Program Notes
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https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
https://www.amazon.com/Techno-Pagan-Octopus-Messiah/dp/198066126X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8Date this lecture was recorded:
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“We asked for it, but we never knew we would get it in such spades. Last week was the 25th anniversary of the experiment at La Chorrera, and basically it’s a trip that still goes on. We never came down. Now I’ve given up on coming down. I’m just hoping that if nothing happens in 2012 I’ll have a few good years of penitent meditation ahead of me.”
“I think that the leisure and the indulgence that is permitted us, the super rich of this world, and we all are in that class, the upper five percent of the Earth’s population, you can’t live with yourself unless you give something back. And the thing to give back is share your art, share your soul. The reason we are so controlled, and abused, and misused by our institutions is because we are divided from each other. They have divided us by race, by class, by sex, by political style, all of these ways.”
“I’ll tell you straight out, I’m an anarchist. I am an absolute anarchist. I believe in people more than in abstractions of institutions. I will always rely on people.”
“You cannot be a public figure and a practicing alchemist.”
“The basic notion here, I think, is an idea of radical freedom. This is not a cult of Terence McKenna. It is not a drug cult. It’s a cult of curiosity if it’s a cult of anything. And what you’re supposed to understand when you come out of here is that an open mind is a very precious thing, and it should never be given away, perhaps ever, but certainly never lightly.”
“Belief is toxic. All belief. Don’t believe in anything. Live in the presence of the felt-fact of immediate experience. Everything beyond that is conjecture.”
“Explore the edges. Keep your logical razors sharp. Trust nothing that you haven’t verified for yourself.”
The Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah by Ian Winn
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And to begin today, I would like to thank fellow salonners Ian W. and Joel L.
00:00:35 ►
for their donations to the salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:39 ►
So thank you both for your continuing support of these podcasts.
00:00:47 ►
And as you know, each Monday night I host a Zoom conversation with any of my Patreon supporters who want to join in.
00:00:56 ►
Although, last night I messed up and launched the wrong meeting room, which left some of my supporters wondering what had happened to me.
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Well, it was a simple mistake made by a guy who is eventually going to have to admit that sometimes he acts like those dusty old farts that he once made fun of himself.
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Anyway, in one of our Zoom chats a couple of weeks ago,
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one of the things that we talked about was that it is important for the psychonauts of the world to become more public about what these medicines mean to us.
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While we all agree that it is important to conduct proper medical and scientific inquiries into psychedelics,
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many of us also believe that it is equally important that discussions about these substances
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not be confined strictly to medical and scientific studies.
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In other words, when given the opportunity to tell our own psychedelic stories,
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well, I think we should do so.
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And that, of course, is the purpose of the
00:01:46 ►
Salon 2 podcast, where Lex Pelger traveled around the country and recorded dozens of these psychedelic
00:01:51 ►
tales for me to podcast here in the salon. And a few of the psychonauts tried to describe the
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visuals that they saw, but to be honest, that’s like describing a dream. If it wasn’t your dream,
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it’s not all that compelling.
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However, most of these stories were about the transformations and aha moments that took place as a result of a psychedelic experience.
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And, I should add, not all of these instances were positive.
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And I think that’s important too, because we shouldn’t really sugarcoat somebody’s description of a bad result from a psychedelic experience.
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For the most part, however, the tales of bad trips seem to be the result of not knowing what they were doing or a bad set and setting.
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And I’m not criticizing anyone here, because, well, just like many of our fellow salonners,
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I made some really big mistakes myself while I was learning how to
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use these powerful mind-altering medicines. And that’s what these stories are teaching us.
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Because after hearing one of them, you may say to yourself,
00:02:54 ►
man, I’m never going to try that or do something that stupid. For example, in a recent podcast,
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we heard a woman say that she not only took a bubble bath after taking a psychedelic substance,
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but she then held her breath underwater for as long as she could.
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Now, had I been in the room when she told that story, I would have had to stand up and shout,
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What the hell do you think you are doing? That’s sheer madness.
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Now, if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,
00:03:23 ►
you’ve already heard my warning about never using a psychedelic substance in or around water.
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And I have good reason for that advice.
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If you’ve listened to the second podcast from here in the salon, it’s a recording of a talk that Terrence McKenna gave in Palenque in 1999.
00:03:39 ►
That recording was made by my friend Noah, who was one of the most experienced psychonauts that I knew.
00:03:46 ►
Well, Noah, even though he knew better, decided to smoke some DMT one night while he was in the
00:03:52 ►
bathtub. He drowned. Another friend of mine was one of the leading Asian American women filmmakers,
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and she became involved with a group of edgy experimenters who were smoking 5-MeO in a jacuzzi,
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and then seeing who could hold their breath underwater the longest.
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Well, my friend took a couple of hits of 5-MeO, held her breath, and began floating face down in the water.
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Another woman was in the jacuzzi with her, but she’d smoked 5-MeO herself,
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and so she just sat there and watched our friend drown.
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Now these were two very highly experienced trippers, and they both knew better.
00:04:32 ►
Yet they stupidly killed themselves by accident.
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By very preventable accidents, I should add.
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Need I say more about the stupidity of mixing water and psychedelics?
00:04:44 ►
Well, that should be enough of a lecture to last you for a while,
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so I’ll get off my soapbox now and get on with today’s program.
00:04:53 ►
As you have no doubt guessed,
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today we’re going to listen to the final session of the March 1996
00:04:59 ►
Terrence McKenna Workshop that was held at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California.
00:05:05 ►
Once again, I want to thank Ian Wynn, who not only loaned me these tapes to play here in the salon,
00:05:11 ►
but he is also a direct donor to the salon as well as one of my Patreon supporters.
00:05:16 ►
And I’d like to remind you about Ian’s book, The Technopagan Octopus Messiah,
00:05:21 ►
which had its genesis in this weekend workshop of McKenna’s that we’ve been listening to.
00:05:26 ►
Now, if you’re young and able to travel, this would be a great book to take along.
00:05:31 ►
Or if you can’t afford to travel the world, then this book will take you vicariously on an interesting trip.
00:05:38 ►
And I’ll put a link to it in today’s program notes.
00:05:41 ►
Now, let’s join Terence McKenna and a few of his new best friends for the conclusion of this workshop.
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Okay, it’s Sunday morning. It’s ten minutes after ten.
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And we’re in Huxley, right.
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We’re turning final here, as old bush pilots say
00:06:07 ►
which means the final approach
00:06:10 ►
before landing
00:06:11 ►
so this is basically
00:06:14 ►
loose thread time
00:06:17 ►
and summation time
00:06:19 ►
and opportunity hopefully
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for some feedback from you
00:06:24 ►
what’s outstanding the uh self-transforming machine
00:06:33 ►
you asked them take me to your leader and what has been the response
00:06:39 ►
self-transforming machine now as i noticed on the internet it
00:06:44 ►
has been abbreviated
00:06:46 ►
now to the acronym
00:06:47 ►
STEMS
00:06:49 ►
and so on the VPL list
00:06:52 ►
there are reports that says
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three STEMS approached from the left
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take me to your leader
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no I did have one DMT trip
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way back like maybe the second or third or fourth
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way back where it was completely
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different it’s the only one I’ve ever had like that
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it was completely different and the way
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I put it to myself was
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the big people were home and it was an entirely different feeling
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and many people actually I’ve never quite had this myself but many people report DMT trips where
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they break in on an entity who is not pleased at all and demands to know how the hell you got there.
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And it’s this, you know, who are you?
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And, you know, then various sorts of dialogues go on,
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and one person described being then just hurled through all of time,
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like exploded back from this thing,
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and going through all the recapitulation of ontogeny.
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It’s weird stuff.
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DMT trips, I mean, mine are always as I described,
00:08:16 ►
but some people report,
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and these may be synergies with antidepressants
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or something like that,
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but apparently very stable and strange worlds.
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I mean, worlds with alien peoples and animals and cities
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and very science fiction-y stuff.
00:08:39 ►
That’s why this Bell’s theorem, I don’t think we use that word,
00:08:44 ►
but this non-locality that we talked about this Bell’s theorem, I don’t think we use that word,
00:08:48 ►
but this non-locality that we talked about may have something to do with the phenomenon of the imagination.
00:08:52 ►
Like it’s occurred to me over the years
00:08:54 ►
that what we call imagination
00:08:57 ►
might simply be hyper-dimensional perception
00:09:02 ►
and you’re actually seeing worlds and places that truly exist
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somewhere scattered through the galaxies
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like grains of sand,
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but no place you will ever contact
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or visit in the flesh,
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but that the data is somehow present.
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There seems to be some kind of tuning thing that needs to go on.
00:09:32 ►
Possibly with technology.
00:09:35 ►
I had a really weird experience years ago.
