Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson
Date this lecture was recorded: December 1988.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.]
“Anything that becomes a cliche eventually makes people stupid.”
“You’ve gotta deal with the future because that is where you are going to be spending the rest of your life.”
“Most of human history shows that we only do things the intelligent way only after we have tried every possible stupid way and found out that none of them worked.”
“I see interest disappearing, along with rent, in the next several years.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And we’re going to pick up today where we left off at the end of podcast number 612,
00:00:29 ►
where Robert Anton Wilson was talking about the coming of computerized machines
00:00:34 ►
that will be capable of producing various states of consciousness in us
00:00:38 ►
without having first ingested any substance.
00:00:41 ►
And if you’ve been listening to some of the recent recordings from our live salon sessions, well you know that while these machines are not yet
00:00:48 ►
here, they are in development and I may even live to see them myself. Sadly Bob
00:00:56 ►
Wilson is no longer with us to see for himself, and as we are about to hear, back
00:01:02 ►
in 1988, well he thought that these machines then would only be a few years away.
00:01:07 ►
So let’s join him now and see what basis he had back then to predict the coming of machines that can produce psychedelic experiences.
00:01:16 ►
And just to be sure that you put this talk in its proper perspective, you may want to keep in mind the fact that when this talk took place,
00:01:24 ►
the World Wide Web, which is what most people think of when they’re talking about the internet
00:01:29 ►
well, the web wouldn’t even be rolled out on the net for another four years after this talk was given
00:01:34 ►
and as you know quite well, since then so much new tech has been rolled out
00:01:41 ►
that the world is now significantly different than it was, well,
00:01:45 ►
when this talk was given for sure. At least it’s different in the way that we communicate
00:01:49 ►
with one another on a global basis. And now, here is the one and only Robert Anton Wilson.
00:01:58 ►
These machines are accelerating all the time. Pretty soon, there’s a machine called the mind mirror,
00:02:08 ►
which shows you how much alpha,
00:02:11 ►
how much beta, alpha, delta, and theta you’ve got in each hemisphere,
00:02:13 ►
and you’ve got guides showing various patterns.
00:02:17 ►
And you just look at the patterns
00:02:18 ►
and try to duplicate them on the screen,
00:02:20 ►
using that as a feedback device.
00:02:22 ►
There’s one pattern that’s typical of a Zen master.
00:02:24 ►
It looks like an upside-down pair. You can sit there with the mind mirror and gradually approximate to
00:02:29 ►
the upside-down pair, and your brain is changing and mutating while you’re doing that. Now, you
00:02:35 ►
combine that technology with something like the Synchro Energizer, and it’s obvious that within
00:02:40 ►
three years outside, we are going to have a machine where you sit down with a computer keyboard
00:02:46 ►
and you plug in the type of consciousness you want.
00:02:48 ►
You just type in how much alpha in the right lobe, how much beta in the left lobe, and so on.
00:02:53 ►
You get the exact program of what you want, and your brain goes into that.
00:02:58 ►
This can’t be more than three or four years away.
00:03:00 ►
I’ve spoken to a lot of the researchers in this field.
00:03:02 ►
Some of them think they’re going to have it next Tuesday after lunch.
00:03:06 ►
The people in the
00:03:08 ►
gerontology field
00:03:09 ►
think life extension is coming
00:03:11 ►
in a couple of years.
00:03:14 ►
We are going through a
00:03:15 ►
fantastic mutation where
00:03:17 ►
we’re moving off this planet.
00:03:20 ►
We’re learning to
00:03:21 ►
raise our intelligence by
00:03:23 ►
programming our brains for higher functioning and we’re expanding to raise our intelligence by programming our brains for higher functioning,
00:03:27 ►
and we’re expanding our lifespan.
00:03:29 ►
And so we’ve got space migration, intelligence increase, life extension,
00:03:33 ►
which gives you Timothy Leary’s well-known slogan, smile.
00:03:37 ►
But all that is going on while we’re passing through dozens of other mutations at the same time.
00:03:43 ►
while we’re passing through dozens of other mutations at the same time.
00:03:52 ►
In the 1890s, well, a pioneer futurist calculated that New York would be abandoned by 1922 because the horse manure would be up to the third floor by then.
