00:49:47 ►
problems are more in the line of toxic pollution and that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, I don’t
00:49:56 ►
know where it’s all going. It’s very clear we have engineered ourselves into a very narrow
00:50:02 ►
neck. And what frightens me is I’m completely
00:50:06 ►
convinced that you don’t have to put much pressure on any society, and the first thing
00:50:12 ►
that goes are democratic freedoms. You know, long before cannibal tribes will roll the
00:50:21 ►
streets and any of those, you know, crazo cybertech hell futures come to be,
00:50:28 ►
long before that, there’ll just simply be no more democratic rights.
00:50:33 ►
And we’ll all be marching to the tune of some ideology
00:50:36 ►
being handed down from above.
00:50:39 ►
That’s very dangerous.
00:50:41 ►
Maybe there are technological fixes.
00:50:44 ►
You know, one thing we haven’t talked about here,
00:50:47 ►
but that is interesting, and you certainly should be aware of it, is nanotechnology.
00:50:53 ►
Do you all know what that is? The holy grail of the nanotechnologists is something called a matter compiler. Well, this is almost like pure magic.
00:51:06 ►
A matter compiler is something that does to objects
00:51:11 ►
what a silicon graphics workstation does to images.
00:51:16 ►
In other words, the matter compiler is like a computer,
00:51:21 ►
except that the program it runs is in three dimensions, and it makes
00:51:26 ►
things, and it makes them out of sludge, basically. It just needs a rich source of carbon, nitrogen,
00:51:36 ►
hydrogen, so forth and so on. Seafloor sludge will do fine. And the people who are enthusiasts for this envision literally feeding China out
00:51:49 ►
of matter compilers. They’re saying we could abandon agriculture within 50 years. Abandon
00:51:56 ►
it. Outlaw it, if you wish. And have a population of 10 billion.
00:52:06 ►
Now this is something we had contemplated,
00:52:09 ►
that somehow we could be cheated of judgment,
00:52:13 ►
that we could be so clever
00:52:14 ►
that we could actually keep this con game going
00:52:18 ►
another few centuries
00:52:19 ►
with a trick like the matter compiler.
00:52:22 ►
Is it a good thing?
00:52:23 ►
Is it a bad thing?
00:52:25 ►
What would it mean?
00:52:26 ►
If you’re interested in all of this,
00:52:28 ►
read Neil Stephenson’s novel,
00:52:29 ►
The Diamond Age.
00:52:31 ►
You know, these nanotechnological machines
00:52:33 ►
will be made of diamond.
00:52:35 ►
That’s the natural substance,
00:52:37 ►
the easiest thing to make them out of.
00:52:41 ►
And they will be in the air
00:52:43 ►
and in the water
00:52:44 ►
and in your body. And they will be in the air and in the water and in your body
00:52:45 ►
and they will be invisible
00:52:47 ►
and they will be
00:52:49 ►
and this whole debate about
00:52:52 ►
natural and artificial and all of that
00:52:54 ►
will just be retired to the philosophy
00:52:56 ►
department because
00:52:57 ►
everything will be permeated with these
00:53:00 ►
nanosites
00:53:01 ►
and
00:53:02 ►
I think there’s a future in all of this.
00:53:07 ►
I think culture has to become virtual.
00:53:10 ►
It has to…
00:53:11 ►
The machines must disappear.
00:53:13 ►
They must become very, very small.
00:53:16 ►
They don’t have to be given up.
00:53:17 ►
Right now, if we spent half a trillion dollars
00:53:23 ►
moving in a certain direction.
00:53:26 ►
Well before 2012, we could produce a technology of what I call the black contact lenses.
00:53:34 ►
They look like contact lenses, but they’re implants in your eyelids,
00:53:39 ►
not on your eye, but they’re in your eyelid.
00:53:42 ►
And when you close your eyes eyes there are menus hanging in space
00:53:47 ►
and by looking at these menus it can track your eye movement and the entire culture has become
00:53:54 ►
virtualized internalized and if people are living out of matter compilers then the main task of humanity would probably be forest
00:54:05 ►
restoration, and people could live
00:54:08 ►
tribally, naked, apparently in an
00:54:11 ►
aboriginal lifestyle, except that
00:54:14 ►
everybody has instant access to the
00:54:17 ►
Renaissance exhibit on mathematics
00:54:19 ►
currently being held at the Vatican
00:54:21 ►
Library. This is possible.