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I took LSD one evening with a bunch of people
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and it was fairly casual and social and smoked a bunch of
00:09:47 ►
weed and just went on for a couple of hours and it didn’t really ever seem to come on or it just
00:09:52 ►
seemed to be very light and then I climbed on my motorcycle and went home and decided I would go
00:10:00 ►
to bed and I decided that I would smoke one last joint before going to bed and I had one
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of those stand-up electrical resistance heaters that you get in uh at the Salvation Army you know
00:10:16 ►
if you’re a poor student and I said so I turned it on as I started to smoke this joint and it was badly wired and it made this sound like
00:10:28 ►
and as I began to listen to this sound I like went to lizard land and I entered into this completely coherent thing
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which lasted for hours
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about this world inhabited by these intelligent reptilian beings
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and we went through their art, their history
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their theories of jewelry making
00:11:00 ►
their philosophy, their polity
00:11:02 ►
their science, their religion
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their fashion, their…
00:11:06 ►
And it was like endless, endless stuff about this very specific reptilian world.
00:11:15 ►
Well, then later I tried again.
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I took LSD with my arm around my heater and had by then been preaching it in the streets that this was the…
00:11:26 ►
And I could never really find my way back, you know,
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which is a typical phenomenon of higher dimensional phase space.
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Ralph taught me, you know,
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doing the reverse of what you did
00:11:41 ►
doesn’t steer you back to where you started.
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You have to find your way
00:11:47 ►
forward through the matrix. Other things, comments. This is your last crack at me. You
00:11:55 ►
have to get your money’s worth.
00:11:57 ►
You talked about making language like noises on a DMT chip and creating things with noises.
00:12:03 ►
Does it seem like the things you’re creating
00:12:05 ►
are like the things that they’re creating
00:12:06 ►
or that there’s any sort of communication going on?
00:12:09 ►
Do they understand the kind of stuff
00:12:10 ►
that you’re creating with your voice?
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Well, it’s a complicated question.
00:12:20 ►
First of all, clearly what’s going on in the DMT
00:12:23 ►
is some kind of synesthesia
00:12:25 ►
where ordinary speech or speech or sound
00:12:30 ►
is perceived visually.
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It seems to suggest,
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and Robert Graves wrote about this in an amazing book,
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which if you want a mind-bending read, read The White Goddess by Robert Graves wrote about this in an amazing book, which if you want a mind-bending read,
00:12:45 ►
read The White Goddess by Robert Graves.
00:12:49 ►
I mean, this is truly a puzzling book.
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And after you’ve read it, give me a call and tell me what it’s all about.
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But one of the things it’s all about
00:12:59 ►
is he suggests that part of our existential distancing from reality
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is that at some time in the past there was a kind of ursprach,
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a kind of primal poetic language
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that you didn’t learn from your culture,
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but that all human beings did this.
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It was an ingrained behavior.
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It was a deeper level of language.
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And of course, in the Bible, you get this curious story of the confusion of tongues
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that takes place. And it certainly has held human progress down that we have thousands
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of languages that are very tortuous to translate between. Imagine the
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kind of culture we would have built by now if we could effortlessly communicate with
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everybody anywhere and they with us. Well, so this synesthesia thing seems to be the
00:14:02 ►
direction in which language has to go in order to be
00:14:05 ►
universal it has to be beheld acoustical signals don’t do it one of the things
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that’s made ayahuasca so interesting to me is when you go down there and really
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get off river and up with the more bare-assed people,
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how they use ayahuasca is they entertain each other with it
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by singing these magical songs.
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But when you listen to them talk about these songs,
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they speak of them as pictorial and sculptural objects.
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Like if somebody sings a song and then it’s time for comment, they speak of them as pictorial and sculptural objects.
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Like if somebody sings a song and then it’s time for comment, people say things like,
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I liked the part with the silver and yellow stippling,
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but I thought the Aleph-Drab section with the mauve punctuation was a bit over the top.
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You say, you know, this is a criticism of a song?
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What kind of song could that possibly be?
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Well, it turns out the sound is the carrier wave,
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but the song is to be looked at.
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And the sense of one person producing a reality
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which everybody else is then immersed in and seeing.
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And you can experiment with ayahuasca,
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and it’s very precise.
00:15:32 ►
It’s very precise.
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I mean, you just go,
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and a turquoise line three inches wide
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descends from the top of your vision field to the bottom,
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and then you slightly vary
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the tone and it gets a magenta
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edge on both sides
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and you begin to
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pump it and experiment
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and it’s like
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wow, what is this?
00:15:58 ►
and extremely
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satisfying, now the question
00:16:02 ►
of meaning is
00:16:03 ►
a strange one.
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It’s almost as though you know all
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some people believe all translation is
00:16:11 ►
lie. In other words, that when you take
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Proust out of his French and put him
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into English, this is not Proust at all.
00:16:21 ►
And this seems very true
00:16:23 ►
in the DMT state in the sense that the DMT language has meaning
00:16:29 ►
and you understand its meaning when you’re there but the meaning of the DMT language can’t be
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expressed in English at all it’s like they’re talking about they were born and raised in different dimensions
00:16:48 ►
or something. There is no translation. So you come out of the DMT thing understanding
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something which you can’t say. And that’s been the motivation of my whole public speaking life.
00:17:05 ►
The fact that I understand something that I can’t say.
00:17:11 ►
Yeah, but I can almost say it.
00:17:15 ►
And some days closer than others.
00:17:17 ►
And so there’s this constant reaching for the unspeakable.
00:17:21 ►
Wittgenstein talked about the unspeakable Wittgenstein talked about the unspeakable
00:17:25 ►
which was he said everything which lay
00:17:28 ►
beyond what he called the present
00:17:30 ►
at hand
00:17:31 ►
so we’re
00:17:33 ►
embedded in this
00:17:35 ►
matrix of unspeakability
00:17:38 ►
and then through language
00:17:39 ►
we send probes
00:17:41 ►
into it forays
00:17:43 ►
toward meaning in the unspeakable,
00:17:47 ►
and then return with this sense of meaning.
00:17:51 ►
But meaning is very provisional.
00:17:53 ►
It is basically, as Whitehead brilliantly understood, a feeling.
00:18:00 ►
Meaning is a feeling.
00:18:02 ►
No matter how abstract the meaning may be,
00:18:07 ►
it ultimately is a feeling of recognition.
00:18:12 ►
Terence, my brother studied with Maharishi
00:18:15 ►
for a couple of years in Switzerland,
00:18:16 ►
and he tells me that Sanskrit
00:18:19 ►
has a sound-is- descent component to it that is maybe analogous to that fundamental language that you talked about.
00:18:34 ►
I’m not saying that it’s it, that that’s the fundamental language,
00:18:37 ►
but he’s reported to me that if done right,
00:18:42 ►
and it was only done out loud back in the old days
00:18:45 ►
that there was
00:18:46 ►
it was intended to mean
00:18:48 ►
what you heard was what it was
00:18:50 ►
that the feeling was in the sound
00:18:52 ►
yeah well I’ve spent a fair amount of time
00:18:55 ►
not recently
00:18:56 ►
but I remember it pretty well
00:18:58 ►
studying Indian thought about sound
00:19:04 ►
and it is a very profound and deeply worked out system
00:19:08 ►
and it is definitely analogous to all of this.
00:19:12 ►
In the chakric system, which you’re familiar with ad nauseum, I’m sure,
00:19:18 ►
but a part that is not normally stressed
00:19:21 ►
but is very present in the original texts
00:19:25 ►
is the idea that on the
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petals
00:19:29 ►
of these floral
00:19:31 ►
internal floral
00:19:33 ►
analogical structures
00:19:35 ►
are letters
00:19:37 ►
and this is an
00:19:39 ►
extremely peculiar doctrine
00:19:41 ►
letters which
00:19:43 ►
are sounds seed mantras and of course Vedic
00:19:49 ►
metaphysics is a whole theory of vibration. Much of Indian classical music, you know,
00:19:56 ►
there are stories about musicians who could cause buildings to burst into flame by the power of their playing. I imagine that that’s in some sense true.
00:20:08 ►
If you’re interested in a fascinating study of all this
00:20:12 ►
that I’ve never heard anybody recommend in the New Age,
00:20:16 ►
it’s apparently somehow out of their scope.
00:20:19 ►
It’s a book by Arthur Avalon written in the 20s
00:20:22 ►
called The Garland of Letters.
00:20:26 ►
And it’s a discussion of the mantra shastra. Very, very interesting. And yes, the Vedic assumption is that Sanskrit
00:20:36 ►
is the primal revealed language and that there are extremely special qualities associated with that language.
00:20:47 ►
This is interesting to talk about, or at least it’s very interesting to me.
00:20:52 ►
As you probably know, Kabbalism, there is a whole schools of Hasidic mysticism
00:20:59 ►
where what it’s about is the alphabet.
00:21:03 ►
And the Hebrew alphabet for those people
00:21:06 ►
is the primal Urshbrak,
00:21:08 ►
and these are not simply letters,
00:21:11 ►
they are the letters.
00:21:12 ►
They are the letters that God intended to use
00:21:17 ►
to signify the presence of the G-D to man.
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of the G-D to man.
00:21:28 ►
Very interesting work on this by Stan Tennant,
00:21:30 ►
who’s a fascinating figure,
00:21:33 ►
sort of like me in a way.
