575 - Countdown Into Complexity

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

https://www.psycherence.org/Date this lecture was recorded: March 1996

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The way to get off on DMT is after you feel completely peculiar you have to do one more enormous hit. This is where courage comes in.”

“A meme has gotten loose on this planet that is the social equivalent of cancer in my opinion, and what it is is capitalism. Capitalism does not serve human beings. It serves itself in the same way that cancer does not serve a human being.”

“The reason people fetishize objects is because they have no accessible dimension of inner worth. They feel worthless.”

“I think the Internet probably will turn out to be very toxic for capitalism.”

Psycherence 2018

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

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

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

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And it is my pleasure to begin today by thanking Joel L. for his donation to the salon to help with our expenses here.

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And I also want to thank my new Patreon supporter, Laura G., who also participated in last night’s Zoom conference with me and several other salonners. And I’d like to point out that in today’s program notes, which you’ll find at

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psychedelicsalon.com, you’ll see a poster advertising an upcoming conference that features

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Jeremy Narby, Susan Blackmore, Dennis McKenna, and Luis Eduardo Luna. And it’s coming up this

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September 21st in Tallinn, Estonia. And well, it promises to be a really important psychedelic event.

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If all goes well, I hope to be able to podcast some talks from this conference,

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but if there’s a way for you to attend in person,

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I think it would really be well worth your time and expense to do so.

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Because, in addition to a great conference,

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Tallinn, Estonia has been named Lonely Planet’s Best Value Destination of 2018.

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So, if you are a world traveler, well, it seems like this would be a good place to be this coming September.

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And I’ll be mentioning this again in future podcasts, but I thought I should mention it today

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because you can still obtain a discount ticket if you buy it before the 1st of August.

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Now, for the past few episodes here in the salon,

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we’ve been listening to some recordings that were sent to me by Ian Wynn.

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And after hearing the first two parts of this workshop,

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he sent me an email, and I’d like to read part of it here.

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You know, sometimes it’s easy for me to forget that

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these Terrence McKenna workshops aren’t only about Terrence.

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In fact, they most likely had a significantly greater impact on the lives of the people who attended them than they did on Terrence.

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You know, I can still remember sitting in the room where the Valley of Novelty recordings were made.

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And while there, I also found some people who, well, they had what I was looking for.

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So whenever I listen to one of those talks from back then,

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well, it takes me back to those wonderful days,

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days of being somewhat uncomfortable while sitting on the floor

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and listening to the Bard McKenna.

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So I thought that it would be interesting for you to hear a few memories

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from somebody who was actually there

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when the recording that we were about to listen to was made.

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And this is from Ian Wynn, and I quote,

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As mentioned, these tapes were given to me after the conference by the kindly staff at Esalen.

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They were stored in my parents’ attic in Central California for 20 years,

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under a black roof in the baking sun, and I’m frankly astounded at the sound quality.

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in the baking sun, and I’m frankly astounded at the sound quality. It’s a bit surreal,

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like attending a conference that had such a lasting impact on my life all over again.

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The first time I heard Terrence’s voice was in person, and I remember being entranced by his leprechaunic sing-song and getting distracted by some of his throwaway remarks, like time as a landscape,

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novelty having no morality,

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speaking of someone as an avowed techno-pagan.

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Even while talking about the ultimate goal of humanity,

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the internet and his infernal time wave,

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he always seemed at play,

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not taking himself too seriously,

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happy to surf the wave that is language.

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This particular podcast was bittersweet. The dude who asked Terrence about mapping his experiences onto myths and vice versa,

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playing a game with leprechauns that might yield something of value, around the one hour and seven

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minute mark, was a very good friend of mine who died a few years ago. His name was Greg Janelle, and Terrence took an immediate liking to him,

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as did almost everybody.

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I met Greg and his best friend Morlock at the conference.

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In their capacity as mail-order ministers with the Church of the Subgenius,

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the two of them conducted my wedding ceremony for my wife and I

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on a beach not far from Esalen.

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They were, in Terrence’s words,

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the people in the room who had what I was looking for. Greg was also my stay cool guy,

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working the pipe the last time I smoked DMT. Anyway, after a horrible second bout with leukemia,

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Greg took bodhisattva vows and died. Anyway, there’s a whole community who was thrilled to hear Greg’s voice again,

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and talking to Terence McKenna about leprechauns, no less.

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End quote.

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And it was this workshop, actually, that inspired Ian to document his adventures

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when he left this workshop at Esalen,

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and it’s in his newly re-released novel,

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The Technopagan Octopus Messiah, which I’ll link

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to in today’s program notes. So now let’s return to the March 1996 Terence McKenna workshop that

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we just heard about. But first, a little spoiler alert here. Before the next half hour is up,

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you’re going to hear Terence go on about the possibility of a worldwide economic collapse

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and the further possibility that China may be about to start another world war.

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But as you listen to him take off on this rant,

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try to relate what he’s saying to the state of the world today.

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My point being that, as my dear sainted mother often said,

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everything has changed, but nothing is different.

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Well, the blooming and buzzing confusion which the infant experiences is the same world we’re

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looking at right now, except that the infant has no language for it. Now, the interesting thing

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about the DMT thing is you have no language for it. That’s interesting point number one.

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Interesting point number two,

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somebody arrives on the scene

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eager to provide language.

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That’s suggestive.

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So it seems like what they’re saying is,

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you know, we’ve stamped your passport,

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you’re over the border,

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but no one here speaks English,

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so if you want to make yourself understood,

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please pick

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up the local lingo johnny pronto and in fact we’ve assigned a team teaching group uh the feeling of

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the dmt thing and this is why i entertain the possibility that might be an anticipation of death. What happens when you smoke DMT is there’s an initial kind of handshaking confusion,

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like when two computers meet and exchange protocols.

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There’s a 30-second period where everything sort of gets sorted out, and this thing forms

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like a mandala i call it the chrysanthemum and it’s a rotating orange

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yellow floral circular mandalic thing if you have not taken enough it is a kind of like a kind of

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rubberized membrane or something if you haven’t taken enough you’ll hit it and bounce off and have this really

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ambiguous experience

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which is pretty horrible actually

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just kind of confusion

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which slowly goes away

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but if you’ve taken enough

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and the key to taking enough

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and here comes a piece of practical advice

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that may be worth more than the entire

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workshop, the way to get off

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on DMT is after you feel completely peculiar,

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you have to do one more enormous hit.

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This is where courage comes in.

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Most people, they take it,

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and they say, it’s working.

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This stuff feels really weird.

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It’s really working.

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Say, do one more hit.

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And they say, no, no, it’s working.

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Say, no, do one more hit. And they say, no, no, it’s working.

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Say, no, do one more hit.

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So then you do, or we say you do.

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You penetrate that membrane, and you go through a series of like,

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to me it’s like a ramp,

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but it’s like a series of disystolic compressions

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that push me forward.

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Birth canal analogy obviously

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and then I break into the elf dome

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or the hive as I call it

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and certain intuitions accompany this

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without any rationale

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and one is I’m underground

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this place is warm it’s domed, it’s reasonably well lit,

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but there’s enormous weight above my head.

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I’m far under the earth somehow.

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Fairies, as we all know, live under hills.

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So then I’m there,

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and the elves and the elf machines and the language lesson are proceeding,

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but if I can stabilize and calm my hysteria

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so that I can maintain some kind of objectivity,

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I notice that really the place I break into

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is somebody very odd, someone very strange.

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It’s their idea of a reassuring environment for a human being.

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Somebody who doesn’t know very much about human beings,

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but who’s really trying hard, built this terrarium of arrival.

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And it has the aura of a maternity ward. And I’ve thought, you know, these

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self-transforming elf machines, which I take so seriously and try to make the basis for a new

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ontology, they could be nothing more profound than those plastic shapes that we hang over a baby’s bassinet to teach it to coordinate space and color.

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In other words, what those things are is they’re educational toys.

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They aren’t the main clam.

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They’re not in charge of the hospital.

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They’re just something dumped in your arrival playpen

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to keep you happy while the doctors make the observation and the doctors

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never appear and the whole thing is pervaded with a wonderful affection and zaniness it’s completely

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life-affirming i have no patience with alien abduction and any of that. I think that’s pathology. I think

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it’s media damaged people manipulated by incredibly unscrupulous new age weirdos.

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There is no paranoia in this. It’s entirely positive, although very, very weird. The main

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thing it is, is hard to understand.

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What’s this all for, you know?

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Maybe you thought you were going to have an insight into your relationship

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or resolve your hatred of your father,

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and instead you’re playing canasta with elves.

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Yeah.

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Is the experience progressive?

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Not very.

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It’s always the same. The emphasis is on imitating the language and

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so you don’t sense that there’s a breakthrough point beyond that i mean as as you’ve mentioned

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passing through the membrane getting into this environment now you’re in this environment the

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exchange is taking place you’re dealing with it on a rudimentary basis,

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but you don’t have any perception that there’s an increase.

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Well, the problem is the brevity.

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We very quickly figured this out back in the 60s.

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You only get three minutes.

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It’s like visiting the American Museum of Natural History for three minutes.

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So what we really need was an extender.

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And that was why we went to the Amazon in the first place,

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was because ayahuasca from the anthropological literature

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sounded like it was the extender.

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And in fact, if you brew it stiff enough, it is,

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and you can get in there for quite a while.