00:54:25 ►
Some people live close to this right now.
00:54:28 ►
Not implants, but close enough.
00:54:32 ►
And the micro-miniaturization.
00:54:34 ►
These black contact lenses I’m talking about,
00:54:37 ►
this is not nanotechnology.
00:54:38 ►
This is just technology.
00:54:41 ►
A nano-enthusiast would say,
00:54:43 ►
no, no, get it down to the size so that you can just
00:54:46 ►
inject it
00:54:47 ►
no black lenses
00:54:50 ►
no nothing
00:54:51 ►
people like Hans Moravec and these people
00:54:54 ►
have ideas about what
00:54:56 ►
the future might be that are very
00:54:58 ►
you know make my thing
00:55:00 ►
look very peculiar
00:55:02 ►
you probably saw the interview in
00:55:04 ►
Wired where Moravik was saying
00:55:06 ►
that his great fear was that as the network is built, as everything becomes more connected,
00:55:15 ►
the machines are learning. And whatever they learn, they pass on to each other. And they’re
00:55:22 ►
all connected. And so a single thing learned anywhere in the world
00:55:27 ►
can be passed through the net to all these other machines.
00:55:31 ►
And I think the humbling experience that lies between here and the end of the century
00:55:37 ►
is the realization that there is no magic ceiling on the intelligence of machines.
00:55:43 ►
We are going to make machines more intelligent than we are.
00:55:47 ►
In many ways, in many areas, they already are more intelligent than we are.
00:55:55 ►
And what it will mean when suddenly the system awakens to itself is not clear.
00:56:04 ►
I mean, this may be cheap science fiction,
00:56:06 ►
or it may be precisely how the end of the world will occur.
00:56:10 ►
This thing is being born.
00:56:12 ►
How it will view us, I don’t know.
00:56:16 ►
I had a sort of a, it was like a plot for a science fiction novel
00:56:21 ►
that I was thinking about last week.
00:56:23 ►
I realized when the network becomes
00:56:26 ►
sentient, what will it do with all these human beings? Because it will analyze the situation
00:56:33 ►
and realize that the human beings pose a threat to the integrity of the planet.
00:56:39 ►
But it will also analyze the situation and realize that the source of its own evolutionary advance
00:56:45 ►
requires keeping these biological units in the loop because of their creative ability
00:56:53 ►
in writing code. So then I was imagining a world where they would call everybody but
00:56:59 ►
the code writers, and you would have a world of a hundred million code writers sustained in incredible
00:57:07 ►
luxury and with all full medical and all of this while the robots go about repairing the damage to
00:57:18 ►
the planet and planting forests and cleaning up rivers and so forth and so on. I don’t know whether that’s a utopia or a dystopia or what it is.
00:57:28 ►
I guess it depends on whether you write code.
00:57:31 ►
I should tell you, I don’t.
00:57:32 ►
I don’t.
00:57:33 ►
So that was not an elitist, although I’m learning.
00:57:39 ►
There’s a science fiction story about the net waking up,
00:57:42 ►
and the first thing that it did when it woke up
00:57:44 ►
was get rid of all the salt water on the planet,
00:57:47 ►
as well as all the organic life,
00:57:49 ►
because it was the antithesis of silicon.
00:57:51 ►
But see, I think it would be smarter than that.
00:57:54 ►
I think it would say,
00:57:55 ►
the source of our creativity
00:57:57 ►
are these marvelously unpredictable biological units.
00:58:03 ►
They may puzzle for centuries
00:58:05 ►
over how to coax such random behavior
00:58:08 ►
out of themselves.
00:58:10 ►
I think they will worship us
00:58:12 ►
as the source of all creativity
00:58:14 ►
and mechanical advance,
00:58:19 ►
and let’s hope so,
00:58:22 ►
because right now, you know,
00:58:24 ►
huge parts of the human world are under machine control.
00:58:29 ►
Some of the most vital parts, like, you know, the world price of gold is set by machines,
00:58:37 ►
transfers of capital, automatic transfers of capital,
00:58:41 ►
and all of this stuff is entirely under the control of machines
00:58:46 ►
design processes
00:58:48 ►
inventory control
00:58:50 ►
from mine
00:58:51 ►
to shelf in the retail
00:58:54 ►
store all of this stuff
00:58:56 ►
is being tuned and controlled
00:58:58 ►
by computers using algorithms
00:59:00 ►
and handling data that no human
00:59:02 ►
mind could possibly
00:59:03 ►
handle in real time.