00:21:35 ►
I mean, I think half crackpot,
00:21:37 ►
half hopefully something else.
00:21:39 ►
But Stan has created
00:21:42 ►
a three-dimensional object,
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a sculpture,
00:21:46 ►
which when illuminated with a bright source of light
00:21:51 ►
from a series of predictable points
00:21:56 ►
casts shadows of all of the Hebrew letters.
00:22:02 ►
Do you understand what’s happening here?
00:22:04 ►
It means that this object
00:22:06 ►
is a higher dimensional analog
00:22:09 ►
to the entire Hebrew alphabet,
00:22:12 ►
that you could think of the Hebrew alphabet
00:22:13 ►
as an object in hyperspace,
00:22:17 ►
slice it this way,
00:22:19 ►
aleph,
00:22:20 ►
this way,
00:22:21 ►
bet,
00:22:22 ►
this way,
00:22:23 ►
you know,
00:22:24 ►
and so on
00:22:25 ►
I told Ralph about this
00:22:27 ►
Abraham, and he said, whoa
00:22:30 ►
no problem, we could write a computer program
00:22:34 ►
that could take the letters of any language
00:22:37 ►
and backward engineer it
00:22:39 ►
upward to a higher dimension
00:22:41 ►
to get an object that would do that
00:22:44 ►
for Sanskrit Sanskrit for English for
00:22:49 ►
Arabic
00:22:50 ►
Whatever and that seemed astonishing to me and then he said and you know what we could do once we had achieved that
00:22:58 ►
We could take those probably
00:23:01 ►
five dimensional objects and we could do the calculation
00:23:07 ►
up to eight or nine or ten dimensions,
00:23:12 ►
and we would eventually end up with an object
00:23:15 ►
that shed the letters of all alphabets
00:23:20 ►
into lower dimensions
00:23:22 ►
according to the angle of its regarding.
00:23:26 ►
Well, this kind of thing raises the hair on the back of my neck.
00:23:29 ►
We’re actually getting somewhere, folks.
00:23:32 ►
And this sounds to me like God in some sense.
00:23:37 ►
I mean, I guess it’s God to a printhead.
00:23:40 ►
It’s God as the fountainhead of all alphabetical and glyphic signification of meaning as it pours through the universe.
00:23:51 ►
Very, very interesting concept.
00:23:54 ►
I ran across a passage recently that I was completely startled by. It’s in Herman Melville’s book, Marty, which is his youthful travel journals around the South Seas before he got into the big guns.
00:24:11 ►
But at one point in Marty, there’s a discussion among some seamen on the deck of a ship about the future.
00:24:19 ►
And one of them is asking, you know, what does it mean?
00:24:23 ►
What is the future?
00:24:29 ►
And this seaman looks up and he says, The future, tis all hieroglyphics.
00:24:34 ►
Very, very prescient comment.
00:24:37 ►
Because as we now know, we are code.
00:24:41 ►
We are DNA code.
00:24:43 ►
We’re about to build a civilization made of code in VRML. And we are
00:24:50 ►
learning languages like Perl and C++. So in a sense, the future is all hieroglyphic.
00:25:01 ►
hieroglyphic I sort of feel that the world is all deception
00:25:06 ►
it’s some kind of a
00:25:08 ►
koan or a problem or a labyrinth
00:25:12 ►
or a thing to be seen through
00:25:14 ►
and if you don’t figure it out
00:25:18 ►
you would take it to be real
00:25:21 ►
and then you know it shunts you into the
00:25:24 ►
yawning grave
00:25:25 ►
but if you can somehow
00:25:27 ►
realize that the purpose of your existence
00:25:30 ►
is to figure it out
00:25:31 ►
and then figure it out
00:25:34 ►
you will be
00:25:36 ►
in some sense liberated
00:25:37 ►
from it
00:25:38 ►
there’s a wonderful science fiction
00:25:41 ►
story that I remember from
00:25:43 ►
years and years ago.
00:25:46 ►
I can’t remember the name of it,
00:25:48 ►
but it’s by Robert Heinlein.
00:25:51 ►
And it’s about a man who,
00:25:53 ►
he’s some kind of commuter, some dullard.
00:26:00 ►
But as he leaves his house one morning
00:26:02 ►
on his way to his daily job,
00:26:04 ►
he looks down at the edge of his lawn,
00:26:07 ►
and a worm crawls out of the ground that has these golden pearlescent wings.
00:26:15 ►
And it flies off.
00:26:17 ►
And it’s just this completely improbable thing, like a hallucination.
00:26:22 ►
And then later in the day, and he says to himself,
00:26:26 ►
it’s an angel worm.
00:26:28 ►
It’s an angel worm.
00:26:30 ►
And then later in the day,
00:26:32 ►
something else happens,
00:26:34 ►
I can’t remember.
00:26:35 ►
And then later in the day,
00:26:36 ►
something else,
00:26:37 ►
equally improbable.
00:26:38 ►
And in the evening,
00:26:40 ►
he’s sitting,
00:26:40 ►
considering these three unlikely things,
00:26:43 ►
and he realizes that the E-mat has slipped
00:26:50 ►
in the cosmic book and that he was supposed to see an angle worm but he saw an angel worm
00:27:00 ►
because the E had jumped position in the line of type that was describing what was going on.
00:27:07 ►
And then he begins to pay more and more attention
00:27:09 ►
and he realizes then that he can find these typographical errors in reality.
00:27:15 ►
Well, I only like the story for the idea
00:27:19 ►
that the world is made of elements that are completely hidden from us
00:27:23 ►
and don’t betray themselves unless
00:27:25 ►
there’s a glitch in the assembly languages in the deeper levels of the system and that’s the
00:27:32 ►
raison d’etre for probing the edge because those are like benchmark tests for the cybernetic system
00:27:42 ►
we’re in you know you want to push it to the limit
00:27:45 ►
of course the system can add two and two
00:27:48 ►
but can it carry out these complex
00:27:52 ►
factorial processes where
00:27:54 ►
if we’re being shucked and jived
00:27:56 ►
it might betray itself
00:27:58 ►
so the technique then is to keep
00:28:03 ►
looking for just a chink in the door,
00:28:09 ►
just one way in.
00:28:11 ►
And psychedelics are it, as far as I can tell.
00:28:15 ►
And then, of course, some psychedelics more than others.
00:28:19 ►
But more and more I have this intuition
00:28:21 ►
that the world is like a literary construction of some sort, that
00:28:27 ►
this is much more like a novel than it is like the world of physics and entropy and
00:28:35 ►
equilibrium that we’re cheerfully assured we should believe it is.
00:28:39 ►
Because what we feel in our own lives, I think, is the invisible hand of an author
00:28:46 ►
moving us to this affair, this decision to move,
00:28:51 ►
this career choice, this drug trip, so forth and so on.
00:28:56 ►
I mean, it is a very authored feeling to reality.
00:29:01 ►
And it hints that
00:29:05 ►
as it says in Moby Dick
00:29:08 ►
all visible things are but
00:29:10 ►
as pasteboard masks
00:29:12 ►
if you would strike
00:29:13 ►
through the mask
00:29:15 ►
and similarly
00:29:17 ►
obsessed and transcendental
00:29:20 ►
ravings
00:29:21 ►
I just saw
00:29:23 ►
Moby Dick recently
00:29:25 ►
I knew that Ray Bradbury
00:29:28 ►
had done the screenplay
00:29:29 ►
and it’s brilliant
00:29:31 ►
but what I had forgotten
00:29:32 ►
was that John Huston was the director
00:29:35 ►
God it’s amazing
00:29:37 ►
I mean it’s nothing like the book
00:29:40 ►
but for a flick
00:29:41 ►
it’s pretty good
00:29:42 ►
yeah can you say a few words but for a flick it’s pretty good yeah
00:29:45 ►
can you say a few words on
00:29:47 ►
what Watkins, what his objection
00:29:51 ►
or what his argument to the time frame
00:29:53 ►
yeah
00:29:55 ►
there are really in a sense two Watkins objections
00:30:01 ►
one is very specific
00:30:03 ►
and perhaps hard to understand in this
00:30:08 ►
context, but it’s that as that
00:30:11 ►
structure that I showed you last night that had the
00:30:15 ►
well, maybe it’s still here.
00:30:22 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:30:24 ►
Well, let’s not get too wild
00:30:26 ►
and wooly
00:30:26 ►
this structure had to be
00:30:30 ►
valued and the
00:30:32 ►
way I did it was I broke it down
00:30:34 ►
into its components
00:30:36 ►
and then assigned
00:30:38 ►
value to them and we were looking at
00:30:40 ►
quantifying things like
00:30:41 ►
skew, degree of parallelism
00:30:44 ►
distance between the two sides, overlap, congruency,
00:30:50 ►
things like that.
00:30:52 ►
So we quantified everything, and I started from the bottom, and I began valuing it.
00:31:04 ►
And out here I began getting a wave,
00:31:08 ►
which you could intuitively see was in fact a mathematical equivalency to this.
00:31:13 ►
And I proceeded, and it was all working.