00:03:57 ►
He was projecting one variable forward, the increase in population,
00:04:00 ►
but he was leaving out the fact that technology is accelerating.
00:04:04 ►
It turns out New
00:04:05 ►
Yorkers aren’t being destroyed by horseshit, they’re being destroyed by automobile fumes,
00:04:10 ►
just like us lucky people in Los Angeles. But that too will pass. Pretty soon people will be
00:04:16 ►
working at home and they won’t be driving these cars around all the time. Einstein’s brain survives.
00:04:23 ►
That’s at a university in New York, a medical school.
00:04:26 ►
Sometime soon, somebody’s going to get a cell out of Einstein’s brain.
00:04:30 ►
It’ll probably be done with a federal grant to the National Institute of Mental Health and so on, a funded research project.
00:04:36 ►
I prefer to think it’ll be some mad scientist with a hunchbacked assistant creeping in at night.
00:04:43 ►
But we’re going to get a cell out
00:04:46 ►
of einstein’s brain and then we’re going to take the dna and the rna and we’re going to have einstein
00:04:52 ►
dna and rna and put it in a little pill you see and you take the einstein pill and you’ve got
00:04:58 ►
einstein dna and einstein rna and you start to act more like Einstein and think more like Einstein.
00:05:10 ►
You can get brainwaves from people who are still alive. You don’t need to manufacture the pill.
00:05:17 ►
You can get John Lilly’s brainwaves, map them out, put them in the computer, type out the keyboard and get those brainwaves going through your brain and you are thinking, feeling, perceiving like
00:05:21 ►
John Lilly. Or if you want a really funky thing, you can get Rajneesh’s
00:05:26 ►
brainwaves. If you’re into bum trips, if you’re an adventurer and want to see how much you can
00:05:33 ►
stand, you can take a George Bush brainwave and live through the last 20 years of CIA machinations
00:05:39 ►
and so on. We have, throughout history, we have been inside an iron triangle. Lifespan
00:05:48 ►
is limited, very limited. Most mammals die within 30 years. Most human beings have died
00:05:56 ►
within 30 years. And it’s not just high infant mortality. You look back in the past centuries,
00:06:02 ►
you find there was high infant mortality, but there was high mortality between infancy and 10,
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and high mortality between 10 and 20,
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and high mortality between 20 and 30,
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and by then almost everybody was dead.
00:06:14 ►
We’re extending that all the time.
00:06:17 ►
The AIDS epidemic has the strange side effect
00:06:19 ►
that more money is going into immunological research than ever before in history,
00:06:24 ►
and the immunological system is the key to longevity. When the cure for AIDS is found, it will undoubtedly
00:06:30 ►
mean that we’re all going to live longer. And I don’t mean increments of 10 or 20 years. I mean
00:06:34 ►
doubling, tripling, maybe quadrupling human lifespan. And so that side of the triangle is
00:06:41 ►
becoming more and more elastic, stretching more and more. And the other, the second side of the triangle is becoming more and more elastic, stretching more and more. And the other, the second
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side of the triangle that limits us is space. The average mammal never travels more than 10 miles
00:06:51 ►
from where it’s born. The average human being throughout history has never traveled more than
00:06:55 ►
10 miles from where they were born. In Ireland, you can find people who are still living that way.
00:07:01 ►
There are people in Dublin who have never visited other neighborhoods of Dublin.
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who are still living that way.
00:07:02 ►
There are people in Dublin who have never visited other neighborhoods of Dublin.
00:07:05 ►
Now, we’re getting used to bad jetting all over the world.
00:07:09 ►
I’m continually meeting people in Amsterdam
00:07:11 ►
who I met the year before in Boulder, Colorado,
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or I run into somebody in New York
00:07:17 ►
who tells me about somebody I met
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the last time I was in London.
00:07:22 ►
And you don’t have to be rich to do this.
00:07:28 ►
People are just traveling more all the time because they stopped defining travel as a luxury
00:07:32 ►
and defined it as a necessity, so they fit it into their budgets and they do it.
00:07:36 ►
More and more people are traveling further and further.
00:07:39 ►
Now, most of our communication technology is in outer space now.
00:07:43 ►
The rest of our technology will be moving into outer space in the next 10 years,
00:07:47 ►
and we’ll be moving into outer space after it.