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But it doesn’t become particularly more rationally apprehendable.

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It’s a great mystery. It’s a puzzle, it shouldn’t exist.

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It’s the thing which you don’t believe exists.

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It does.

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I just had a crazy idea.

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You’re talking about elves, I’m thinking about Santa Claus.

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And flying in a sled, having a red-nosed ranger and seeing in the dark

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and rangers eating mushrooms

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and so on.

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You want me to extend your list for you?

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Santa Claus’s colors are red and white.

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Santa Claus is associated with the spruce tree.

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The spruce tree is the mycorrhizal symbiote of the amanita.

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The amanita is associated with magical flight.

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Santa Claus flies.

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The amanita is associated with reindeer.

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He flies with the aid of reindeer.

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He makes gifts for all the boys and girls in the world

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with the help of elves.

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Elves, in all traditions, are what are called demon artificers.

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They make things.

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That’s what elves do, whether it’s shoes or gold jewelry, or they make things.

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Elves are artificers. Now now what else before i leave this

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theme ah santa claus lives at the north pole the north pole is the axis mundi the

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igdrasil the magic world ash of north north shamanism grows at the north pole you pile all

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this stuff up and you say this has got to be an ancient memory of a Namanita cult.

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Although I’ve looked at Santa Claus,

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and I have never found a source that would trace it back

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further than the 10th century.

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But I maintain, you know, it’s Paleolithic, probably.

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Yeah.

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The probability of finding a new tryptamine

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that we weren’t aware of that

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extends the trip, so to speak,

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30 minutes of time to get the language down,

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they also might be sort of, you know.

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Well, Sasha, you know, is now

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working on the tryptamines, and

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I asked him in Mexico, I said,

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you know, of all of these tryptamines

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you’ve elaborated, which ones

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are the most interesting? I can’t remember the one he named, but it was a synthetic, and he said it was

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extended. There’s a certain, I don’t know if fear is the word, but these places are

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really strange, and for most people, three minutes is quite enough.

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And then they need to attempt to assimilate it.

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Part of the problem is you can’t remember it.

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I mean, I’ve seen people smoke DMT,

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give all the presentation of intoxication,

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come down, lie still,

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and when you say, what happened?

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They say, nothing happened, nothing at all happened, and furthermore, I think I won’t be seeing too much of you in the future.

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In fact, I’m sure of it.

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What about the possibility of sort of the analog of going to the gym before going out and doing a sports activity.

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That one practices remembering dreams

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or trying to experience

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the weirdest sober things possible

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in order to have the most stamina in the

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altered state. Isn’t the dream

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itself, the images

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a language?

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I mean, isn’t there a form of…

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Aren’t your images communicating something

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to you through images?

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You mean in a normal dream?

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In a normal dream, there’s the citizens

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of the dream that come.

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And depending upon

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whether you’re visual or auditory or whatever,

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they’re communicating to you as well.

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So you’re watching,

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observing and participating

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and feeling, and you’re getting

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messages at the same time well and the dream world itself is is very bizarre i i have recurrent

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dreams a lot of my dreams are recurrent and i had an experience recently i was having a recurrent

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dream and uh it was basically I was in a restaurant,

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and this guy was taking my order.

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And as I looked at him, I realized I had seen him before in a dream.

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And I said, I’ve seen you before, but it’s been a long, long time.

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And he said, yeah, well, I went to Alaska and worked the salmon boats for a while,

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but now I’m back. you know because they’re they’re always interacting with the same power sources they’re getting new ones but they’re interacting that’s

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right yeah

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the power source.

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That’s right.

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Yeah.

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When you’re talking about the images that you’re

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describing,

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what happens to my

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understanding is

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it sounds like

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these are the keepers

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of the patterns of life,

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in a sense.

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They’re the keepers of

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the DNA,

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or when something

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comes into life,

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a species or a species

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exits life, that there or a species exits life,

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that there is a gathering up of the patterns.

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And it’s the life itself.

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We don’t understand that realm or that form,

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but maybe in this altered state that we get to go into

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and see what it’s like to gather up patterns

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and illustrate to us how the patterns, because

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it’s kind of like it’s a joyous thing, you know, life in itself, that the keepers would

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be something.

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Well, imagine how astonishing it would be if we could confirm that there was something

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beyond death and that in fact it was not only there was something,

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but whatever this something was was actually looking back at us.

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I was raised Catholic and took a lot of time to deconstruct this kind of stuff.

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It did not seem to me rationally supportable.

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But actually that’s in the light of a fairly simple rationalism.

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Now I look at nature, and everywhere what I see is that nature conserves novelty. This is something

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you’ll hear me say many times. In other words, once nature achieves some structure, she is very reluctant to let it go.

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Life is an example.

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Life was achieved more than a billion years ago.

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And through asteroid cataclysm and polar reverse and solar dynamic,

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it is tenaciously, tenaciously held on.

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So it may be that this thing,

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which we call the personality, the self,

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is actually of interest to nature

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as a complex structure,

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and that it really does use the physical body

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as a kind of workbench upon which to build a higher dimensional vehicle of some sort.

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Otherwise, it’s very hard to account for some of what’s going on.

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And this is one of the most confounding ideas that you could put forth in this intellectual environment, because if there’s one thing that science has definitely put some without intent, without will, without sentience.

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It’s just happening. It’s mutation grinding against natural selection, and that’s all it is,

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according to them. Well, evidence from the shamanic dimension seems to be quite the contrary.

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dimension seems to be quite the contrary. By the way, this is what I intended to talk about this afternoon. I was not led astray. My notion of this afternoon was

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that what we would talk about is the various characteristics of novelty. This

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morning we talked about the methods, then the various characteristics of novelty, and DMT represents a concrescence of novelty. It is the paradigmatic psychedelic, it’s the paradigmatic dimension-transiting experience.

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experience other descents into novelty are your own maturation, your individual experience of life.

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Hopefully, if you’re getting older, you’re getting smarter. There’s no excuse for anything else. How would it be if it worked the other way? Although for some people, they seem to manage that. So life, that so life your life is a descent into novelty as well leading they all door all these novel

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paths lead to the same door marked post-mortem history is another descent into novelty and now

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that descent is proceeding at such a pace that we can almost physically feel ourselves moving into the future.

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I mean, we require daily newspapers and hourly updates

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to stay on the moving crest of what we have set loose.

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So the individual journey through life toward death,

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the cultural journey toward transcendence, eschatology, apocalypse,

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whatever it is, depending on the cultural style,

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and then fractally embedded in these larger forms of novelty,

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the psychedelic experience,

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and, in the spirit of thoroughness, the sexual experience,

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which against the background of ordinary life and activity,

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definitely represents a nexus of novelty and focus.

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So all of these things are descents into novelty,

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and then I maintain on a still more micro scale,

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this period of time we’re experiencing

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between the end of February and mid-summer

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a similar thing that these patterns repeat

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and sometimes they’re extremely dramatic

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I suppose death itself being the most

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dramatic example because basically

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that’s the trip from which you do not return

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and so forth.

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You’re aware that Friday was the biggest single change in financial markets in the last seven years?

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No, I flew Thursday. What happened Friday?

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Well, the stock market lost 180 points.

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The bond market had a disastrous…

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You know when bonds fell?

00:24:10 ►

Yielded pretty support.

00:24:12 ►

The market fell how far?

00:24:13 ►

180 points.

00:24:14 ►

On Friday?

00:24:16 ►

Well, they must be shitting white over the weekend.

00:24:18 ►

What’s going to happen Monday morning?

00:24:20 ►

Right, Monday’s a big day.

00:24:21 ►

Well, I…

00:24:22 ►

I win!

00:24:24 ►

I win!

00:24:21 ►

Right, Monday’s a big day.

00:24:24 ►

Well, I win!

00:24:32 ►

Not that the stock market is the revelation of God’s holy will for mankind,

00:24:37 ►

but notice that what is interesting about the stock market,

00:24:40 ►

even if you don’t give a hoot about money or capitalism,

00:24:45 ►

is that it’s an effort to mass average change.

00:24:48 ►

It’s an effort to give you a very large-scale picture of many, many opinions brought into a final recension of some sort.

00:24:58 ►

So in a way, it is like the time wave.

00:25:01 ►

It is, and just to further your thought,

00:25:04 ►

the great article in The Economist

00:25:06 ►

from last week,

00:25:07 ►

International Magazine of Finance,

00:25:10 ►

that put a statistical correlation now

00:25:13 ►

on all of the world’s markets

00:25:15 ►

becoming interlocked.

00:25:17 ►

All the big developed country markets

00:25:20 ►

are not acting independently of each other

00:25:22 ►

as they used to.

00:25:23 ►

The rubber band force is becoming much tighter. Well, see, if they would study dynamics, this wouldn’t puzzle them at all.

00:25:31 ►

That’s a well-known phenomenon in dynamics. It’s called coupled oscillation. The simplest example

00:25:37 ►

being walk into a Swiss cuckoo shop and all the cuckoo clocks hanging on the wall the pendulums are swinging in unison that’s not

00:25:47 ►

because the guy spent hours setting the cuckoo clocks it’s because hanging them on the wall

00:25:53 ►

they actually communicate their vibrations to each other through the wall and after a few hours of

00:25:59 ►

running at all kinds of different speeds, everything falls into step.

00:26:05 ►

Coupled oscillation.