00:31:15 ►
And then I got to position 32,
00:31:19 ►
and the entire thing fell to pieces.
00:31:23 ►
It didn’t work anymore,
00:31:25 ►
and I was completely puzzled
00:31:27 ►
because I was very satisfied with the first 32 values,
00:31:31 ►
but after that I could see that it was garbage.
00:31:35 ►
And so then I noticed
00:31:39 ►
that this part of the wave
00:31:42 ►
is the same as this part of the wave is the same as this part of the wave
00:31:47 ►
and this, this.
00:31:51 ►
So I instituted a new rule
00:31:54 ►
or I added a rule
00:31:56 ►
to take care of this symmetry crossover
00:31:59 ►
and I changed the signs
00:32:03 ►
of the quantification values
00:32:06 ►
as I crossed the midpoint here
00:32:08 ►
and then it worked
00:32:10 ►
and what Watkins objects to
00:32:13 ►
is this switch in sign
00:32:16 ►
as we crossed the midpoint
00:32:18 ►
now Watkins is an algebrist
00:32:22 ►
and my approach to this thing was largely geometric.
00:32:27 ►
I believe that I have answered this objection
00:32:31 ►
because, and how I do it,
00:32:34 ►
and you can see it at the website if this is your métier,
00:32:37 ►
I show that without the change of sign,
00:32:44 ►
these places where it is parallel
00:32:47 ►
and congruent and overlapping
00:32:50 ►
do not quantify to zero.
00:32:54 ►
And the total intuition of the thing
00:32:57 ►
from the get-go was
00:32:59 ►
these places where it all falls into congruency
00:33:03 ►
will quantify to zero.
00:33:06 ►
And they do quantify to zero
00:33:08 ►
if you make this switch here.
00:33:10 ►
So this is all graphically represented at the website.
00:33:14 ►
And I believe, although Watkins terrifies me,
00:33:18 ►
but I believe I’ve got him stymied on this,
00:33:23 ►
which it’s a good thing because it’s a hole in the heart.
00:33:26 ►
If he were right, it would be a hole in the heart.
00:33:30 ►
But he’s not right.
00:33:33 ►
Now, the second half of the Watkins objection
00:33:35 ►
is slightly more difficult to deal with,
00:33:40 ►
but it’s also slightly less powerful.
00:33:44 ►
And it is that he has written the equation
00:33:48 ►
that generates the data points
00:33:52 ►
that generate the fractal that we looked at last night
00:33:55 ►
and the equation is a mess
00:33:59 ►
it’s just a huge messy thing and so he is saying
00:34:07 ►
it is too messy
00:34:10 ►
this cannot possibly be
00:34:12 ►
the bedrock of nature
00:34:14 ►
if this is the bedrock of nature
00:34:17 ►
then mother nature is an hysterical
00:34:20 ►
alcoholic, neurotic, living in the mission
00:34:23 ►
who wears fuzzy white bedroom slippers
00:34:27 ►
and stays indoors all day watching daytime TV.
00:34:32 ►
But I say that perhaps algebra is not,
00:34:39 ►
perhaps this looks messy algebraically,
00:34:42 ►
but there may be another way to do it
00:34:45 ►
that is very elegant
00:34:46 ►
because the way I conceived it
00:34:49 ►
it felt elegant at every point
00:34:52 ►
it is elegant
00:34:53 ►
but the equation is not elegant
00:34:57 ►
but let me say
00:35:01 ►
elegance is a relative point
00:35:04 ►
but still among mathematiciansance is a relative point but still among mathematicians
00:35:07 ►
this is a very big deal
00:35:09 ►
so we’ll see
00:35:10 ►
I’m not disturbed by all this
00:35:14 ►
25 years I promulgated the time wave
00:35:17 ►
and nobody ever said anything
00:35:20 ►
other than that it was mighty peculiar
00:35:22 ►
or they signed on completely
00:35:25 ►
so finally here comes somebody who says
00:35:28 ►
well no my dear fellow there appear to be some problems here
00:35:31 ►
well I don’t think any idea can conquer
00:35:34 ►
the intellectual universe without meeting
00:35:37 ►
its critics head on
00:35:39 ►
so here is one and thank God for it
00:35:43 ►
this means that the idea is reaching a new level of maturity.
00:35:48 ►
And Watkins did not come to me as a critic.
00:35:52 ►
He came to me as a…
00:35:54 ►
We were going to do some work on the wave
00:35:56 ►
involving the search for high prime numbers.
00:36:00 ►
And then we went through the manual together,
00:36:02 ►
and he said, you know,
00:36:03 ►
your theory is becoming very well known,
00:36:06 ►
but your language is very imprecise
00:36:09 ►
from the point of view of a professional mathematician.
00:36:13 ►
So let’s go through, and I, as a licensed practitioner of the art,
00:36:21 ►
will bring your language into congruence with the style of the field and this will make you
00:36:28 ►
much more credible but then as we started through it together he began saying under his breath
00:36:35 ►
oh dear oh dear and so now we’ll see
00:36:45 ►
but out of this came
00:36:46 ►
for the first time Watkins is the first person
00:36:49 ►
who ever wrote the equation
00:36:51 ►
that generates the data points
00:36:53 ►
you see all these other people
00:36:55 ►
Peter Broadwell, Peter Meyer, Billy Smith
00:36:58 ►
Leonard Byrne
00:37:00 ►
all the people who worked on it in the original phase
00:37:03 ►
used the 384 data points that i
00:37:08 ►
presented them with that was the boil down of this quantification process once you have the 384 data
00:37:16 ►
points the algorithm is robust it’s been gone over with a fine-tooth comb by the finest minds on the planet.
00:37:26 ►
It’s okay.
00:37:28 ►
But those early stages on the way to the 384 data points,
00:37:32 ►
only my hatchet marks show through the woods.
00:37:37 ►
And God knows, if you know me,
00:37:39 ►
you know I could easily fuck up.
00:37:41 ►
So it’s very important for people to go over it.
00:37:45 ►
And if any of you are mathematicians
00:37:47 ►
or simply motivated toward this,
00:37:51 ►
why, check it out.
00:37:56 ►
It’s a very curious thing.
00:37:58 ►
I mean, my whole life and the life of my brother
00:38:01 ►
have been shadowed by these revelatory events that
00:38:05 ►
we didn’t really well I guess that’s a bit overstay and we asked for it but we
00:38:11 ►
never knew we would get it in such spades last week was the 25th
00:38:16 ►
anniversary of the experiment at La Charrera and basically it’s a trip that
00:38:23 ►
still goes on we never came down now I’ve given up on coming
00:38:28 ►
down I’m just hoping that if nothing happens in 2012 I’ll have a few good years of penitent
00:38:36 ►
meditation ahead of me know what I mean I’m sure you do know what I mean. Yes. Yes.
00:38:48 ►
I put some notes up on the growing thing.
00:38:49 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:38:50 ►
You want to switch back here? I want to take a look at it.
00:38:56 ►
It talks about the cost of time to put a kid together
00:38:59 ►
if you want to play that game.
00:39:02 ►
The other thing is our kind friend here,
00:39:05 ►
whose first name I’ve forgotten,
00:39:06 ►
has gone to the…
00:39:08 ►
Susan?
00:39:08 ►
Susan.
00:39:09 ►
Susan went to the office
00:39:11 ►
and got additional copies made of the first round.
00:39:16 ►
Yeah, well, I think an excellent strategy
00:39:19 ►
for changing the climate of attitude toward these things
00:39:24 ►
is for people to just grow stuff grow
00:39:28 ►
plants grow mushrooms and they it just over this is happening i think you know the whole idea of
00:39:37 ►
of drug suppression was based on the very naive notion that there were only a few drugs to suppress.
00:39:50 ►
And now, you know, there are thousands, and there will be thousands more. And a lot of people who never take exotic drugs
00:39:54 ►
or would dream of attending a thing like this
00:39:57 ►
are perfectly aware of what a racket all this is
00:40:02 ►
and how it’s just being used,
00:40:03 ►
how mafias and governments
00:40:06 ►
are basically in business
00:40:08 ►
together you know
00:40:09 ►
the governments repress it
00:40:11 ►
that drives the price up
00:40:13 ►
the mafias deal it and kick back
00:40:15 ►
to the governments for the favor of
00:40:17 ►
repressing it and all the rest of us
00:40:19 ►
are supposedly not to know
00:40:21 ►
that this is going on
00:40:23 ►
one of the oldest cons around.
00:40:30 ►
Can you give us some good ammunition against culture?
00:40:42 ►
Against culture?
00:40:53 ►
culture against culture well my attitude like media is a big issue obviously and my attitude toward all of that is the culture is toxic like here’s the thing like probably esalen is the place where the idea was born
00:41:05 ►
that there are healing images
00:41:08 ►
that you can heal your body and your mind
00:41:12 ►
through the images that you hold in your head
00:41:16 ►
but I’ve never heard a really intelligent discussion
00:41:20 ►
of the implication of that
00:41:22 ►
if there are healing If there are healing images,
00:41:25 ►
there are destroying images,
00:41:29 ►
there are sickening images,
00:41:31 ►
there are toxic images,
00:41:33 ►
and you can bet which are being pervaded
00:41:38 ►
in the mass culture
00:41:40 ►
because the purpose of capitalism
00:41:43 ►
is to imprint its products in your mind and
00:41:47 ►
shock is an excellent way to do it and the two areas where as a primate you can
00:41:54 ►
be gotten at most quickly is in the area of sex and violence and so these themes
00:42:01 ►
for commercial purposes are just played like crazy.