00:07:49 ►
Space colonies will be up there in the next 15 years,
00:07:53 ►
full of hundreds and thousands of people.
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And next there’ll be millions of people.
00:07:58 ►
Jerry O’Neill has already designed a space colony for 4 million people.
00:08:02 ►
The whole thing is designed and it can be built with the technology we now have.
00:08:06 ►
It doesn’t require any breakthroughs into new technology.
00:08:09 ►
All it requires is the four million people who really want to do it,
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putting their energy together and taking off.
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And so one side of the triangle is space.
00:08:21 ►
The other side is time.
00:08:22 ►
We’re getting more and more time.
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We’re getting more and more space. We’re getting more and more space.
00:08:25 ►
And the third side is the innate limitations on human consciousness and intelligence.
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Throughout history, we have been like the Norway rats in the behaviorist laboratory.
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We’ve been conditioned mechanisms, imprinted and conditioned. We follow mechanical programs
00:08:41 ►
that are imprinted in points of imprint vulnerability and other mechanical programs that are imprinted in points of imprint vulnerability and other mechanical programs that are conditioned by repetition and we get conditioned to go around saying yes the king
00:08:51 ►
must be obeyed yes the pope must be obeyed or we can get conditioned to go around saying we have a
00:08:56 ►
democracy now we are free well we’re still robots and we’re still following the same robot programs
00:09:02 ►
now with modern neuroscience advancing so rapidly in so many areas,
00:09:07 ►
these brain machines I was talking about
00:09:09 ►
and dozens of other new insights that are coming along,
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new insights and tools all the time,
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the intelligence increased part of Leary’s equation.
00:09:18 ►
Consciousness has no limits.
00:09:20 ►
Space has no limits, time has no limits,
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and consciousness has no limits.
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We’re not in the triangle anymore.
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We are expanding to infinity in all directions.
00:09:29 ►
And you’ve got to keep that thought in mind if you’re going to prepare for the 21st century.
00:09:34 ►
Because the future is coming at you faster all the time.
00:09:38 ►
Fortunately, you only have to deal with it one day at a time.
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But whenever you hear somebody say, be here now, remember, anything that
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becomes a cliche eventually makes people stupid. And that has become a cliche in the last 20 years.
00:09:52 ►
You’ve got to deal with the future because that is where you are going to be spending the rest
00:09:57 ►
of your life. Now I will entertain questions and hopefully some of the questions will entertain me.
00:10:07 ►
Who wants to be the goat and go first?
00:10:09 ►
Yes.
00:10:10 ►
When you do that, speak up a little bit, too.
00:10:12 ►
Sure.
00:10:13 ►
I guess I have a question about the types of things that look very interesting to you.
00:10:17 ►
Can you tell me more about the Secret Society or whatever it is called, the Illuminati, that these tapes are about?
00:10:25 ►
Oh, the Illuminati, that these tapes are about? Oh, the Illuminati.
00:10:32 ►
The Illuminati is about the most controversial subject on the planet.
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And when I’m asked about the Illuminati, I always have an inner struggle
00:10:42 ►
whether I should tell the truth or engage in a shameless put-on.
00:10:50 ►
The Illuminati was founded in Bavaria in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a former Jesuit.
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And it was a secret society within Freemasonry, which is already a secret society.
00:11:04 ►
So it was a secret within a
00:11:06 ►
secret. It has therefore aroused great curiosity, especially among paranoids.
00:11:13 ►
The technique of the Illuminati has been copied many times. There was an Irish revolutionary
00:11:19 ►
group called the Marley Maguires, which some of you may have heard of if you’re into labor history or into Irish history. They were a secret society within the ancient
00:11:30 ►
order of Hibernians, which was a secret society. So they were a secret society
00:11:34 ►
within a secret society too. It’s a very clever technique. In Italy recently
00:11:41 ►
we had pe due, or in English P2,
00:11:45 ►
which was a secret society within the Grand Orient Lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry,
00:11:52 ►
which is the biggest Freemasonic lodge on the European continent outside of England.
00:11:57 ►
In England the biggest lodge is, of course, the Scotch Rite.