00:26:07 ►

Women in dormitories,

00:26:09 ►

their menstruation falls into phase.

00:26:12 ►

That’s a coupled biological oscillator.

00:26:14 ►

And you get this in many, many systems.

00:26:18 ►

And the problem with it is,

00:26:20 ►

in something like a stock market situation,

00:26:22 ►

is it then tends to amplify

00:26:25 ►

small perturbations into very large perturbations

00:26:29 ►

and the entire system then tends to destabilize

00:26:33 ►

well that’s very interesting

00:26:35 ►

next week could be major

00:26:37 ►

the way the descent into novelty will work

00:26:40 ►

is there’s no earth shaking moment

00:26:43 ►

for many months preceding the 25th of February,

00:26:48 ►

and we’ll look at this tonight,

00:26:49 ►

but for many months preceding the 25th of February,

00:26:53 ►

things have become more and more locked,

00:26:57 ►

conservative, recidivist, whatever you want to call it,

00:27:00 ►

habitual, traditional, repetitious.

00:27:03 ►

Then the cusp was the 25th of February,

00:27:06 ►

but you don’t feel the earth move.

00:27:10 ►

The 26th is not greatly different from the 25th.

00:27:15 ►

The 27th is slightly more different.

00:27:18 ►

The 28th still slightly more,

00:27:20 ►

but over the next two months,

00:27:22 ►

every day will mark a greater descent into novelty.

00:27:28 ►

And as I say, a worldwide economic collapse would certainly precipitate all kinds of other

00:27:34 ►

changes, and there’s plenty of instability in the system.

00:27:39 ►

And the Chinese are playing with the idea of world war, at least their military are, while the political people are busy dying.

00:27:48 ►

Once you get the internationalist rhetoric out of Marxism,

00:27:53 ►

what you have is national socialism.

00:27:56 ►

So it isn’t communists that are about to return to power in Russia.

00:28:00 ►

It’s national socialism that’s about to take power in Russia.

00:28:04 ►

That’s a terrifying possibility.

00:28:09 ►

And then, of course, as I said, the unexpected,

00:28:11 ►

which can be anything from asteroid strike to technical innovation

00:28:15 ►

to Ebola outbreak to political assassination.

00:28:20 ►

These things are, you know, you can bet on the unexpected.

00:28:25 ►

It’s the safest bet on the table.

00:28:28 ►

The curious thing for me, again, going back to millenarianism,

00:28:32 ►

is that in a sense the construct is an abstraction.

00:28:37 ►

We are not reaching the year 2000.

00:28:40 ►

In essence, it means nothing.

00:28:43 ►

It is the energy that we bring to it

00:28:46 ►

that in a sense creates the atmosphere

00:28:48 ►

for the events to take place.

00:28:51 ►

Well, you mean that the year 2000

00:28:54 ►

is no different from any other year?

00:28:56 ►

Exactly.

00:28:56 ►

Well, except that,

00:28:59 ►

if you look at the way society frames its values,

00:29:03 ►

one of the largest value frames that we have,

00:29:08 ►

perhaps arguably the largest,

00:29:09 ►

is the calendar.

00:29:12 ►

And so once you accept a calendar,

00:29:15 ►

then its rhythms become automatic.

00:29:19 ►

And so here we are,

00:29:20 ►

facing the turn of a thousand years,

00:29:22 ►

which you’re right,

00:29:23 ►

in and of itself, it’s nothing,

00:29:26 ►

but because we are psychologically driven by it,

00:29:29 ►

it becomes something.

00:29:31 ►

You can hear these politicians, if they have no rhetoric,

00:29:34 ►

they just use the calendar itself as a rhetorical launching pad

00:29:39 ►

and try to make that seem like progress.

00:29:43 ►

Here’s a progressive program.

00:29:45 ►

We’ll turn the millennium.

00:29:47 ►

Well, we’re going to turn the millennium,

00:29:49 ►

and whether it’s progressive or not,

00:29:52 ►

there will be a lot of Christian hysteria

00:29:57 ►

as we approach the millennium,

00:29:59 ►

because it’s not only,

00:30:01 ►

well, it’s their last chance.

00:30:04 ►

I mean, I don’t think anybody believes that in 3000,

00:30:09 ►

Christianity will be making a major push.

00:30:13 ►

This is their last chance to deliver,

00:30:15 ►

and they are very confident of the delivery.

00:30:18 ►

And so there is a spreading hysteria.

00:30:21 ►

And of course, whenever society becomes incomprehensible people assume that the

00:30:27 ►

end is near and that seems to attend that spreading social confusion millenarianism is inevitably

00:30:35 ►

well not inevitably but largely a phenomenon of the displaced, the economically desperate, and so forth.

00:30:47 ►

Yeah.

00:30:49 ►

What do you think is going to happen?

00:30:50 ►

Is there going to be another nativistic movement?

00:30:52 ►

A large cargo cult?

00:30:54 ►

What’s going to happen?

00:30:56 ►

You mean over the next ten years or so?

00:30:58 ►

With Pat Buchanan?

00:31:00 ►

I don’t think so.

00:31:02 ►

I think Pat Buchanan is discovering the world is even more novel than he supposed.

00:31:10 ►

If you’ve never won and you win, that’s novel.

00:31:16 ►

But now it’s time to win again, and it’s no longer novel.

00:31:20 ►

You’re back with the problem you had before you won the first time. I’m very hopeful

00:31:30 ►

because as I look at large scales of time, I see that what has always been conserved

00:31:35 ►

is greater richness of opportunity, greater freedom. And the way I define the ultimate omega point of novelty is it must be the place

00:31:50 ►

where all things become possible. How could it not be that? Because that’s what novelty means,

00:31:58 ►

is strange things being possible. Well, when all strange things are possible, you’ve met the novelty maxima.

00:32:06 ►

Well, how could such a place exist? Well, it couldn’t unless you move into hyperspace,

00:32:13 ►

or if you invent time travel, or something like that, then you break the forward momentum of

00:32:20 ►

linear history. But that’s conceivable. I meanivable there’s no reason intrinsically

00:32:26 ►

why time travel is

00:32:28 ►

impossible

00:32:28 ►

and time travel is simply

00:32:31 ►

00:32:33 ►

romanic

00:32:35 ►

for

00:32:36 ►

transformation of energy

00:32:39 ►

and matter on all scales

00:32:41 ►

time travel is faster than light

00:32:44 ►

travel, these things all become the same thing and matter on all scales. Time travel is faster than light travel.

00:32:45 ►

These things all become the same thing.

00:32:48 ►

And there is no reason why

00:32:51 ►

these things can’t be anticipated.

00:32:54 ►

The whole purpose of data coordination,

00:32:57 ►

whether it’s occurring in an amoeba

00:32:59 ►

or a mega international corporation,

00:33:03 ►

the purpose of data coordination

00:33:05 ►

is to predict the future.

00:33:07 ►

Always.

00:33:09 ►

I mean, that’s what your senses do for you.

00:33:11 ►

You know, notice when you look over there

00:33:14 ►

and decide to walk over there,

00:33:17 ►

you’re also deciding to walk over then.

00:33:21 ►

In other words, you are coordinating data

00:33:23 ►

to move through time and space

00:33:24 ►

toward a future point

00:33:26 ►

and the whole evolution of life

00:33:29 ►

on one level can be seen

00:33:33 ►

as a conquest of dimensions

00:33:35 ►

the earliest forms of life were

00:33:38 ►

fixed slimes

00:33:42 ►

of some sort

00:33:43 ►

and then motility

00:33:45 ►

motion became a possibility

00:33:47 ►

but just basically groping in a linear line

00:33:50 ►

unable to see what is ahead of you

00:33:54 ►

unable to see what you’ve just left

00:33:56 ►

but groping, groping

00:33:58 ►

well then over time and through evolution

00:34:00 ►

light sensitive chemicals get sequestered on the surface of these organisms.

00:34:07 ►

And now they have a gradient that tells them where light is, and they can go toward it or away from

00:34:16 ►

it. They are gaining dimensional sophistication. Well, from that point to the evolution of human beings it’s basically evolution works on one theme

00:34:27 ►

the developing of better bodies

00:34:29 ►

for the conquest of three dimensional space

00:34:32 ►

so the fin turns into the leg

00:34:36 ►

and so forth and so on

00:34:38 ►

and then finally that’s like fulfilled

00:34:41 ►

in higher animals

00:34:43 ►

the cheetah can run 70 miles an hour and so forth and so on.

00:34:47 ►

These are the limits of flesh

00:34:51 ►

are achieved. But then at that point,

00:34:55 ►

mind begins to flex its muscle and move forward.

00:34:59 ►

And what is language but the ability

00:35:03 ►

to recreate the past in the present

00:35:06 ►

or to recreate the hypothetical in the present?

00:35:09 ►

In other words, in a world without language, experience is always being lost.

00:35:16 ►

You have it and then it goes away.

00:35:18 ►

If you can talk about it around the campfire and tell the stories,

00:35:23 ►

then the past stays with you and the ancestors

00:35:28 ►

accompany you on your journey through time. Well, then if you get still more sophisticated

00:35:34 ►

and begin to write, now not only the great myths, the enduring triumphs and tragedies of your group can be kept,

00:35:46 ►

but all the minutia, the tax records,

00:35:50 ►

the tallies of crops bought and sold,

00:35:53 ►

the king lists, everything can be kept.