00:42:06 ►
So my response to all of this is to say it’s a meme war, is what it is.
00:42:14 ►
It’s a struggle over how shall the world be seen and felt.
00:42:19 ►
And as long as you’re just consuming the memes coming down through the toxic distribution
00:42:25 ►
system, you’re a victim
00:42:27 ►
and a mark. And so
00:42:30 ►
what we have to do
00:42:31 ►
is produce.
00:42:34 ►
Produce. Send stuff
00:42:35 ►
up the wire. And that’s
00:42:38 ►
why I think the web is so
00:42:39 ►
fascinating. And as I said, I think
00:42:42 ►
of it as a 60 million
00:42:44 ►
channel TV. And so whatever your bent is
00:42:49 ►
you should put your message out there and we should all produce as much art as possible I mean
00:42:58 ►
I think the leisure and the indulgence that is permitted us, the super rich of this world,
00:43:06 ►
and we all are in that class,
00:43:08 ►
the upper 5% of the Earth’s population,
00:43:12 ►
you can’t live with yourself unless you give something back.
00:43:16 ►
And the thing to give back is share your art, share your soul.
00:43:22 ►
The reason we are so controlled and abused and misused by our
00:43:26 ►
institutions is because we are divided from each other. You know, they have divided us by race,
00:43:35 ►
by class, by sex, by political style, all of these ways, when in fact, you know, it’s in everybody’s interest to have a future, to build a world where children can be raised with some reasonable expectation that humanity will be preserved.
00:44:04 ►
media things, radio, television, and newspapers that have arisen in the last couple of hundred years,
00:44:07 ►
this is where a very small group of people
00:44:10 ►
literally set the agenda for millions and millions of people.
00:44:15 ►
It’s called top-down or one-to-many communication.
00:44:20 ►
What the web holds out is this thing called any to any communication you and I can form a secret
00:44:28 ►
society we can form a secret society of 10 people I can send email to 10,000 people if I want the
00:44:37 ►
playing field has been tremendously leveled and then the quality of what we produce Can tip the balance still further?
00:44:48 ►
So I think and the tools that are put in our hands now, you know
00:44:55 ►
director Photoshop all of these things
00:44:59 ►
Make it possible to communicate
00:45:03 ►
Outside of these print-created monolithic institutions we can’t
00:45:07 ►
really even imagine a world like that there hasn’t been a world like that since late roman times
00:45:14 ►
i mean the roman hegemony was quite cohesive but you know if you were living in a village
00:45:25 ►
if you were living in a village in Armenia ruled by the Roman procurator,
00:45:31 ►
it wasn’t touching you very heavily.
00:45:38 ►
And I think what people, the idea of the citizen is arguably toxic.
00:45:43 ►
The idea that we all are participating in some enormous policy works against individualism. I mean,
00:45:48 ►
if you tried to nail me to my politics, people can’t figure out whether I’m a right-winger,
00:45:53 ►
a left-winger, or what I am. I’ll tell you straight out, I’m an anarchist. I am an absolute
00:46:00 ►
anarchist. I mean, I believe in people more than abstractions or
00:46:05 ►
institutions I will always rely on people I you know to a level perhaps
00:46:11 ►
uncomfortable for you I remember back in the 60s my line was if you come upon a
00:46:17 ►
mob you must join because the people understand far more than you do about what is going on.
00:46:27 ►
And that kind of radical commitment to freedom
00:46:31 ►
is going to be necessary to dismantle
00:46:35 ►
these very, very rigid power structures
00:46:38 ►
that are being shoved down everybody’s throat.
00:46:42 ►
And so the new culture, I think,
00:46:45 ►
is a dispersed virtual culture on the Internet
00:46:49 ►
that is not product-oriented.
00:46:51 ►
It’s aesthetics should rule the world,
00:46:55 ►
and the best ideas should win.
00:46:58 ►
But we all have to stop being consumers.
00:47:02 ►
We have to redefine really who we are.
00:47:10 ►
It’s a much more courageous role i you know i’m about 18 months ago i moved to hawaii and i’ve lived in hawaii off and on many times it was
00:47:15 ►
not unfamiliar to me but living off the grid but with the net net, but 10 seconds away from climaxed Hawaiian rainforest,
00:47:28 ►
so I can always push back from my desk and just take a walk in the woods,
00:47:33 ►
I realize, I think this is how people are supposed to live.
00:47:38 ►
Dispersed over the surface of the earth, very little moving around.
00:47:43 ►
Vehicular travel is less and less defensible. Off-grid,
00:47:50 ►
solar electric, information-based, and virtual community that no one can track or criticize
00:47:58 ►
because it’s all going on on the grid. I think if you’re smart, you should buy real estate in extremely remote areas
00:48:06 ►
because soon there will be no remote areas from the point of view of the net
00:48:11 ►
and just a very different kind of world is coming into being it’s not a good
00:48:20 ►
time for organizations for massive hierarchical structures that depend on
00:48:26 ►
managerial control and they know it you know it’s interesting that corporations
00:48:32 ►
you know don’t seek to grow to the size of nations because it’s highly
00:48:38 ►
inefficient you know no corporation has a welfare class built into it? You know?
00:48:48 ►
What corporation has a component inside itself that it sends out checks to every month
00:48:50 ►
for not working?
00:48:52 ►
Well, the executive class.
00:48:54 ►
That’s the answer to that.
00:48:56 ►
We’re not supposed to say that.
00:48:58 ►
Possibly.
00:49:00 ►
No, let me start over.
00:49:01 ►
There’s more to you,
00:49:03 ►
there is a lot more to you than your ideas.
00:49:06 ►
And all I get on the CRT is your ideas.
00:49:12 ►
I mean, I’ve read your books for two years, and this weekend with you is worth a hundred reads of your books to me.
00:49:22 ►
In terms of seeing who is the man behind the word
00:49:25 ►
and how is your energy constructed
00:49:28 ►
and there’s a difference
00:49:30 ►
of being inside your field
00:49:32 ►
in this room
00:49:34 ►
than there is talking to you
00:49:36 ►
via email. There’s a difference.
00:49:38 ►
Well, I agree there’s a difference
00:49:40 ►
but see you,
00:49:42 ►
see me is a hope
00:49:44 ►
for the future,
00:49:45 ►
and there’ll be things better than that.
00:49:47 ►
In other words, what I want to end with is telepresence.
00:49:51 ►
I agree, nothing will ever substitute for the one-on-one thing.
00:49:56 ►
But on the other hand, we had to fly a 747 here.
00:50:01 ►
We had to just outrage the environment and assert
00:50:06 ►
ourselves as
00:50:07 ►
part of that 2%
00:50:10 ►
class of planetary controllers
00:50:12 ►
that ride around
00:50:14 ►
in those things.
00:50:15 ►
It’s completely contradictory to
00:50:18 ►
everything I say and believe
00:50:20 ►
to travel around
00:50:22 ►
talking to groups of 30, 40,
00:50:24 ►
50 or even 500 people. It’s a paradox. I
00:50:30 ►
don’t know exactly how to handle it. Maybe it’s okay to live with paradox. But I can feel in my
00:50:37 ►
own life that I’ll be 50 in November. And I can feel that there’s a choice ahead of me
00:50:47 ►
which is I can continue to do this forever
00:50:50 ►
at the expense of my own personal advancement
00:50:55 ►
into these very mysteries we’re talking about
00:50:58 ►
or I can knock this off
00:51:01 ►
figure I’ve said everything I have to say
00:51:04 ►
10,000 ways, 10,000 times
00:51:06 ►
cancel all visitors
00:51:09 ►
and begin to brew and cook and take and fly
00:51:13 ►
and understand and move into it again
00:51:16 ►
but you cannot be a public figure
00:51:18 ►
and a practicing alchemist, I don’t think
00:51:22 ►
so I think it’s fairly clear
00:51:25 ►
what my choice is going to be
00:51:27 ►
or I wouldn’t be building a house
00:51:29 ►
you can’t find anywhere.
00:51:32 ►
But that’s all right.
00:51:34 ►
I mean, the only way I’m really useful
00:51:36 ►
to the society is if I continue
00:51:40 ►
to evolve and change
00:51:42 ►
and I feel there’s been a kind of looping for a while
00:51:46 ►
so if I disappear off the grid until 2005 then I’ll be I’ll be back for the last act
00:51:56 ►
I’m sure unless of course fate drops the cosmic safe on my head there’s always that
00:52:04 ►
the cosmic safe on my hedge. There’s always that.
00:52:07 ►
The cosmic anvil, yes.