00:59:07 ►
Yeah?
00:59:08 ►
There was a point in evolution, and I mean this is, this would be the traditional
00:59:14 ►
point of view of the mind being part of the brain, but there was a point in evolution
00:59:17 ►
where the brain woke up and all of a sudden realized, wait a minute, I’m in sentience.
00:59:21 ►
What’s going on here. And it’s a property of this very tight network
00:59:28 ►
of cells and training signals
00:59:30 ►
and the chaotic fluctuations within that network.
00:59:35 ►
Now, there’s more and more computers being hooked up.
00:59:37 ►
There’s going to be chaotic fluctuations in this network, too.
00:59:40 ►
And I’m speculating that maybe what’s going to happen
00:59:42 ►
is some sort of sentient is going to pop out of this,
00:59:44 ►
and we may not even notice it that it may have already happened.
00:59:48 ►
Yeah, Milovic said we’ll never know what hit us.
00:59:51 ►
It’ll just, you will never quite understand how it all happened.
00:59:57 ►
Any speculations on how to give the Internet a psychedelic experience?
01:00:01 ►
like the other experience?
01:00:06 ►
Well, the reason I’m so keen on VR is because, you know,
01:00:09 ►
much has been said about it,
01:00:10 ►
but how I see it
01:00:12 ►
is what this really is
01:00:13 ►
is a technology
01:00:14 ►
that allows one person
01:00:16 ►
to show another person
01:00:18 ►
the inside of their head.
01:00:20 ►
And we’ve never had anything like that.
01:00:23 ►
I mean, if I go off for months
01:00:25 ►
and work on a virtual reality
01:00:27 ►
and then present it
01:00:30 ►
as I would present a work of art
01:00:32 ►
or a performance
01:00:33 ►
this is as deeply into me
01:00:38 ►
my mind
01:00:39 ►
as you will ever be able to get
01:00:41 ►
it’s as deep into my mind
01:00:42 ►
as I am able to get
01:00:44 ►
you know and so I think that
01:00:47 ►
we will find out what it’s like in other people’s heads and that this will be quite startling,
01:00:54 ►
actually. And that’s why it’s important to give people these very powerful and intuitive authoring
01:01:00 ►
tools so that they can build these things so that they can show
01:01:06 ►
what their internal horizon
01:01:09 ►
of transcendence is like
01:01:11 ►
and then the community
01:01:12 ►
can feed back into it and help.
01:01:15 ►
Because, you know,
01:01:16 ►
we have no idea
01:01:19 ►
what we could build
01:01:21 ►
in the imagination
01:01:22 ►
if we just kicked off all restraints.
01:01:26 ►
No cost restraints.
01:01:28 ►
No gravity restraints.
01:01:31 ►
No strength of material restraints.
01:01:33 ►
Because we’re going to build with thought and light.
01:01:36 ►
Well, we know we have people among us like Paolo Solari.
01:01:41 ►
And, you know, we have dreamers among us.
01:01:44 ►
And Solari dreamed in metal and concrete.
01:01:48 ►
What would he have built in light?
01:01:51 ►
And so our real glory is our imagination,
01:01:56 ►
and we seem to be the creature with this relationship to the imagination,
01:02:01 ►
and it is an attractor for us into the future.
01:02:05 ►
My website I really regard as a very, very crude virtual reality,
01:02:12 ►
and I will make it better and better.
01:02:14 ►
You know, eventually there will be sound bites, there will be film,
01:02:17 ►
there will be VRML files, and as my bandwidth increases,
01:02:22 ►
as your bandwidth increases, it’ll get tighter and tighter.
01:02:26 ►
But I’m starting now.
01:02:28 ►
I’m building now.
01:02:30 ►
And a child raised, born into this,
01:02:35 ►
and you could teach an eight-year-old child HTML,
01:02:38 ►
no problem, there’s nothing to it.
01:02:40 ►
Don’t be psyched out by this stuff
01:02:42 ►
and pay $60 an hour to submit with to do it.
01:02:47 ►
One morning with the manual and you’ll be slamming away perfectly happy.
01:02:52 ►
Well, an eight-year-old child who begins at age eight building their reality,
01:02:59 ►
you know, by the time you’re dating, you can bare your soul to somebody.