00:35:57 ►

And now, you know, through the transformation of media electronically,

00:36:02 ►

we essentially, the past is a file in our world.

00:36:08 ►

And the file is more and more,

00:36:11 ►

once we have VR,

00:36:14 ►

much of the past will stay around

00:36:16 ►

as an adjunct to the present.

00:36:19 ►

On the other end of that equation,

00:36:22 ►

we have developed incredibly powerful mathematical tools

00:36:26 ►

for predicting and extending data into the future.

00:36:31 ►

It’s terribly, terribly important.

00:36:34 ►

The stock market is a good example.

00:36:36 ►

I mean, we need to know how these markets operate

00:36:39 ►

in order to avoid social confusion and breakdown of social systems. Inventory theory is a place

00:36:49 ►

where you need to know six weeks, ten weeks out where you’re going to be. Because if you’re

00:36:56 ►

warehousing a lot of stuff, you’re losing money. If you can refine your predictive understanding of how your market operates,

00:37:05 ►

you can save a lot of money.

00:37:07 ►

You can save and make money by predicting the future.

00:37:11 ►

This has not been lost on anybody.

00:37:14 ►

And so there’s a great deal of interest in doing this.

00:37:18 ►

Well, if this is a valid program of research,

00:37:23 ►

valid program of research,

00:37:27 ►

then its holy grail would obviously be as complete a prediction of the future as is feasible.

00:37:34 ►

And I think the time wave and catastrophe theory

00:37:38 ►

and complexity theory and these things

00:37:41 ►

are new techniques and new styles of trying to approach that ideal.

00:37:47 ►

Yeah.

00:37:48 ►

What constitutes something that

00:37:50 ►

includes you and say, wait, that was a novel

00:37:52 ►

that’s typified novelty

00:37:54 ►

because things that I’ve been hearing about so far

00:37:56 ►

have to do with like

00:37:57 ►

presidential elections or

00:37:59 ►

stock market crashes. None of that seems

00:38:02 ►

very novel to me.

00:38:03 ►

Yeah, well, that’s a good question.

00:38:07 ►

Novelty, I think I may have mentioned this, but it’s worth discussing.

00:38:12 ►

Novelty should never occur without its ghost concept accompanying it,

00:38:20 ►

which is its opposite, which is habit.

00:38:23 ►

In my version of how the universe works,

00:38:27 ►

it’s a struggle between these two forces,

00:38:30 ►

habit and novelty.

00:38:33 ►

And in a period of a million years,

00:38:35 ►

there’s a way to draw the picture of the battle.

00:38:39 ►

And in the last ten minutes,

00:38:41 ►

there’s a way to draw the picture of the battle.

00:38:44 ►

So what is habit?

00:38:45 ►

Habit is repetition of activities already accomplished. Repetition is habit.

00:38:55 ►

Tradition is habit. Limited risk-taking is habit. I think you get the idea. Novelty, on the other hand, is high-risk, new, untried,

00:39:12 ►

strange, unusual, stands out from the surrounding environment, and surprises.

00:39:22 ►

and surprises.

00:39:27 ►

So against God’s intercession into history,

00:39:30 ►

Pat Buchanan’s win in New Hampshire may not appear to be greatly novel,

00:39:33 ►

but that’s not the correct scale of comparison.

00:39:37 ►

The correct scale of comparison

00:39:39 ►

was the expectation that he would lose.

00:39:44 ►

You see, so habit and novelty

00:39:46 ►

occur in the most sublime

00:39:48 ►

and mundane

00:39:49 ►

dimensions

00:39:51 ►

because they’re relative

00:39:54 ►

terms, they’re always measured

00:39:56 ►

against their surround

00:39:58 ►

so that you know if you’re in

00:40:01 ►

some incredibly constipated

00:40:03 ►

ritual dominated society and you so much as put a spot If you’re in some incredibly constipated, ritual-dominated society,

00:40:06 ►

and you so much as put a spot of paint on your toenail,

00:40:11 ►

social ripples go out from this.

00:40:14 ►

It has to be explained, defended.

00:40:16 ►

What does this mean? Who does it challenge?

00:40:18 ►

It’s a novel act against the background of such constipated expectations. On the other hand,

00:40:25 ►

there are societies where full-body elective surgery won’t even get a ripple from your gang

00:40:32 ►

when you show up at the coffeehouse. So that’s an area where the standards of novelty and habit

00:40:40 ►

are different. Over large scales of time, it seems very clear to me that the story of our

00:40:48 ►

universe is novelty is winning. Novelty is winning. It’s a very slow battle of attrition

00:40:58 ►

because habit is so reluctant to give ground and will take ground back. But over large scales of time,

00:41:08 ►

novelty is winning. That’s where we come into the picture. That’s why there’s life on this planet.

00:41:15 ►

That’s why there’s people on this planet. That’s why there’s high technology on this planet.

00:41:20 ►

Because novelty is winning. That’s one point. The other point is it’s winning faster and faster.

00:41:29 ►

It isn’t simply proceeding at the same pace.

00:41:34 ►

What happens in a 10-year period now

00:41:37 ►

is orders of magnitude more connections being made

00:41:43 ►

than were made in a ten or thousand or perhaps

00:41:47 ►

million year period at times in the past. And all time is, is the connections, the events which

00:41:56 ►

fill it. In other words, if you think of a million years in absolutely empty space and ask how long, what’s it like

00:42:06 ►

to experience a million years in absolutely empty space

00:42:09 ►

it passes in an instant

00:42:12 ►

because nothing happened

00:42:16 ►

if nothing happened

00:42:18 ►

then there was no time

00:42:19 ►

time is defined by the events which fill it

00:42:23 ►

if there are no events, time collapses into nothingness.

00:42:28 ►

A universe in which nothing happens is a universe that has no duration.

00:42:34 ►

So you need duality to have time.

00:42:36 ►

Yeah, yeah.

00:42:38 ►

It’s an illusion of a lower dimensional slice of reality.

00:42:43 ►

You need duality. Is it a priori like you can’t say?

00:42:48 ►

Is the dualism a priori?

00:42:52 ►

It’s given, if that’s what you mean by

00:42:56 ►

a priori. It’s a real thing, and by that we could

00:43:00 ►

argue what that means, but it’s a real thing in the same way that space, time,

00:43:04 ►

and space, gravitation

00:43:06 ►

and energy are real

00:43:07 ►

things. It’s not a construct

00:43:09 ►

of the human mind.

00:43:13 ►

Can I try my idea of

00:43:15 ►

the reason for the cataclysm

00:43:18 ►

that’s fast

00:43:20 ►

approaching or

00:43:20 ►

the

00:43:22 ►

extension of novelty.

00:43:28 ►

Let me

00:43:28 ►

start at the

00:43:29 ►

beginning.

00:43:31 ►

One definition

00:43:32 ►

of enlightenment,

00:43:34 ►

one definition,

00:43:34 ►

one narrow

00:43:35 ►

definition,

00:43:36 ►

is the

00:43:37 ►

growing

00:43:38 ►

together of

00:43:39 ►

the gap

00:43:40 ►

between

00:43:40 ►

desire and

00:43:41 ►

fulfillment.

00:43:43 ►

And I

00:43:43 ►

think what

00:43:43 ►

we have

00:43:44 ►

managed to

00:43:44 ►

accomplish

00:43:44 ►

with our culture

00:43:45 ►

is we’ve produced a society that is arranging for fulfillment and desire

00:43:52 ►

with technological systems performing to their utmost to pull that off.

00:44:00 ►

So people are becoming fulfilled on a physical level.

00:44:05 ►

They’re becoming enlightened technically,

00:44:08 ►

but there’s no matching change in how they feel about themselves.

00:44:13 ►

So there’s this horror coming over the horizon

00:44:17 ►

of people finding themselves with everything they always wanted

00:44:23 ►

and feeling totally not right about it.

00:44:27 ►

That to me characterizes the neighborhood I live in

00:44:31 ►

real well. People are going faster and faster and faster

00:44:35 ►

with more and more and more stuff and not feeling good about it.

00:44:39 ►

If we get to the end point of that process,

00:44:43 ►

we come to a place where people are intensely frustrated

00:44:47 ►

because they’ve got everything but nothing is right.

00:44:50 ►

To me, that feels like a change of state time.

00:44:55 ►

Well, yeah, somehow it’s a real problem

00:44:59 ►

because a meme has gotten loose on this planet

00:45:04 ►

that is the social equivalent of cancer, in my opinion.

00:45:09 ►

And what it is, is it’s capitalism.

00:45:13 ►

Capitalism does not serve human beings.

00:45:17 ►

It serves itself in the same way that cancer does not serve a human being.

00:45:23 ►

It serves itself.

00:45:23 ►

in the same way that cancer does not serve a human being.

00:45:24 ►

It serves itself.

00:45:33 ►

What I mean by this is that it fetishizes objects and it tries to tell you that certain objects will make you happy

00:45:38 ►

if you can possess them.

00:45:41 ►

Well, then you work very hard to possess them,

00:45:43 ►

but then you’re not happy.

00:45:45 ►

At the same time it is raising these expectations in the hearts and minds of

00:45:53 ►

millions and millions of people that it knows it can’t deliver to. If you

00:45:59 ►

cut all the rainforests and dug all the metals, you couldn’t deliver the middle-class American lifestyle

00:46:06 ►

to the population of the planet. And the effort to do so would wreck the entire ecological system.