00:12:02 ►
The Pai Due was a secret society within Italian Freemasonry, within the Grand Orient
00:12:07 ►
Lodge, and it was run, oddly enough, by three people who were Knights of Malta. The Knights
00:12:15 ►
of Malta are a secret society of Catholic lay entities. Note how I avoided human chauvinism
00:12:25 ►
and didn’t say lay persons.
00:12:28 ►
The Knights of Malta is a secret society
00:12:30 ►
of Catholic lay entities
00:12:32 ►
devoted to undoing the Protestant Reformation
00:12:35 ►
and restoring the Pope to his rightful position
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as ruler of the whole Western world.
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As a matter of fact, the whole world,
00:12:41 ►
now that they found out,
00:12:42 ►
there’s more than the Western world.
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And it is my hypothesis world. As a matter of fact, the whole world, now that they found out, there’s more than the western world. And
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it is
00:12:48 ►
my hypothesis that Pei Due
00:12:49 ►
was not a Masonic conspiracy, but
00:12:51 ►
a Knights of Malta conspiracy, which
00:12:53 ►
molded its way,
00:12:56 ►
virused its way into Italian
00:12:58 ►
Freemasonry, so the Freemasons
00:12:59 ►
would get the blame for it if the
00:13:03 ►
lid ever blew
00:13:04 ►
off.
00:13:06 ►
There are many links between Pei Dewei and the Illuminati,
00:13:10 ►
which has led some people to speculate that the Illuminati itself was a Catholic conspiracy,
00:13:16 ►
that Weishaupt never left the Jesuits,
00:13:18 ►
and that the Illuminati was a Catholic conspiracy within masonry.
00:13:22 ►
The world is full of strange loops like that.
00:13:25 ►
The top CIA informant in the Soviet embassy in Washington during the 70s
00:13:33 ►
was known by the code name Fedora,
00:13:36 ►
and he was regarded by the CIA as their best source of information
00:13:40 ►
for what’s going on in ruling circles in Russia.
00:13:44 ►
And the FBI accidentally stumbled on evidence that Fedora was a KGB colonel
00:13:50 ►
whose job was infiltrating the CIA and feeding them false information.
00:13:56 ►
The FBI notified the CIA of this by telephone immediately.
00:14:02 ►
That sounds naive, but at that time the FBI believed that their line to the CIA was
00:14:08 ►
untappable. However, within a few minutes after they notified the CIA of Fedora’s role as a KGB
00:14:17 ►
mole within the CIA, Fedora left the Russian embassy for the airport and flew back to Moscow
00:14:22 ►
immediately, which left the CIA with
00:14:25 ►
two alternative gloomy hypotheses to consider. One is that their untappable phone line wasn’t
00:14:31 ►
untappable, and the other is that there’s another KGB mole within the CIA high enough up to know
00:14:37 ►
exactly what’s going on and defend the other moles, if one of them has their cover blown.
00:14:43 ►
if one of them has their cover blown.
00:14:46 ►
That did happen in England.
00:14:52 ►
England has had since the 50s a series of about 20 scandals in which top officials turned out to be moles for the Soviets.
00:14:56 ►
This even extended into MI6, which is the British equivalent of the CIA.
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There have been about six people from MI6
00:15:07 ►
who have been exposed to Soviet moles.
00:15:10 ►
And then the head of MI6 died,
00:15:12 ►
and a book came out claiming he was a Soviet mole, too.
00:15:17 ►
And there’s a lot of good evidence to support it,
00:15:18 ►
but the best argument for it is,
00:15:20 ►
how did these six other moles get so high in British intelligence
00:15:24 ►
if they weren’t protected
00:15:25 ►
by a mole at an even higher level
00:15:27 ►
these are fascinating
00:15:31 ►
topics to me
00:15:34 ►
as a writer of novels
00:15:35 ►
of suspense and intrigue however
00:15:37 ►
ugly they are
00:15:38 ►
they make for good plot lines
00:15:41 ►
that’s my fascination with the
00:15:43 ►
Illuminati, Pei De Wei, the CIA,
00:15:46 ►
and similar clandestine operations.
00:15:50 ►
Is that enough of an answer?
00:15:53 ►
Do you want more?
00:15:53 ►
What did the Illuminati actually do?
00:15:58 ►
Well, they founded
00:16:00 ►
Phi Beta Kappa, for instance.