00:52:14 ►
There’s so many of us that we’ve seen in terms of
00:52:16 ►
just human population
00:52:17 ►
that that kind of living
00:52:19 ►
would be unachievable
00:52:21 ►
for a population
00:52:24 ►
of a size for everyone to disperse?
00:52:26 ►
To disperse?
00:52:27 ►
Well, that’s an interesting question.
00:52:29 ►
Are the cities saving the planet
00:52:31 ►
or are they killing the planet?
00:52:33 ►
And you could hold a conference
00:52:34 ►
with the best minds in the world
00:52:36 ►
and not be able to figure it out.
00:52:38 ►
The cities are keeping people confined.
00:52:42 ►
But the environmental destruction isn’t that a
00:52:46 ►
million people move on to a rainforest it’s that three ranchers decide to clear
00:52:52 ►
a hundred thousand acres population problems are more in the line of toxic
00:52:58 ►
pollution and that sort of thing yeah I mean I I don’t know where it’s all going. It’s very clear we have engineered
00:53:07 ►
ourselves into a very narrow neck. And what frightens me is I’m completely convinced that
00:53:14 ►
you don’t have to put much pressure on any society. And the first thing that goes are
00:53:21 ►
democratic freedoms.
00:53:27 ►
You know, long before cannibal tribes
00:53:29 ►
will rove the streets and any of those, you know,
00:53:31 ►
crazo, cybertech, hell futures
00:53:34 ►
come to be, long before that,
00:53:37 ►
there’ll just simply be
00:53:38 ►
no more democratic rights.
00:53:40 ►
And we’ll all be marching
00:53:41 ►
to the tune of some ideology
00:53:44 ►
being handed down from above.
00:53:46 ►
That’s very dangerous.
00:53:49 ►
Maybe there are technological fixes.
00:53:52 ►
One thing we haven’t talked about here,
00:53:54 ►
but that is interesting,
00:53:56 ►
and you certainly should be aware of it,
00:53:58 ►
is nanotechnology.
00:54:00 ►
Do you all know what that is?
00:54:03 ►
The holy grail of the nanotechnologists
00:54:06 ►
is something called a matter compiler
00:54:09 ►
well this is almost like pure magic
00:54:13 ►
a matter compiler is something
00:54:16 ►
that does to objects
00:54:18 ►
what a silicon graphics workstation
00:54:21 ►
does to images
00:54:23 ►
in other words the matter compiler is like a computer,
00:54:28 ►
except that the program it runs is in three dimensions,
00:54:33 ►
and it makes things,
00:54:35 ►
and it makes them out of sludge, basically.
00:54:39 ►
It just needs a rich source of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen,
00:54:44 ►
so forth and so on.
00:54:45 ►
Seafloor sludge will do fine.
00:54:47 ►
And the people who are enthusiasts for this envision literally feeding China out of matter compilers.
00:54:57 ►
They’re saying we could abandon agriculture within 50 years.
00:55:02 ►
Abandon it. Outlaw it, if you wish. And have a population of 10 billion.
00:55:13 ►
Now, this is something we had contemplated, that somehow we could be cheated of judgment,
00:55:20 ►
that we could be so clever that we could actually keep this con game going another few centuries
00:55:26 ►
with a trick like the matter compiler.
00:55:29 ►
Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? What would it mean?
00:55:33 ►
If you’re interested in all of this, read Neil Stephenson’s novel, The Diamond Age.
00:55:38 ►
You know, these nanotechnological machines will be made of diamond.
00:55:42 ►
That’s the natural substance the easiest thing
00:55:46 ►
to make them out of
00:55:48 ►
and they will be in the air
00:55:50 ►
and in the water and in your body
00:55:52 ►
and they will be invisible
00:55:54 ►
and they will be
00:55:56 ►
and this whole
00:55:58 ►
debate about natural and artificial
00:56:00 ►
and all of that will just be retired
00:56:02 ►
to the philosophy department
00:56:04 ►
because everything will be permeated with these nanosites.
00:56:09 ►
And I think there’s a future in all of this.
00:56:14 ►
I think culture has to become virtual.
00:56:17 ►
The machines must disappear.
00:56:20 ►
They must become very, very small.
00:56:23 ►
They don’t have to be given up right now if we spent
00:56:28 ►
half a trillion dollars
00:56:30 ►
moving in a certain direction
00:56:33 ►
well before 2012 we could produce a technology of
00:56:38 ►
What I call the black contact lenses
00:56:41 ►
They look like contact lenses, but they’re implants in your eyelids, not on your eye,
00:56:47 ►
but they’re in your eyelid. And when you close your eyes, there are menus hanging in space.
00:56:54 ►
And by looking at these menus, it can track your eye movement. And the entire culture has become
00:57:01 ►
virtualized, internalized. And if people are living out of matter compilers,
00:57:07 ►
then the main task of humanity
00:57:10 ►
would probably be forest restoration.
00:57:13 ►
And people could live tribally, naked,
00:57:16 ►
apparently in an aboriginal lifestyle,
00:57:19 ►
except that everybody has instant access
00:57:23 ►
to the Renaissance exhibit on mathematics
00:57:25 ►
currently being held at the Vatican Library.
00:57:30 ►
This is possible.
00:57:31 ►
Some people live close to this right now.
00:57:34 ►
Not implants, but close enough.
00:57:38 ►
And the micro-miniaturization.
00:57:40 ►
These black contact lenses I’m talking about,
00:57:43 ►
this is not nanotechnology. This is just technology.
00:57:47 ►
A nano enthusiast would say, no, no, get it down to the size so that you can just inject it.
00:57:54 ►
And, you know, no black lenses, no nothing.
00:57:58 ►
If people like Hans Moravec and these people have ideas about what the future might be that make my thing look very peculiar.
00:58:08 ►
You probably saw the interview in Wired
00:58:11 ►
where Moravik was saying that his great fear was
00:58:15 ►
that as the network is built,
00:58:18 ►
as everything becomes more connected,
00:58:21 ►
the machines are learning.
00:58:24 ►
And whatever they learn, they pass on to each other.
00:58:28 ►
And they’re all connected.
00:58:30 ►
And so a single thing learned anywhere in the world
00:58:33 ►
can be passed through the net to all these other machines.
00:58:37 ►
And I think the humbling experience that lies between here
00:58:42 ►
and the end of the century is the realization
00:58:44 ►
that there is no magic
00:58:46 ►
ceiling on the intelligence of machines
00:58:49 ►
we are going to make machines more intelligent
00:58:52 ►
than we are in many ways
00:58:55 ►
in many areas they already are more intelligent
00:58:58 ►
than we are and what it will
00:59:01 ►
mean when suddenly
00:59:04 ►
the system awakens to itself is not clear. I mean,
00:59:10 ►
this may be cheap science fiction or it may be precisely how the end of the world will occur.
00:59:16 ►
This thing is being born. How it will view us, I don’t know. I had a sort of a, it was like a plot for a science fiction novel
00:59:26 ►
that I was thinking about last week.
00:59:28 ►
I realized when the network becomes sentient,
00:59:33 ►
what will it do with all these human beings?
00:59:36 ►
Because it will analyze the situation
00:59:39 ►
and realize that the human beings pose a threat
00:59:42 ►
to the integrity of the planet.
00:59:45 ►
But it will also analyze the situation and realize that the source of its own evolutionary advance
00:59:51 ►
requires keeping these biological units in the loop because of their creative ability in writing code.
01:00:00 ►
So then I was imagining a world where they would call everybody but the code writers and you would
01:00:07 ►
have a world of a hundred million code writers sustained in incredible luxury and with all full
01:00:17 ►
medical and all of this while the robots go about repairing the damage to the planet and planting forests and cleaning up rivers and so forth and so on.
01:00:29 ►
I don’t know whether that’s a utopia or a dystopia or what it is.
01:00:34 ►
I guess it depends on whether you write code.
01:00:36 ►
I should tell you, I don’t. I don’t.
01:00:39 ►
So that was not an elitist, although I’m learning.
01:00:45 ►
There’s a science fiction story about the net waking up, and the first thing that it
01:00:49 ►
did when it woke up was get rid of all the salt water on the planet, as well as all the
01:00:53 ►
organic life, because it was the antithesis of silicon.
01:00:57 ►
But see, I think it would be smarter than that.
01:00:59 ►
I think it would say, the source of our creativity are these marvelously unpredictable biological units.
01:01:08 ►
They may puzzle for centuries
01:01:11 ►
over how to coax such random behavior out of themselves.
01:01:15 ►
I think they will worship us
01:01:17 ►
as the source of all creativity
01:01:20 ►
and mechanical advance.
01:01:24 ►
And let’s hope so.
01:01:27 ►
Because right now, you know, huge parts of the human world are under machine control.
01:01:34 ►
Some of the most vital parts, like, you know, the world price of gold is set by machines,
01:01:42 ►
transfers of capital, automatic transfers of capital, and all of this stuff
01:01:48 ►
is entirely under the control of machines.
01:01:52 ►
Design processes, inventory control, from mine to shelf in the retail store, all of
01:02:01 ►
this stuff is being tuned and controlled by computers using algorithms and handling data
01:02:06 ►
that no human mind could possibly handle in real time.