00:46:15 ►

So capitalism either has to transform itself from within, because no human being or institution can oppose it. Or there has to come some force from the outside

00:46:30 ►

which will break it down.

00:46:32 ►

I don’t know what that could be

00:46:35 ►

unless it would be a revulsion

00:46:37 ►

over what the cost of practicing capitalism is.

00:46:44 ►

In other words, if we could create,

00:46:46 ►

and this is a job for media.

00:46:48 ►

The media has basically whored itself

00:46:52 ►

to the capitalist agenda

00:46:54 ►

and knows no way out.

00:46:58 ►

The media in the naive era,

00:47:01 ►

before all this stuff was figured out,

00:47:03 ►

was assumed to educate and inform the citizens so

00:47:07 ►

that rational decisions could be made. That’s not what it’s about now. Now it’s to distort,

00:47:13 ►

manipulate, delude, and mislead. What is needed is a rediscovery of inner wealth. This is, again, the psychedelic thing.

00:47:26 ►

The reason people fetishize objects

00:47:28 ►

is because they have no accessible dimension of inner worth.

00:47:34 ►

They feel worthless without the Ferrari

00:47:38 ►

and the cuisine art and whatever this object is that they’re into.

00:47:42 ►

Once you take psychedelics,

00:47:45 ►

you discover that you are shabby stuff

00:47:49 ►

compared to the inner wealth of your own imagination.

00:47:53 ►

But unless you know that,

00:47:55 ►

you will always want after that stuff.

00:47:58 ►

So my hope is,

00:48:00 ►

and it seems to accompany psychedelic use, I think,

00:48:04 ►

less interest in material possessions.

00:48:07 ►

Not that people dress in hair shirts and wander the byways,

00:48:12 ►

but I think people who take psychedelics make and lose money

00:48:16 ►

in a considerably more relaxed fashion than people who don’t.

00:48:22 ►

There are several sources of such an enlightenment

00:48:25 ►

that is inner wealth versus external wealth.

00:48:28 ►

One of them is trauma.

00:48:29 ►

A lot of families who lose a son or daughter

00:48:31 ►

or nearly lose one

00:48:32 ►

rediscover what their values are.

00:48:34 ►

Right.

00:48:35 ►

Psychedelic one is a very common one.

00:48:37 ►

And since it’s at a single moment,

00:48:39 ►

it’s often recognized as the source.

00:48:41 ►

I think oftentimes people do have that kind of enlightenment,

00:48:43 ►

but the source is hard to find or it happens gradually. Psychedelia, I mean, someone can

00:48:47 ►

come down from the first asset trip and go, wow, I see my values like I didn’t see them before.

00:48:51 ►

I’m quitting my job. I’ve had it. What other experiences, you know,

00:48:55 ►

I’m trying to broaden the category besides trauma and psychedelia and perhaps

00:48:59 ►

the forces of losing all of your work. Like people lose in a a stock market, and they jump out a window, or they go,

00:49:06 ►

hey, I’ve got choices I didn’t see before.

00:49:07 ►

I don’t have to, like, defend my castle anymore.

00:49:09 ►

Well, the two other things are a near-death experience.

00:49:13 ►

That brings, that forces you to figure out

00:49:16 ►

what you really give a hoot about.

00:49:18 ►

And the other, I think, a little pleasanter

00:49:21 ►

than the near-death experience, is travel.

00:49:26 ►

You know? Go live in Benares for a year

00:49:29 ►

and then see how this looks to you

00:49:33 ►

it’s not for nothing that we call these psychedelic experiences trips

00:49:38 ►

the only thing I know that changes people the way psychedelics do

00:49:43 ►

is travel and I don’t mean this

00:49:46 ►

sanitized bullshit first class united airlines three-star hotel travel I mean you know the real

00:49:56 ►

thing down and dirty uh live like the people do if you can stand it. I mean, it’s very, very difficult. I’ve lived with Amazon tribes,

00:50:06 ►

and you’re there and you’re having this experience

00:50:09 ►

and you’re thinking to yourself,

00:50:11 ►

everybody in my culture would wish to be with these people.

00:50:15 ►

These are the real, original people.

00:50:18 ►

Now, if they just stop throwing puppies in the fire,

00:50:21 ►

maybe we could sit down and enjoy their company.

00:50:25 ►

It’s not easy.

00:50:27 ►

It tests your values.

00:50:30 ►

How can you

00:50:32 ►

bring a

00:50:33 ►

Western mind into

00:50:36 ►

a third world

00:50:37 ►

nation where

00:50:39 ►

many are fully willing to

00:50:42 ►

trade what environmental

00:50:44 ►

treasures they have for the goods of capitalism.

00:50:48 ►

How can you say, well, psychedelics will put you in touch with values that you don’t need?

00:50:55 ►

Coca-Cola. I had an experience in Thailand, actually probably up in Burma,

00:51:02 ►

where I stopped by the village hunter’s shack and every manner of endangered beasts was changed for sale and I was

00:51:12 ►

astounded at all these beautiful parrots he was saying for a dollar and bought

00:51:17 ►

one of these parrots and the healthiest one set it free he looks at me like I’m

00:51:20 ►

crazy and goes to the village store to buy cigarettes.

00:51:27 ►

How can we bring,

00:51:32 ►

how can we stop the bartering of the environment for capitalism?

00:51:34 ►

Can we bring psychedelics to that?

00:51:37 ►

Or any other experience?

00:51:39 ►

Yeah, well, I don’t know.

00:51:42 ►

Another observation on exactly that point,

00:51:45 ►

and that is the absence of wealth

00:51:47 ►

is ruining the environment.

00:51:49 ►

The absence of wealth ruins the environment.

00:51:51 ►

For example, when you land in New Delhi

00:51:54 ►

and the door opens on an airplane,

00:51:56 ►

the first thing you get overwhelmed with

00:51:58 ►

is the air is unbelievable because of the smoke.

00:52:01 ►

The reason that a picture from that smoke exists

00:52:04 ►

is because of what people used to cook with. The rest of it is because of the smoke. The reason that a picture from that smoke exists is because of what people used to cook with.

00:52:07 ►

The rest of it is because of the cheap autos that they used.

00:52:12 ►

So, I mean, it’s the absence of wealth

00:52:13 ►

that makes fear unbelievable.

00:52:15 ►

Yes, I’m not advocating poverty.

00:52:18 ►

I’m advocating something more like simplicity.

00:52:22 ►

I like, well, let me describe my lifestyle to you, which sort of then is a

00:52:28 ►

statement about what I’m trying to do. I live in Hawaii, up a terrible road, with no telephone

00:52:36 ►

in, but I have a wireless modem out, and I have an excellent Mac Mac and I don’t make any I don’t believe in the

00:52:47 ►

distinction between nature and technology I am happiest when I am

00:52:52 ►

totally immersed in nature with the best technology available and most things I

00:53:02 ►

care about are immaterial I I mean, I have books,

00:53:05 ►

but it’s the information in them that is represented.

00:53:10 ►

The electricity is generated from solar.

00:53:13 ►

Some of the food is grown on site.

00:53:17 ►

More will be.

00:53:18 ►

But it’s not like a back-to-the-land movement

00:53:22 ►

or anything like that.

00:53:23 ►

It’s very casual. It seems the natural way to live

00:53:28 ►

one thing that the internet holds out for many many people is

00:53:34 ►

the end of the entire

00:53:37 ►

Cycle based on the concept of office culture and commuting

00:53:42 ►

Most people who work in offices

00:53:45 ►

don’t need to go to the office now.

00:53:48 ►

And the momentum continues to have commuting and so forth.

00:53:51 ►

But when these corporations realize

00:53:53 ►

how much money they could save

00:53:55 ►

by telling people to stay home,

00:53:57 ►

office culture is just going to dissolve overnight.

00:54:01 ►

Well, then something like 65%

00:54:06 ►

of all automobile travel

00:54:08 ►

is in the pursuit of

00:54:10 ►

moving to and from the job

00:54:12 ►

that could all be

00:54:14 ►

eliminated

00:54:16 ►

I think the internet

00:54:18 ►

is the physical analog

00:54:20 ►

to the psychedelics

00:54:22 ►

until the internet arose

00:54:23 ►

it was very hard for me

00:54:26 ►

to see

00:54:27 ►

how we were going to get

00:54:30 ►

from here to the omega

00:54:32 ►

point now I have

00:54:34 ►

no problem it’s all

00:54:35 ►

in place I mean the internet

00:54:38 ►

has to grow faster

00:54:39 ►

it has to the bandwidth

00:54:42 ►

has to be expanded

00:54:43 ►

the codes have to be simplified the bandwidth has to be expanded, the codes have to be simplified, the protocols have to be simplified, and everybody has to be brought online. society because what we’re living in and this is a McLuhanist rap what we’re

00:55:06 ►

living in is a linear print created world it was created by print heads they

00:55:14 ►

couldn’t help themselves they thought they were normal human beings but they

00:55:18 ►

were very very dramatically distorted by their relationship to typography and they created this kind of

00:55:27 ►

world.

00:55:28 ►

Well, now we’re moving into the era of electronic culture and all kinds of phenomenon associated

00:55:35 ►

with the old way of doing things are going to disappear.

00:55:39 ►

For example, a quality of print culture was the phenomenon called mass media.

00:55:46 ►

Mass media is finished.