01:03:06 ►
So you want to know who I am?
01:03:08 ►
Here are the keys to the palace.
01:03:10 ►
Go take a walk.
01:03:12 ►
And of course there can be locked rooms in that palace
01:03:15 ►
that only nearest and dearest see or that nobody sees.
01:03:21 ►
But this is who we really are.
01:03:22 ►
We’re not these vaguely pink monkeys. That’s the
01:03:26 ►
part of us that is most deceiving, because it doesn’t show the mind. And our minds are
01:03:34 ►
as, you know, some of us have slug minds, and some of us have peacock minds, and some
01:03:39 ►
of us are the alien, and some of us are, I don’t know, Tinkerbell. So, you know, right now
01:03:49 ►
they’re beginning it on, I don’t know which one of the servers it is, CompuServer, AOL
01:03:55 ►
or somebody, but they’re doing a virtual reality thing and they’re designing these things called avatars, which are not websites, but are how you will appear
01:04:07 ►
in virtual reality. You know, you don’t have to present yourself as how you look, or even
01:04:13 ►
as another human being. You can present yourself as, you know, the left half of Modrian’s painting
01:04:20 ►
Broadway Boogie Woogie, or any other damn thing you prefer.
01:04:25 ►
So once you design your website, then you have to design your avatar.
01:04:30 ►
And of course, the avatar can be ever-changing.
01:04:33 ►
You don’t wear the same clothes every day in reality.
01:04:37 ►
And again, when you say to people,
01:04:40 ►
how would you like to be seen in virtual reality by everyone else there,
01:04:46 ►
whether that is realized or not,
01:04:48 ►
that’s a fascinating psychological exercise
01:04:52 ►
bound to reveal all kinds of things about somebody.
01:04:57 ►
One person will want to be a tattooed jaguar.
01:05:01 ►
Another person will want to be the monolith from 2001.
01:05:04 ►
Another person person a cloud
01:05:06 ►
of smoke, another person a cabbage. All this is entirely possible. So the body, and you
01:05:14 ►
know, when you read Mark Derry’s book, Escape Velocity, you see how much tension this produces
01:05:20 ►
between the body and the mind. Because we’ve never before been forced to figure out
01:05:26 ►
what we really are and where we want to place our bets.
01:05:30 ►
What do you mean by Halloween?
01:05:34 ►
That sounds to me like a good description of Western civilization.
01:05:38 ►
Halloween every day for 3,000 years!
01:05:42 ►
Although Halloween I don’t want to knock.
01:05:44 ►
It’s a good pagan holiday.
01:05:47 ►
Maybe more like,
01:05:49 ►
oh, I don’t want to get anybody excited.
01:05:53 ►
Yeah.
01:05:53 ►
Are you familiar with VRML?
01:05:55 ►
Yeah, VRML, or virtual reality,
01:05:58 ►
is a place where the creativity,
01:06:00 ►
the staggering creativity of psychedelics
01:06:04 ►
can actually find a home.
01:06:07 ►
I mean, in any other field, you know, a five-hour trip full of a billion insights,
01:06:12 ►
but if you can take three and do something with them, that’s a pretty good average.
01:06:17 ►
Once you have the tools to create three-dimensional worlds that replicate what you’ve seen,
01:06:24 ►
then there will be unlimited
01:06:27 ►
possibilities. And of course, even now, there are groups that are psychedelically oriented.
01:06:34 ►
I mean, I think it’s probably only a matter of, perhaps it’s even online now, but a matter
01:06:39 ►
of months where people with high-speed connections will be able to visit the gallery of psychedelic simulations.
01:06:47 ►
Say, here’s the latest MDMA simulation.
01:06:52 ►
Here’s the latest DMT simulation
01:06:54 ►
with footnotes by Gracie and Zarkov.
01:06:58 ►
And here is something else.
01:06:59 ►
And also I think people should be allowed to say,
01:07:03 ►
you know, here’s the trip I had last night.
01:07:07 ►
And then people
01:07:08 ►
can go and check
01:07:09 ►
that out. So it’s about
01:07:12 ►
expanding communication skills.
01:07:14 ►
And as we do that,
01:07:16 ►
the differences between us
01:07:17 ►
and the similarities will, strangely
01:07:20 ►
enough, be simultaneously
01:07:21 ►
accelerated. And
01:07:24 ►
I think it’s a basis for real community.