00:16:10 ►
According to some Federalist writers, Jefferson was an Illuminati agent within the American government, but then there were writers who claimed the
00:16:15 ►
Illuminati financed the Russian Revolution. There are all sorts of theories about the
00:16:20 ►
Illuminati. What they actually did was spread radical ideas. How much else they did
00:16:26 ►
is a matter of debate, yes.
00:16:29 ►
Where is Carl Oglesby nowadays, and what is he doing?
00:16:32 ►
He’s a professor of history at Boston University, and the last time I saw him was in a discussion
00:16:40 ►
at New York University last week, where Carl and I gave a talk on conspiracies
00:16:46 ►
from Dealey Plaza to the present.
00:16:49 ►
And we discussed Carl’s model
00:16:52 ►
according to which there is no…
00:16:55 ►
The American ruling class is not a class.
00:16:58 ►
There are actually two ruling classes in the United States
00:17:01 ►
that are trying to annihilate each other.
00:17:03 ►
The Yankees, which is the New England, New York banking houses,
00:17:07 ►
and the Cowboys, which is the Western entrepreneurs
00:17:10 ►
who started the aerospace industry, the oil industry, and the computer industry.
00:17:18 ►
And Oglesby’s model is that these two are behind all the things
00:17:23 ►
that we can’t understand about modern American politics.
00:17:26 ►
It’s the result of the warfare between these two.
00:17:29 ►
And I’ve added to that, I’ve generalized that to a hypothesis about all of history,
00:17:35 ►
that all of history consists of wars between declining eastern powers and rising western powers,
00:17:41 ►
which is caused by the gradual westward migration of ideas
00:17:46 ►
and the capital that results
00:17:48 ►
from the ideas.
00:17:50 ►
And it turned out Carl is as much a fan
00:17:52 ►
of my books as I am of his,
00:17:54 ►
which illustrates Edmund
00:17:56 ►
Wilson’s theory of the shock of recognition.
00:17:58 ►
One genius always recognizes
00:17:59 ►
another.
00:18:01 ►
Or it illustrates that people with the same
00:18:03 ►
form of mental illness tend to be attracted to each other.
00:18:10 ►
Yes?
00:18:11 ►
The idea that power and money moving west, could you say now that probably Japan is next in line?
00:18:17 ►
It’s been so far west.
00:18:18 ►
It certainly looks that way.
00:18:20 ►
Everybody in Silicon Gulf that I know spends all their time worrying about what the Japanese are doing.
00:18:26 ►
So it certainly looks like
00:18:27 ►
there has been
00:18:29 ►
this movement all the way around the world
00:18:31 ►
and now it looks like it’s shifting from California
00:18:33 ►
to Japan, but at the same time
00:18:35 ►
there’s a feedback factor.
00:18:38 ►
New knowledge travels back
00:18:40 ►
faster eastward than it ever
00:18:41 ►
did in previous history.
00:18:43 ►
So knowledge is going around the world in two directions at the same time,
00:18:47 ►
and meanwhile it’s expanding into outer space.
00:18:50 ►
So I think the specific rim culture that William Erwin Thompson has written about,
00:18:56 ►
the anthropologist, he talks about this emerging culture,
00:19:00 ►
the Pacific Rim, which is made up of Japan, Australia, California,
00:19:04 ►
and a few others like British Columbia and Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands and so on.
00:19:08 ►
It seems to be the culture that’s shaping the future right now.
00:19:12 ►
But the Pacific Rim culture is just the terrestrial part of it.
00:19:16 ►
If you take a wider framework, there’s an extraterrestrial culture emerging
00:19:20 ►
as our technology moves into space, and we’re going to move into space with it.
00:19:24 ►
as our technology moves into space and we’re going to move into space with it.
00:19:30 ►
My trajectory of the future is the brightest, boldest people are going to settle Lagrange Point 5 in the next 20 to 50 years.
00:19:38 ►
And in the next 100 years, the Lagrange area will get so crowded and bureaucratized
00:19:46 ►
and conformist and stultified that the brightest and boldest will move out
00:19:52 ►
and settle in the asteroid belt.
00:19:55 ►
And by then we’ll have star travel.