00:55:48 ►

It doesn’t make any sense anymore.

00:55:53 ►

Mass media is one-to-many communication.

00:55:57 ►

And what the Internet offers is any-to-any communication.

00:56:02 ►

You know, we all have contempt, or I assume we do,

00:56:06 ►

or mild contempt,

00:56:07 ►

for the tabloid newspapers

00:56:10 ►

that we see when we check

00:56:11 ►

through the grocery store.

00:56:14 ►

Elf, or dwarf

00:56:16 ►

rapes nun, flees in UFO.

00:56:19 ►

That kind

00:56:20 ►

of thing. Well, but now let’s

00:56:21 ►

think about the New York Times

00:56:23 ►

for a moment. The New York Times

00:56:25 ►

is designed for what? To be read by millions of people. Who would want to read something designed

00:56:35 ►

to be read by millions of people? The very nature of the goal indicates that there will be very little there for you only to the degree that you share

00:56:48 ►

some interests with all these other millions

00:56:51 ►

of people and many of these interests are artificially

00:56:55 ►

created by the media

00:56:57 ►

so other notions

00:57:00 ►

that were put in place by print

00:57:02 ►

did I mention this last night

00:57:06 ►

about the interchangeability of

00:57:08 ►

type

00:57:08 ►

type as you know

00:57:12 ►

is interchangeable

00:57:13 ►

manuscript is not

00:57:16 ►

that simple notion of

00:57:18 ►

the interchangeability of the

00:57:19 ►

subunits of a technology

00:57:22 ►

permit two

00:57:23 ►

incredible things in our world the idea of the citizen

00:57:30 ►

the citizen and the idea of the unique individual and also modern industrial techniques of

00:57:40 ►

manufacture the assembly line is essentially where you build things the way you

00:57:47 ►

print things. You assemble the parts, you assemble the small parts and create completed objects.

00:57:54 ►

So this notion that stresses uniformity, interchangeability, and co-equality of subunits creates the entire political and social ambiance

00:58:07 ►

of the post-Renaissance mind.

00:58:10 ►

Now, something entirely different is happening.

00:58:15 ►

The new media is non-linear.

00:58:19 ►

It doesn’t require lockstep acquiescence in a model of behavior.

00:58:29 ►

That’s why fringe elements, which were kept very much at the fringe through the reign of print,

00:58:36 ►

have in the 20th century broken out and managed to set the agenda of much of society. So things like surrealism, jazz,

00:58:49 ►

ethnic consciousness, homosexuality,

00:58:53 ►

different styles of dissent

00:58:57 ►

have in the 20th century all gained a great deal more prominence

00:59:02 ►

as the print culture gave way to the electronic culture.

00:59:07 ►

And in the future, I think these enormous structures which we’re asked to participate in

00:59:15 ►

are just going to fade away like national governments.

00:59:20 ►

I think basically we’re going to live in a world which has only two levels.

00:59:24 ►

I think basically we’re going to live in a world which has only two levels.

00:59:31 ►

The local level, basically your watershed, and the planetary level.

00:59:41 ►

And the systems of control that lie between those two levels will be very thin and invisible.

00:59:47 ►

A tremendous leveling of information takes place the print game is a game of privilege information confers power and if you have it you

00:59:55 ►

hold it the electronic game is a game where all information is equally

01:00:02 ►

accessible and shareable,

01:00:09 ►

and it creates a different and more egalitarian information field.

01:00:15 ►

And capitalism contributes to this to some degree.

01:00:18 ►

I am not entirely anti-capitalistic.

01:00:20 ►

I think it needs to be tamed.

01:00:23 ►

But capitalism contributes to this. what I mean by that is

01:00:25 ►

think of how governments deal with information

01:00:28 ►

they classify everything top secret

01:00:32 ►

and then they hold it

01:00:34 ►

what is the effect of that?

01:00:37 ►

it slows invention

01:00:40 ►

it slows novelty

01:00:42 ►

well how does capitalism deal with new information, new technologies?

01:00:48 ►

You get it to market as fast as you possibly can in order to ace the competition. In the capitalist

01:00:56 ►

set of rules, if you have a proprietary technology, to keep it secret is insane. How will you make any money if you keep it secret?

01:01:05 ►

You must tell it.

01:01:07 ►

So capitalism itself has become a force for novelty.

01:01:11 ►

This is what, you know, when people started coming out of the Soviet Union as it collapsed,

01:01:17 ►

this is what blew their minds completely about the West,

01:01:20 ►

was the diversity and abundance.

01:01:22 ►

was the diversity and abundance.

01:01:29 ►

I remember some Russians came to me once,

01:01:31 ►

I don’t know, five years ago or so when the Soviet Union was collapsing,

01:01:33 ►

and I was driving them around,

01:01:36 ►

showing them the scene,

01:01:37 ►

and I pointed to an A and P,

01:01:40 ►

and I said,

01:01:41 ►

you can get any food you want in there.

01:01:46 ►

And the guy said, oh, come on.

01:01:48 ►

And I said, name a food.

01:01:51 ►

You can get it in there.

01:01:53 ►

He said, tangerines, like it was a knockout punch.

01:01:59 ►

He said, no problem.

01:02:00 ►

They got tangerines stacked waist deep.

01:02:03 ►

And anything else you can imagine.

01:02:05 ►

So capitalism produces this enormous abundance,

01:02:10 ►

but without very much ethical concern for the process by which it’s done

01:02:15 ►

or the consequences for the users and the environment.

01:02:19 ►

In the business world, especially in the software world,

01:02:21 ►

I see large companies in the business of purchasing novelty

01:02:24 ►

and then producing novelty.

01:02:26 ►

That is, less and less companies have R&D institutions within them.

01:02:29 ►

They let the innovation happen in these sort of tiny companies,

01:02:31 ►

and they go back to the tiny companies.

01:02:33 ►

That’s because they don’t want those long-haired, dope-smoking weirdos

01:02:36 ►

actually inside their corporate structure.

01:02:39 ►

You can hire them as consultants,

01:02:42 ►

because then you can can them at will.

01:02:45 ►

But for God’s sake, don’t get them on the medical plan.

01:02:49 ►

Yeah.

01:02:49 ►

There was an article in a magazine

01:02:51 ►

and a fellow from IBM, he had a suit on and everything.

01:02:54 ►

Somebody accused IBM of being weak in the multimedia market

01:02:57 ►

where multimedia represents new and novel.

01:02:59 ►

He says, oh, we have some guys with earrings and long hair here.

01:03:04 ►

Defense.

01:03:02 ►

Oh, we have some guys with earrings and long hair here.

01:03:10 ►

Yes, well, one of the amusing things about the computer revolution and capitalism and all that is that technology has evolved so quickly

01:03:15 ►

that the people running capitalism from the top

01:03:20 ►

no longer understand the tools that are necessary for it.

01:03:25 ►

They have to pay guys with ponytails and piercings to turn on the machines every morning.

01:03:32 ►

And that must be very terrifying to them.

01:03:36 ►

But the guys who dug the oil wells, I don’t think carried an entirely different analysis of society.

01:03:48 ►

I mean, there were class differences, but these long-haired people are essentially, you’re trading with the enemy,

01:03:56 ►

if you’re a corporation who uses these people. And every corporation must use them, because they’re the smart people.

01:04:06 ►

They will use them.

01:04:08 ►

And all I’m saying is that capital will move wherever it can exploit information.

01:04:15 ►

And if now the information resides there, that’s where they’ll go to exploit that information

01:04:20 ►

for the continuing process of the economic machine.

01:04:25 ►

information for the continuing process of the economic machine. So even though we may be looking at something novel, ultimately when that source is exhausted, they’ll move

01:04:32 ►

on to whatever else they have to move on to to maintain themselves.

01:04:36 ►

Well, no technology in history has ever been put in place with any clear understanding of what its implications would be that’s what we find out later

01:04:47 ►

and

01:04:49 ►

I think the internet

01:04:51 ►

probably

01:04:54 ►

will turn out to be very

01:04:55 ►

toxic for capitalism

01:04:57 ►

when objects can be

01:05:00 ►

made of light

01:05:01 ►

when a Ferrari costs as much

01:05:03 ►

as a Buick

01:05:04 ►

because they’re both made out of

01:05:07 ►

the same material, all of this class structure based on fetishization of objects is going

01:05:14 ►

to disappear.

01:05:15 ►

It’s interesting that both Pac Bell and AT&T announced that they’d be getting the Internet

01:05:19 ►

game.

01:05:19 ►

Now, it’s a little late, but not too late.

01:05:21 ►

But they’ve been late on delivery because they can’t get the staff to build what they want to build.

01:05:26 ►

They can’t find any mason workers

01:05:27 ►

to put their highways together,

01:05:28 ►

and it’s costing them billions,

01:05:31 ►

and that’s the AT&T issue,

01:05:32 ►

and that’s the fact.

01:05:33 ►

Well, AT&T is going to set up

01:05:35 ►

a system of satellites

01:05:37 ►

that are going to give ISDN speed

01:05:39 ►

to every man, woman, and child

01:05:41 ►

on this planet

01:05:42 ►

by pointing straight up at the sky,

01:05:44 ►

avoiding all these

01:05:46 ►

mafias of these local phone companies.

01:05:50 ►

The curious thing, I think, in terms of the social implication of the electronic age is

01:05:56 ►

the possibility of almost a pure form of democracy independent of bureaucratic structure.