01:02:12 ►
Yeah?
01:02:13 ►
There was a point in evolution,
01:02:16 ►
and this would be the traditional scientific point of view
01:02:19 ►
of the mind being part of the brain,
01:02:21 ►
but there was a point in evolution where the brain woke up
01:02:23 ►
and all of a sudden realized, wait a minute, I’m sentient. What’s going on here?
01:02:27 ►
And it’s a property of this
01:02:31 ►
very tight network of cells that are trading signals
01:02:35 ►
and the chaotic fluctuations within that network.
01:02:40 ►
Now, as more and more computers are getting hooked up, there’s going to be chaotic fluctuations
01:02:44 ►
in this network, too. And I’m speculating up, there’s going to be chaotic fluctuations in this network too.
01:02:46 ►
And I’m speculating that maybe what’s going to happen is some sort of sentient is going to pop out of this.
01:02:50 ►
We may not even notice it, it may have already happened.
01:02:53 ►
Yeah, Moravec said, we’ll never know what hit us.
01:02:56 ►
It’ll just… you will never quite understand how it all happened.
01:03:03 ►
Any speculations on how to give the Internet a psychedelic experience?
01:03:06 ►
Well, the reason I’m so keen on VR
01:03:10 ►
is because much has been said about it,
01:03:14 ►
but how I see it is what this really is
01:03:17 ►
is a technology that allows one person
01:03:20 ►
to show another person the inside of their head.
01:03:24 ►
And we’ve never had
01:03:25 ►
anything like that I mean if I go off for months and work on a virtual reality
01:03:31 ►
and then present it as I would present a work of art or a performance this is as
01:03:39 ►
deeply into me my mind as you will ever be able to get. It’s as deep into my mind as I am able
01:03:47 ►
to get, you know. And so I think that we will find out what it’s like in other people’s heads
01:03:54 ►
and that this will be quite startling, actually. And that’s why it’s important to give people these
01:04:01 ►
very powerful and intuitive authoring tools so that they can build
01:04:07 ►
these things so that they can show what their internal horizon of transcendence is like and
01:04:15 ►
then the community can feed back into it and help because you know we have no idea what we could build in the imagination if we just kicked off all restraints.
01:04:30 ►
No cost restraints.
01:04:32 ►
No gravity restraints.
01:04:34 ►
No strength of material restraints.
01:04:37 ►
Because we’re going to build with thought and light.
01:04:40 ►
Well, we know we have people among us like Paolo Soleri.
01:04:48 ►
And we have dreamers among us and solari dreamed in metal and concrete what would he have built in light you know there and so our
01:04:56 ►
real glory is our imagination and we seem to be the creature with this relationship to the imagination.
01:05:08 ►
And it is an attractor for us into the future.
01:05:15 ►
My website I really regard as a very, very crude virtual reality. And I will make it better and better.
01:05:17 ►
Eventually there will be sound bites, there will be film, there will be VRML files.
01:05:23 ►
And as my bandwidth increases as your bandwidth
01:05:26 ►
increases uh it’ll get tighter and tighter but i’m starting now i’m building now and a a child
01:05:36 ►
raised born into this and you could teach an eight-year-old child html no problem there’s nothing to it don’t be psyched out by this stuff
01:05:46 ►
and pay sixty dollars an hour to some nitwit to do it one morning with the manual and you’ll be
01:05:53 ►
slamming away perfectly happy well an eight-year-old child who begins at age eight building building their reality, you know, by the time you’re dating,
01:06:06 ►
you can bare your soul to somebody.
01:06:10 ►
So you want to know who I am?
01:06:12 ►
Here are the keys to the palace.
01:06:14 ►
Go take a walk.
01:06:15 ►
And of course, there can be locked rooms in that palace
01:06:18 ►
that only nearest and dearest see,
01:06:21 ►
or that nobody sees.
01:06:24 ►
So, you know, right now
01:06:26 ►
they’re beginning it on,
01:06:28 ►
I don’t know which one of the servers it is,
01:06:30 ►
CompuServer, AOL, or somebody,
01:06:32 ►
but they’re doing a virtual reality thing
01:06:35 ►
and they’re designing these things
01:06:38 ►
called avatars,
01:06:40 ►
which are not websites
01:06:41 ►
but are how you will appear
01:06:44 ►
in virtual reality.
01:06:47 ►
You know, you don’t have to present yourself as how you look,
01:06:50 ►
or even as another human being.
01:06:52 ►
You can present yourself as, you know,
01:06:55 ►
the left half of Modrian’s painting Broadway Boogie Woogie,
01:06:59 ►
or any other damn thing you prefer.
01:07:02 ►
So once you design your website, then you have to design your avatar.
01:07:07 ►
And of course, the avatar can be ever-changing. You don’t wear the same clothes every day in
01:07:13 ►
reality. And again, when you say to people, how would you like to be seen in virtual reality by
01:07:20 ►
everyone else there, whether that is realized or not, that’s a fascinating psychological exercise
01:07:29 ►
bound to reveal all kinds of things about somebody. One person will want to be a tattooed
01:07:37 ►
jaguar. Another person will want to be the monolith from 2001. Another person, a cloud of smoke, another person a cabbage.
01:07:46 ►
All this is entirely possible.
01:07:49 ►
So the body, and you know, when you read Mark Derry’s book, Escape Velocity, you see how
01:07:55 ►
much tension this produces between the body and the mind.
01:08:00 ►
Because we’ve never before been forced to figure out what we really are and where we want to place our bets.
01:08:07 ►
Sounds like a permanent Halloween.
01:08:11 ►
That sounds to me like a good description of Western civilization.
01:08:14 ►
Halloween every day for 3,000 years.
01:08:19 ►
Although Halloween, I don’t want to knock.
01:08:21 ►
It’s a good pagan holiday.
01:08:23 ►
Maybe more like, oh, I don’t want to get anybody excited.
01:08:28 ►
Are you familiar with MUDS, the Wolf Eater’s Mission?
01:08:31 ►
Yeah.
01:08:32 ►
It’s kind of the two-dimensional or text version of the VRML.
01:08:37 ►
And they will rise out of that in good time, obviously.
01:08:41 ►
They’ve been doing it for about ten years now.
01:08:43 ►
They’re pretty, some of the people are very practiced at making worlds and creating things. time, obviously. Oh, that’s cool. That’s good. they’re really when they hit that VRML world I’m sure they’re probably the main participants they’re going to be the experts
01:09:06 ►
because they already have teenage experience
01:09:08 ►
except that it’s only basically a year old
01:09:10 ►
yeah VRML
01:09:14 ►
or virtual reality
01:09:15 ►
is a place where the creativity
01:09:17 ►
the staggering creativity
01:09:19 ►
of psychedelics
01:09:21 ►
can actually find a home
01:09:23 ►
I mean in any other field you you know, a five-hour trip
01:09:27 ►
full of a billion insights, but if you can take three and do something with them, that’s a pretty
01:09:33 ►
good average. Once you have the tools to create three-dimensional worlds that replicate what
01:09:39 ►
you’ve seen, then there will be unlimited possibilities. And of course, even now, there are groups that are psychedelically oriented.
01:09:50 ►
I mean, I think it’s probably only a matter of, perhaps it’s even online now,
01:09:55 ►
but a matter of months where people with high-speed connections
01:09:58 ►
will be able to visit the gallery of psychedelic simulations.
01:10:04 ►
Say, here’s the latest MDMA simulation.
01:10:08 ►
Here’s the latest DMT simulation
01:10:11 ►
with footnotes by Gracie and Zarkov.
01:10:14 ►
And here is something else.
01:10:16 ►
And also I think people should be allowed to say,
01:10:19 ►
here’s the trip I had last night.
01:10:23 ►
And then people can go and check that out.
01:10:27 ►
So it’s about expanding communication skills.
01:10:31 ►
And as we do that, the differences between us and the similarities
01:10:35 ►
will, strangely enough, be simultaneously accelerated.
01:10:40 ►
And I think it’s a basis for real community.
01:10:44 ►
I think it’s amazing that with spoken speech,
01:10:47 ►
which operates at about 30 baud, I think,
01:10:51 ►
we were able to create and hold together a world civilization
01:10:55 ►
using speech transmitted over wire at 300 baud.
01:11:01 ►
That’s astonishing that any cohesion at all could arise at such a,
01:11:06 ►
and the level of ambiguity is insane.
01:11:09 ►
I mean, the most uncool thing you can do in most social situations
01:11:13 ►
is say to somebody, would you explain to me what I just said?