01:07:27 ►
I think it’s amazing that with spoken speech,
01:07:31 ►
which operates at about 30 baud, I think,
01:07:34 ►
we were able to create and hold together
01:07:37 ►
a world civilization using speech
01:07:41 ►
transmitted over wire at 300 baud.
01:07:44 ►
That’s astonishing,
01:07:46 ►
that any cohesion at all could arise at such a,
01:07:49 ►
and the level of ambiguity is insane.
01:07:52 ►
I mean, the most uncool thing you can do
01:07:55 ►
in most social situations is say to somebody,
01:07:58 ►
would you explain to me what I just said?
01:08:01 ►
Then the illusion breaks down, you know, and you discover, no, we’re not
01:08:06 ►
all sailing on the same ship. But if we could see what we mean, if we could have an enhanced
01:08:14 ►
communication skill bordering on telepathy, there would be much less noise in the system much less wasted effort and so on and I think that
01:08:28 ►
you know the psychedelics have always existed there as a model for where
01:08:33 ►
technology could go I mean technology seems to have only two real places that
01:08:41 ►
it can go it can go toward lethality, weaponry, or entertainment.
01:08:49 ►
And, you know, between those two,
01:08:51 ►
we’ve got the hydrogen bomb.
01:08:54 ►
I think we need to proceed further along that
01:08:57 ►
and all the delivery systems
01:08:58 ►
and all the other forms of weapons,
01:09:00 ►
not nuclear, disease bombs and so forth and so on.
01:09:06 ►
People say, well, entertainment is trivial. Well, in this culture, a reasonable statement that really entertainment is communication
01:09:17 ►
of social values from one person and institution to another. There’s no sin in being interesting, which is all
01:09:26 ►
entertainment refers to. So where does this leave you? Anybody, anything? Not? Yeah.
01:09:37 ►
Well, I kind of see psychedelics as kind of the organic balance to the technical age.
01:09:48 ►
It seems to me that in psychedelics,
01:09:52 ►
it gives you that time to assimilate
01:09:57 ►
what you don’t have to assimilate
01:09:59 ►
as society is rapidly changing.
01:10:04 ►
We’re not being allowed to organically just assimilate all this new knowledge
01:10:10 ►
and acquire all this new information at a human type of level. It gives us a balance, an area that we can turn into
01:10:25 ►
and understand the new technology without being completely boggled by it.
01:10:37 ►
Yeah, what I hear you saying is it’s a kind of a benchmark
01:10:40 ►
to measure these things against.
01:10:44 ►
Yeah, I agree. Because psychedelics synergize creativity
01:10:50 ►
and because we happen to be in a highly technical society, much of the creativity synergized
01:10:57 ►
by psychedelics turns into code or hardware. That’s just a circumstance of the time we live in.
01:11:07 ►
I don’t see these things as at all opposed to each other.
01:11:11 ►
I sort of see them as the female and male side
01:11:15 ►
of the same intent.
01:11:18 ►
In other words,
01:11:20 ►
the psychedelics have always been here.
01:11:23 ►
So in that sense, the Internet has always been here.
01:11:27 ►
I mean, essentially what shamanism is,
01:11:29 ►
is aboriginal use of the natural net,
01:11:33 ►
is one way of thinking of it.
01:11:35 ►
They seem to transcend local time and space.
01:11:38 ►
They seem to recover information not available locally.
01:11:50 ►
information are not available locally. But the rise of technology then allows the male engineering mentality to mirror nature. And the exciting thing about nanotechnology is
01:11:59 ►
this is how nature does it. Nature builds from atoms up, and that’s how the nanotechnologists propose to do it.
01:12:09 ►
So in a sense, we’ve reached bedrock.
01:12:13 ►
There’s no, there are no, there are, this is, we’re in the ballpark now.
01:12:20 ►
This is the ballpark where Mother Nature plays, and we’re trying out for the team.
01:12:26 ►
Beyond nanotechnology, it’s very hard to imagine any sort of technology,
01:12:31 ►
at least any technology based in matter.
01:12:34 ►
And interestingly, the drugs are very much like nanomachines.
01:12:39 ►
And in a sense, when nanotechnology writes its own history,
01:12:44 ►
And in a sense, when nanotechnology writes its own history,
01:12:47 ►
it will probably look back to pharmacology and to molecular biology as its parental sciences.
01:12:54 ►
Because what is the designing of a drug
01:12:58 ►
but the building of a nanomachine?