01:06:03 ►

In other words, that there’s the possibility

01:06:05 ►

that people can arrive at consensus unmanaged.

01:06:09 ►

This is what’s called electronic tribalism,

01:06:12 ►

that we can remove all these interpretive filters

01:06:16 ►

and structures and methods,

01:06:18 ►

the representative, the parliament, the election,

01:06:21 ►

all of that can be done away with

01:06:24 ►

and that we can actually,

01:06:25 ►

and they hate that. It was very interesting in the last presidential campaign, I don’t know if

01:06:30 ►

you picked up on it, but only Perot spoke for this. You know, he has this idea of these electronic

01:06:38 ►

town meetings. Well, of course, Perot represents a not mainstream point of view from the point of view of the Republicans and the Democrats.

01:06:47 ►

They both just piled onto that.

01:06:50 ►

They hate that.

01:06:52 ►

The idea of real democracy is as threatening to the politicians of this country

01:06:57 ►

as it is to the Chinese leadership.

01:07:00 ►

I mean, they do not want the will of the people to be expressed.

01:07:05 ►

But I think as we cohere into a single organism,

01:07:10 ►

there will be less and less need for these 18th century institutions

01:07:17 ►

that we have put in place and maintain with the power of the gun.

01:07:23 ►

Yeah.

01:07:22 ►

with the power of the gun.

01:07:23 ►

Yeah.

01:07:26 ►

I see a couple of possible paths that the effect that the new media is going to have

01:07:30 ►

on people could go.

01:07:32 ►

One would follow the model of what happened to Europe

01:07:36 ►

when the church stopped becoming the sole interpreter

01:07:39 ►

of the Bible,

01:07:43 ►

and the Bible became something that was printed

01:07:44 ►

and that anybody could read and interpret, and many people did

01:07:47 ►

and started different interpretations. And that sort of caused an explosion of

01:07:51 ►

different ideas and different ways of looking at the world. The other would be

01:07:55 ►

this is a little more difficult to express, but

01:07:59 ►

there’s a terrific Buddhist magazine called Tricycle Magazine, and one of the things that’s

01:08:03 ►

really terrific about it is it’s non-sectarian.

01:08:06 ►

That it has a whole lot of viewpoints. It talks about all sorts of different flavors of Buddhism that people respect.

01:08:13 ►

Because there aren’t enough of the Buddhists in America to have really cool magazines for all these different sects.

01:08:19 ►

Now if that were to change tomorrow, and there was a different magazine for every sect then each magazine would have a single viewpoint the other viewpoints would be

01:08:26 ►

portrayed maybe but as seen as kind of heresy and talked down about and I could

01:08:32 ►

see that sort of thing happening on the web where or with the web like media or

01:08:36 ►

people start pursuing ideas that they’re interested in and they care about they

01:08:41 ►

may end up digging themselves a niche of their own preconceptions and their own

01:08:45 ►

prejudices that they already have

01:08:48 ►

about information and going

01:08:50 ►

to information sources that

01:08:52 ►

support that and prop up

01:08:54 ►

things which may or may not be valid.

01:08:56 ►

The other option is that they could be

01:08:58 ►

exposed to so many different types

01:09:00 ►

of information from the

01:09:02 ►

original sources, not filtered through a mass

01:09:04 ►

media, that they’ll

01:09:05 ►

actually become more informed about more different points of view. I can’t tell right now which

01:09:09 ►

way it’s going to go, or maybe it’s going to go in both directions.

01:09:12 ►

You can’t keep ignorant ignorant because there’s too much access to the other knowledge.

01:09:17 ►

Only if you want it, though. It’s not like now. Today if you turn on CNN, you get not

01:09:23 ►

only the information you’re interested in,

01:09:25 ►

you get information that CNN thinks a large audience of people is going to be interested in.

01:09:29 ►

So you’re inevitably going to be confronted with things that mess with your prejudices.

01:09:37 ►

Now, the downside of this is that what’s happening is CNN is mapping the societal prejudice of its market share

01:09:43 ►

onto all of its audience,

01:09:45 ►

and because there are so few media sources, there are a few selected branches of prejudice

01:09:50 ►

that you’re allowed to tap into. But whether the future’s going to break that up or just

01:09:56 ►

mean that there are going to be tighter groups and smaller groups of predispositions that

01:10:02 ►

are reinforced…

01:10:03 ►

After that’s choice, those that wish to insulate themselves

01:10:05 ►

in only the information they want to see that supports their narrow worldview

01:10:08 ►

will insulate themselves excellently.

01:10:10 ►

And those that wish to just throw themselves into the unknown constantly

01:10:13 ►

will have already available sources.

01:10:15 ►

Yeah, I think we’re already seeing this.

01:10:18 ►

I mean, the V-chip, is that what it’s called?

01:10:20 ►

This thing that lets you control what your kids can access on the Internet.

01:10:24 ►

All this concern about pornography and so forth and so on.

01:10:28 ►

Clearly, some people are going to take the internet raw and love it,

01:10:33 ►

and other people are just going to want the conference on cat grooming and so forth and so on.

01:10:42 ►

There’s nothing we can do about that.

01:10:43 ►

I mean, this is not a new problem. Let me recall

01:10:47 ►

to you that hundreds of millions of people in the world lead larval, low-awareness lives.

01:10:55 ►

I’m not talking about the poor, unwashed. I’m talking about people who watch TV six and seven hours a day. That’s a drug.

01:11:08 ►

And those people have chosen to check out of the historical adventure

01:11:10 ►

and just live in this miasma of pop culture.

01:11:15 ►

And we can decry the loss to them

01:11:18 ►

of awareness and so forth and so on.

01:11:22 ►

But on the other hand,

01:11:23 ►

it makes it easier for the rest of us, I think.

01:11:26 ►

I mean, I don’t want all those people

01:11:28 ►

running around on the freeway

01:11:30 ►

and standing in front of me at the grocery store.

01:11:33 ►

And, you know, better they should be home watching,

01:11:36 ►

you know, whatever it is these people watch.

01:11:42 ►

And people will make these kinds of choices.

01:11:44 ►

And, you know, it will become more and

01:11:46 ►

more extreme. I mean, if you want 24-hour-a-day teledildonic pornography, who’s to say you

01:11:53 ►

shouldn’t have this? But how it will affect your performance as a citizen, I don’t know. I mean,

01:11:58 ►

it’s just like mainlining heroin or something else. People have to make choices, but the fact that they will

01:12:06 ►

sometimes make bad choices is no argument ever for limiting their choices.

01:12:12 ►

You know, you have to come to political bedrock with this. Are you a control

01:12:16 ►

freak or do you believe in the dignity of human nature? If you trust human nature then your politics should be one of always removing control

01:12:30 ►

because control suppresses human nature if on the other hand you’re freaked out about human nature

01:12:36 ►

and you think that if we don’t have laws everybody will turn to cannibalism sodomy and cocaine

01:12:42 ►

to cannibalism, sodomy, and cocaine,

01:12:47 ►

then, of course, everybody has to be leaned on,

01:12:49 ►

and so forth and so on.

01:12:51 ►

But if you don’t have faith in human nature,

01:12:55 ►

that’s a pretty existential situation to be in,

01:12:58 ►

because where do you put your faith?

01:13:02 ►

It’s possible that we’ll fall into, I’ll use your number, 5%, a situation where 95% are looking for novelty and 5% will produce it. And that the 5% who enjoy making novelty will make

01:13:08 ►

just what they want and find a narrow category of people who will find it.

01:13:12 ►

Well, that’s sort of, people say, what should be done or what should we do besides take

01:13:18 ►

psychedelics? And I say, you cannot escape the media, you cannot escape the internet, you cannot escape our dilemma.

01:13:27 ►

You have two choices.

01:13:29 ►

You can consume or you can produce.

01:13:33 ►

That’s it.

01:13:34 ►

And the people who consume are lost souls.

01:13:38 ►

And we all consume.

01:13:39 ►

And in those moments when we consume, we are lost souls.

01:13:43 ►

We need to produce. And what we produce is art.

01:13:49 ►

Art is, the greatest era of art in the history of the human race is dawning right now. If we produce

01:13:59 ►

images and text from the heart, we will compete with these very large network channels called

01:14:09 ►

capitalism, communism, so forth and so on. In a sense, one way to think about the internet

01:14:15 ►

is it’s a 40 million channel TV hookup. 40 million channels. 5.5 now, well, but however many websites there are right now is what I’m thinking of.

01:14:28 ►

And so no one need feel isolated. And isolation has traditionally been a political tool for disempowering people.

01:14:39 ►

If you can make people feel isolated, You can make them shut up. So, you know, if someone, let’s say, is a communist and lives in some tiny town in North Dakota,

01:14:53 ►

in the past, their tendency, I think, would be to keep their mouth shut.

01:14:58 ►

But since they’re getting 400 email messages a day from fellow communists and being informed of conferences going on

01:15:06 ►

constantly and huge FTP sites and all kinds of things, then they just say, that’s my community

01:15:12 ►

and I’m willing to talk about it. They are no longer isolated. And this has empowered all kinds

01:15:20 ►

of fringe points of view. Some you may approve of, some you may not. But I approve of the points of view some you may approve of some you may not but I approve of the concept of the fringe

01:15:28 ►

in and of itself

01:15:30 ►

and then I figure

01:15:31 ►

the memes can sort themselves out

01:15:34 ►

through natural selection

01:15:36 ►

but if a meme doesn’t ever get on to the playing field

01:15:39 ►

where the competition is happening

01:15:41 ►

then it is not fairly dealt with

01:15:45 ►

and can die without having its proper opportunity to impact.