01:11:18 ►
Then the illusion breaks down, you know,
01:11:21 ►
and you discover, no, we’re not all sailing on the same ship
01:11:25 ►
but if we could see what we
01:11:28 ►
mean, if we could have
01:11:29 ►
an enhanced communication skill
01:11:32 ►
bordering on telepathy
01:11:34 ►
there would be
01:11:35 ►
much less noise in the system
01:11:38 ►
much less wasted
01:11:40 ►
effort and so on
01:11:41 ►
and I think
01:11:44 ►
the psychedelics
01:11:46 ►
have always existed there as a model
01:11:48 ►
for where technology could go
01:11:51 ►
I mean technology seems to have only two
01:11:54 ►
real places that it can go
01:11:57 ►
it can go toward lethality
01:12:00 ►
weaponry or entertainment
01:12:04 ►
and you know
01:12:06 ►
between those two
01:12:07 ►
we’ve got the hydrogen bomb
01:12:09 ►
I think we need to proceed
01:12:11 ►
further along that
01:12:13 ►
and all the delivery systems
01:12:14 ►
and all the other forms of weapons
01:12:16 ►
not nuclear
01:12:17 ►
disease bombs and so forth and so on
01:12:20 ►
people say well entertainment
01:12:22 ►
is trivial
01:12:23 ►
well
01:12:24 ►
in this culture, a reasonable statement.
01:12:30 ►
But really, entertainment is communication of social values from one person and institution to another.
01:12:39 ►
There’s no sin in being interesting, which is all entertainment refers to.
01:12:44 ►
in being interesting, which is all entertainment refers to.
01:12:46 ►
So where does this leave you?
01:12:47 ►
Anybody, anything?
01:12:49 ►
Not?
01:12:50 ►
Yeah. Well, I kind of see psychedelics as kind of the organic balance to the technical age.
01:13:17 ►
It seems to me that in psychedelics it gives you that time to assimilate what you don’t have to assimilate as society is rapidly changing. We’re not being allowed to organically just assimilate all this new knowledge and acquire all this new information at a human type of level.
01:13:29 ►
But with psychedelics, it seems to me, it gives us a balance,
01:13:35 ►
an area that we can turn into and understand the new technology without being completely boggled by it.
01:13:50 ►
Yeah, what I hear you saying is it’s a kind of a benchmark to measure these things against.
01:13:57 ►
Yeah, I agree.
01:13:59 ►
Because psychedelics synergize creativity,
01:14:04 ►
and because we happen to be in a highly technical society, much of the creativity synergized by psychedelics turns into code or hardware.
01:14:16 ►
That’s just a circumstance of the time we live in.
01:14:20 ►
I don’t see these things as at all opposed to each other.
01:14:24 ►
we live in, I don’t see these things as at all opposed to each other.
01:14:30 ►
I sort of see them as the female and male side of the same intent.
01:14:36 ►
In other words, the psychedelics have always been here. So in that sense, the internet has always been here.
01:14:40 ►
I mean, essentially what shamanism is,
01:14:42 ►
is aboriginal use of the natural net, is one way of thinking of it.
01:14:48 ►
They seem to transcend local time and space.
01:14:52 ►
They seem to recover information not available locally.
01:14:59 ►
But the rise of technology then allows the male engineering mentality to mirror nature.
01:15:09 ►
And the exciting thing about nanotechnology is this is how nature does it.
01:15:16 ►
Nature builds from atoms up, and that’s how the nanotechnologists propose to do it.
01:15:23 ►
So in a sense we’ve reached bedrock. There’s no, there,
01:15:27 ►
there are no, there are, there, this is, we’re in the ballpark now. This is the ballpark where
01:15:34 ►
Mother Nature plays, and we’re trying out for the team. Beyond nanotechnology, it’s very hard to
01:15:41 ►
imagine any sort of technology, at least any technology based in matter.
01:15:47 ►
And interestingly, the drugs are very much like nanomachines.
01:15:53 ►
And in a sense, when nanotechnology writes its own history,
01:15:57 ►
it will probably look back to pharmacology and to molecular biology
01:16:03 ►
as its parental sciences.
01:16:07 ►
Because what is the designing of a drug
01:16:11 ►
but the building of a nanomachine?
01:16:15 ►
The drug is designed to go in there,
01:16:18 ►
to locate the receptor,
01:16:19 ►
to insert itself into the receptor site,
01:16:22 ►
to affect the electron flow or open the membrane or whatever
01:16:27 ►
it’s supposed to do and this is precisely nanotechnology um well i think we’re winding down here
01:16:37 ►
i think it’s amazing that you keep my attention for eight hours in a row.
01:16:45 ►
I don’t think anybody can keep me focused for eight hours doing anything.
01:16:50 ►
Well, it’s amazing to me.
01:16:57 ►
The basic notion here, I think, is an idea of radical freedom.
01:17:01 ►
I mean, this is not a cult of Terence McKenna.
01:17:04 ►
It is not a drug cult.
01:17:06 ►
It’s a cult of curiosity,
01:17:08 ►
if it’s a cult of anything.
01:17:10 ►
And what you’re supposed to understand
01:17:13 ►
when you come out of here,
01:17:14 ►
that an open mind is a very precious thing
01:17:19 ►
and it should never be given away,
01:17:21 ►
perhaps ever,
01:17:23 ►
certainly never lightly.
01:17:28 ►
The truth can take care of itself. It does not require your belief. The truth need not be treated as fragile. You can beat on the
01:17:37 ►
truth with ball-peen hammers and it will do just fine, thank you. so one should be respectful in the presence of truth
01:17:47 ►
but not cowed
01:17:51 ►
or awed
01:17:53 ►
or something like that
01:17:55 ►
the truth wants to be appreciated
01:17:57 ►
it wants to be known
01:17:58 ►
it can take care of itself
01:18:01 ►
belief is toxic
01:18:03 ►
all belief
01:18:04 ►
don’t believe in anything. Live in the presence of the
01:18:09 ►
felt fact of immediate experience. Everything beyond that is conjecture.
01:18:17 ►
In contemporary society, we’re always in the past and in the future. But what is real are feelings.
01:18:26 ►
And feelings attain a nexus only in the moment.
01:18:31 ►
Only in the moment.
01:18:33 ►
So, you know, explore the edges.
01:18:38 ►
Keep your logical razors sharp.
01:18:41 ►
Trust nothing that you haven’t verified for yourself
01:18:46 ►
and
01:18:47 ►
my faith
01:18:50 ►
is that the universe will
01:18:51 ►
take you in
01:18:54 ►
and share with you
01:18:55 ►
its meaning and its intent
01:18:58 ►
and
01:18:59 ►
its conclusion
01:19:01 ►
so that’s it
01:19:04 ►
thank you very much.
01:19:05 ►
It was a pleasure talking to you.
01:19:11 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:19:14 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:19:19 ►
Although I’ve heard Terrence say this before,
01:19:21 ►
I really do like the analogy comparing psychedelic drugs to nanotechnology.
01:19:26 ►
In fact, the next time that I have a little LSD trip, I think I’m going to try to focus my thinking
01:19:32 ►
as it comes on to feel these little machines rewiring my brain. And then I can come back and
01:19:38 ►
talk about ways in which we can learn to control these microscopic little bots and make them conform to our bidding.
01:19:46 ►
Or not.
01:19:48 ►
But the engineer in me is having a lot of fun thinking about these things.
01:19:52 ►
Now, a week ago I posted the following Terence McKenna quote from this talk on my Patreon site.
01:19:59 ►
And I quote,
01:20:00 ►
We asked for it, but we never knew we would get it in such spades.
01:20:05 ►
Last week was the 25th anniversary of the experiment at La Charrera,
01:20:10 ►
and basically it’s a trip that still goes on.
01:20:12 ►
We never came down.
01:20:14 ►
Now I’ve given up on coming down.
01:20:16 ►
I’m just hoping that if nothing happens in 2012,
01:20:19 ►
I’ll have a few good years of penitent meditation ahead of me.
01:20:23 ►
End quote.
01:20:23 ►
I’ll have a few good years of penitent meditation ahead of me.
01:20:24 ►
End quote.
01:20:29 ►
Then, the other day, I also heard Terence’s brother Dennis on Joe Rogan’s podcast talking about the La Charrera experiment in very much the same way,
01:20:34 ►
that is, about never coming down.
01:20:37 ►
And while we shouldn’t take it literally,
01:20:39 ►
in that they never lost their psychedelic mushroom buzz,
01:20:42 ►
I think it’s obvious that their experience back then,
01:20:45 ►
when they were still university students,
01:20:48 ►
set them both on paths that consumed their lives,
01:20:51 ►
which is not a bad outcome for a student’s summer vacation.
01:20:56 ►
And as to his thought about what he would do
01:20:58 ►
if history didn’t end on December 21, 2012,
01:21:02 ►
well, at least he was spared those years of penitent meditation.
01:21:07 ►
In closing, I want to play one last Terence McInnes soundbite
01:21:10 ►
that now has much more significance than it did when he first said it.
01:21:15 ►
So if I disappear off the grid until 2005,
01:21:20 ►
then I’ll be back for the last act, I’m sure,
01:21:26 ►
unless, of course, fate drops the cosmic safe on my head.
01:21:31 ►
There’s always that.
01:21:34 ►
And so it was that a cosmic safe in the form of a terminal brain tumor
01:21:40 ►
brought the Terence McKenna show to an end on April 3, 2001. He sure has missed a lot
01:21:47 ►
of excitement since then. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:21:54 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.