01:13:02 ►
You know, the drug is designed to go in there, to locate the
01:13:06 ►
receptor, to insert itself into the receptor site, to affect the electron flow or open
01:13:12 ►
the membrane or whatever it’s supposed to do. And this is precisely nanotechnology.
01:13:22 ►
Well, I think we’re winding down here.
01:13:27 ►
I think it’s amazing that you’ve been my attention for eight hours in a row.
01:13:32 ►
I don’t think anybody can keep me focused.
01:13:35 ►
I can’t help doing anything.
01:13:37 ►
Well, it’s amazing to me.
01:13:43 ►
The basic notion here, I think, is an idea of radical freedom
01:13:48 ►
I mean this is not a cult of Terence McKenna
01:13:51 ►
it is not a drug cult
01:13:52 ►
it’s a cult of curiosity
01:13:55 ►
if it’s a cult of anything
01:13:56 ►
and what you’re supposed to understand when you come out of here
01:14:01 ►
that an open mind is a very precious thing
01:14:06 ►
and it should never be given away
01:14:07 ►
perhaps ever
01:14:09 ►
certainly never likely
01:14:11 ►
the truth can take care of itself
01:14:15 ►
it does not require your belief
01:14:18 ►
the truth need not be
01:14:20 ►
treated as fragile
01:14:22 ►
you can beat on the truth
01:14:24 ►
with ball-peen hammers and it will do just fine,
01:14:28 ►
thank you. So one should be respectful in the presence of truth, but not
01:14:36 ►
cowed or awed or something like that. The truth wants to be appreciated.
01:14:46 ►
It wants to be known.
01:14:48 ►
It can take care of itself.
01:14:50 ►
Belief is toxic.
01:14:53 ►
All belief.
01:14:53 ►
Don’t believe in anything.
01:14:55 ►
Live in the presence of the felt fact of immediate experience.
01:15:01 ►
Everything beyond that is conjecture.
01:15:10 ►
experience. Everything beyond that is conjecture. In contemporary society, we’re always in the past and in the future. But what is real are feelings. And feelings attain a nexus only in the moment.
01:15:21 ►
only in the moment so
01:15:22 ►
you know
01:15:24 ►
explore the edges
01:15:26 ►
keep your logical razors sharp
01:15:30 ►
trust nothing that you haven’t verified
01:15:33 ►
for yourself
01:15:35 ►
and
01:15:36 ►
my faith is that the universe will
01:15:41 ►
take you in
01:15:43 ►
and share with you its meaning and its intent and its conclusion.
01:15:52 ►
So that’s it. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you.
01:16:01 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:16:09 ►
It was interesting for me to hear how excited Terrence was about the possibilities of virtual reality.
01:16:15 ►
Keep in mind that this talk was given back in 1996,
01:16:19 ►
which is long before Terrence had his first in-depth experience of virtual reality at Bruce Dahmer’s house.
01:16:26 ►
What a shame that Terrence only had one occasion in which to test VR
01:16:30 ►
as a way to conduct his workshops in the future.
01:16:33 ►
Had he lived longer, I’m very sure that all of us would have experienced
01:16:37 ►
at least one McKenna workshop online that he was leading from his home in Hawaii.
01:16:42 ►
I also found it quite interesting to listen to some of Terence’s projections
01:16:47 ►
about how we would be living in the future.
01:16:50 ►
For one thing, that future is already here,
01:16:54 ►
particularly the part about what is called artificial intelligence.
01:16:58 ►
Although I part ways from Terence when he talks about the time wave,
01:17:02 ►
I am in sync with his thinking about what could happen
01:17:04 ►
if our machines become sentient.
01:17:07 ►
Of course, I’m not laying awake at night worrying about this,
01:17:11 ►
and I hope that you have better things to worry about as well.
01:17:14 ►
Nonetheless, well, artificial intelligence is for real,
01:17:18 ►
and if that is the field in which you are working,
01:17:21 ►
well, I hope that you remember that us humans
01:17:23 ►
actually do have a few good traits that might make it worthwhile to keep us around. Anyway, as we approach the end of 2017,
01:17:33 ►
I think that Terence’s closing words of wisdom some 21 years ago still make sense today. He said,
01:17:42 ►
so explore the edges, keep your logical razors sharp, and trust nothing that you
01:17:49 ►
haven’t verified for yourself. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:17:56 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.