01:15:50 ►

We’re taking away the advantage of the leading memes

01:15:53 ►

and their ability to suppress the new oncoming memes.

01:15:56 ►

Like a marketplace where,

01:15:57 ►

if I try to start a world company today,

01:15:58 ►

I’ll have a difficult time

01:15:59 ►

because the main players would disadvantage me in handicapping.

01:16:03 ►

Right.

01:16:03 ►

They see a reverse handicapping

01:16:04 ►

where the small ones would have an advantage to come

01:16:07 ►

in.

01:16:08 ►

This worldwide web, as it just seems to be changing the nature of gravity, or at least

01:16:14 ►

the way I thought that these various physical forces always were.

01:16:20 ►

And suddenly time, which I understand is relative, is getting speeded up

01:16:26 ►

simply because I’m being barraged with so much information from so many different places,

01:16:33 ►

and it stops being a matter of trying to be smart by assimilating all this information

01:16:41 ►

and becomes more of a case of trying to be smart

01:16:46 ►

by seeing what I can leave alone, what I can distance myself,

01:16:51 ►

what I can funnel out because there’s so much of it.

01:16:55 ►

Well, I think we haven’t quite learned how to use it yet,

01:16:58 ►

and also it isn’t quite what it should be yet.

01:17:02 ►

It’s maddening to try and function on it at 14.4 or 28.8.

01:17:07 ►

Everybody needs ISDN or faster.

01:17:10 ►

The people who use it most successfully,

01:17:13 ►

the way they live is usually they do it through laptops,

01:17:17 ►

and it’s just always on.

01:17:20 ►

I mean, what you need is 24-hour-a-day ISDN connection.

01:17:23 ►

It’s always on.

01:17:24 ►

And so as you think, questions arise, I mean, what you need is 24-hour-a-day ISDN connection. It’s always on.

01:17:28 ►

And so as you think, questions arise.

01:17:33 ►

And you set your infobots going, your elves.

01:17:35 ►

You send them into the matrix. And they return with these bits of information.

01:17:39 ►

So as the day passes and your internal dialogue proceeds,

01:17:43 ►

you’re constantly having messengers arrive with

01:17:46 ►

data which clarifies your understanding of the situation so i think of it what it will clearly

01:17:55 ►

become is it’s just an adjunct to your mind and when the laptop disappears and the whole thing

01:18:02 ►

becomes a subdermal implant or something,

01:18:05 ►

then you’ll just say, gee, I wonder what the gross national product of Sri Lanka is this year,

01:18:11 ►

and then say, the gross national product of Sri Lanka this year was,

01:18:15 ►

and you will be provided with this information.

01:18:20 ►

I mean, obviously there have to be filters and a certain level of sophistication,

01:18:48 ►

I mean, obviously there have to be filters and a certain level of sophistication, but never before in quality information is very hard to come by. The mass media is for the peasants. The guys above the 50th floor,

01:18:56 ►

and guys it is, as you know, they read special newsletters. They receive feed from certain think tanks.

01:19:07 ►

They deal with an entirely different kind of information than you do.

01:19:12 ►

Privileged information, managerial information, leader information.

01:19:19 ►

Well, now that’s all changing.

01:19:22 ►

Sitting without telephone lines in Hawaii at the keyboard of my computer,

01:19:28 ►

I have better intelligence than Stansfield Turner had

01:19:32 ►

when he was director of the CIA for Jimmy Carter.

01:19:36 ►

And I’m Joe Nobody, you know, Earth Citizen One.

01:19:42 ►

So that shows you how quickly the quality of information is improving.

01:19:47 ►

What you do with this is, of course, has always been an individual dilemma.

01:19:56 ►

The psychedelics, to my mind, were a great anticipation of the Internet.

01:20:01 ►

It probably never would have been built had there not been psychedelics

01:20:06 ►

even though it was built by terminal paranoids

01:20:09 ►

because you know it was built

01:20:12 ►

as a command and control system

01:20:14 ►

for thermal nuclear war

01:20:16 ►

but the wonder of that was

01:20:20 ►

that they built it so that it could not be destroyed

01:20:25 ►

not realizing that what that meant

01:20:29 ►

was that they could not destroy it

01:20:32 ►

you know it has no central control

01:20:34 ►

there is no board you bomb

01:20:37 ►

no plug you pull

01:20:38 ►

so they built this indestructible thing

01:20:41 ►

and now it’s loose and growing and unstoppable

01:20:47 ►

and possibly leads to the reformulation of the nature of humanity,

01:20:57 ►

which would be then an interesting process.

01:21:00 ►

Thermonuclear war leads to an enormous paranoid response, which leads to the internet, which leads to liberation.

01:21:10 ►

I’ve always felt that atomic weapons were an enormous IQ booster for the human race. about the fact that a global tribe of carnivorous monkeys have possessed thermonuclear delivery systems for 50 years

01:21:29 ►

and only twice were they ever used,

01:21:34 ►

I think it must have sobered us immeasurably

01:21:37 ►

because there were many issues in those years

01:21:40 ►

where had there not been thermonuclear bombs,

01:21:44 ►

there would have been war and and

01:21:47 ►

so it became a kind of inoculation against war because it was so horrible and it forced the

01:21:53 ►

human race i wouldn’t go so far as to say grow up but it propelled us at least into adolescent

01:21:59 ►

awareness of our of our dilemma, it’s dinner time.

01:22:06 ►

Tonight we’ll do the time wave.

01:22:08 ►

I doubt we’ll revisit this particular area,

01:22:11 ►

so if you hated this, it’s over.

01:22:14 ►

Thank you.

01:22:20 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:22:22 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:22:27 ►

So, what did you think about the discussion about what they thought might happen around the change of the millennium?

01:22:34 ►

While I toyed with the idea of cutting all of that out, I decided to post this workshop’s recording without edits because, well, for our younger saloners, including those who don’t discover this podcast for another 20 years, well, it should be enlightening for them to hear the

01:22:50 ►

concerns that people had about the approaching change of millennium, which was to be followed

01:22:56 ►

by the potential 2012 event of some sort. Now today we realize that it was all a big nothing

01:23:02 ►

burger, but back then there were a lot of intelligent people who had serious concerns about the potential these events had for triggering some form of collective human madness at those times.

01:23:14 ►

Fortunately, most people ignored those changes of date, except for some great parties that took place back then, of course.

01:23:22 ►

But one of the events that Terence predicted came through big time.

01:23:27 ►

Now, keep in mind that the average modem speed

01:23:30 ►

for a net connection back then

01:23:31 ►

was 28,000 bits per second.

01:23:34 ►

And yet Terence was predicting a world

01:23:37 ►

not very unlike our world today,

01:23:39 ►

where all we’d have to do is ask our household

01:23:42 ►

artificial intelligence device a question,

01:23:44 ►

and the answer would magically be given. all we’d have to do is ask our household artificial intelligence device a question,

01:23:48 ►

and the answer would magically be given.

01:23:54 ►

Of course, you still have to give up the privacy of conversations in your own home if you want that service,

01:23:59 ►

but that’s another story, along with the story of the original design of the Internet,

01:24:03 ►

which, along with most people, Terrence got a little bit wrong.

01:24:08 ►

And in case you’re wondering whether the stock market event that so excited Terrence ever materialized into something big, well,

01:24:12 ►

it didn’t. In fact, a couple of months later, the

01:24:16 ►

market began a rise that lasted for several years.

01:24:19 ►

And while back then they thought that a 150 point drop was a big deal,

01:24:23 ►

keep in mind that already this year there have been two days in which it lost over 1,000 points.

01:24:29 ►

But let’s face it, if the time wave was actually a graph of the entirety of human history,

01:24:36 ►

then changes in the U.S. stock market seem rather trivial to me.

01:24:41 ►

And what did you think about the comment somebody made about us achieving our technological

01:24:46 ►

desires without our emotional life keeping up? As I recall, he said that he felt that the pace

01:24:53 ►

of life was getting faster without a compensating delivery of satisfaction. Now keep in mind that

01:24:59 ►

this was said over 20 years ago, and unless I’m wrong, life still continues to accelerate

01:25:06 ►

yet today.

01:25:07 ►

At least it seems that way to me, but maybe that’s not all bad.

01:25:11 ►

For example, Terence also spoke about technology being eventually able to replace parliaments

01:25:17 ►

and other governmental organizations.

01:25:20 ►

Well, with blockchain, that day is here.

01:25:22 ►

Of course, there’s always the issue of implementation, but hey, that’s a detail.

01:25:27 ►

And as a policy man myself, I declare that blockchain is the answer to distancing ourselves from institutions.

01:25:35 ►

And Bitcoin and other digital currencies are the answer to distancing ourselves from government-controlled economic systems.

01:25:43 ►

So what are you waiting for, you geeks and

01:25:45 ►

politicians and activists among us? Let’s begin implementing some new systems around here and get

01:25:50 ►

this little planet back on track again. At least on track as much as it was before us talking apes

01:25:57 ►

took over. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

575 - Countdown Into Complexity – Part 3

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