00:19:57 ►
So by the time that gets bureaucratized and centralized,
00:20:00 ►
they’ll move out of the solar system entirely.
00:20:03 ►
And that leads me to Heinlein’s law.
00:20:05 ►
The intelligence of a species is directly proportional
00:20:08 ►
to the distance from the planet where it started out.
00:20:11 ►
I imagine by the time we get to the other end of the galaxy,
00:20:15 ►
that part of the human race will be the brightest part.
00:20:19 ►
And I’ll just compare New York with California,
00:20:23 ►
and you’ll see what I mean.
00:20:26 ►
And New York with California and you’ll see what I mean. New York is the…
00:20:28 ►
New York intellectual discussion is, can we reconcile Freud with Marx?
00:20:33 ►
They’re living back in the 1920s or around 1900, actually.
00:20:37 ►
These are the hot intellectual issues in New York and things like that.
00:20:41 ►
And Nietzsche wrote about the decadent phase of every culture the
00:20:47 ►
decadent phases when people start writing things like Ecclesiastes the Sun
00:20:53 ►
riseth and the Sun goeth down and there is nothing new under the Sun vanity
00:20:58 ►
vanity all is vanity now that’s the way European intellectual sounded at the end
00:21:02 ►
of the last century that’s because Europe was on the decline.
00:21:07 ►
Now, New York intellectuals sound like that because New York is on the decline.
00:21:10 ►
The only place you’ll find the Dionysian spirit is as you move westward.
00:21:15 ►
It starts in Boulder, Colorado, and extends steadily westward to the Hawaiian Islands and Japan.
00:21:23 ►
Yes.
00:21:31 ►
I say this in New York, too. Makes the matters hell. Yes.
00:21:37 ►
As I read the various newspapers and listen to various television and radio programs, I seem to see a greater casual acceptance of multiple conflicting realities on the part
00:21:44 ►
of people, especially in this country.
00:21:46 ►
Do you see that?
00:21:47 ►
Do you see that approaching, say, the way it is in many parts of Europe,
00:21:52 ►
where we have access to a greater variety of realities than we do often here?
00:21:57 ►
That’s a very interesting question.
00:22:00 ►
I see it a lot, but I don’t trust what I see,
00:22:07 ►
question. I see it a lot, but I don’t trust what I see because I see a specially segmented view of the American public. What I see, if I judged America by what I see on my lecture tours,
00:22:16 ►
nobody ever would have voted for Ronald Reagan.
00:22:19 ►
The only thing, for instance, what I’m referring to specifically is at the same time we’ve got the
00:22:23 ►
urine tests and the DEA, or actually the customs officials, seizing research vessels because of marijuana cigarettes found on board,
00:22:31 ►
we also have police chiefs, mayors, and governors seriously discussing legalizing cocaine.
00:22:36 ►
And these are being reported in the same newspapers with nobody saying,
00:22:39 ►
look, look, aren’t these two different?
00:22:40 ►
aren’t these two different?
00:22:48 ►
Yeah, I think that is,
00:22:52 ►
I regard my most important contribution to literature or knowledge or comedy
00:22:56 ►
or whatever I’m engaged in
00:22:58 ►
is popularizing the multi-model approach
00:23:01 ►
of modern physics,
00:23:04 ►
which is don’t look for the correct map,
00:23:06 ►
look for the map that’s most useful here and now.
00:23:09 ►
And always remember, it’s not the true map for all eternity,
00:23:12 ►
and be ready to change it.
00:23:14 ►
And when you stop to think that there’s a Picasso statue
00:23:19 ►
in front of City Hall in Chicago,
00:23:22 ►
it does seem that the world has mutated.
00:23:24 ►
What the hell is that Picasso statue doing in Chicago, it does seem that the world has mutated. What the hell is that
00:23:26 ►
Picasso statue doing in Chicago? Where the mayor, when I was living in Chicago, the mayor
00:23:33 ►
was a gangster named Richard Daly who was renowned for saying things like, the police
00:23:39 ►
are not here to create disorder, the police are here to maintain disorder. The man could not speak an intelligent,
00:23:46 ►
coherent sentence of English. There’s other famous declarations where there is no ghetto
00:23:51 ►
in Chicago, and we’re going to move everybody out of the ghetto. And yet they got this Picasso
00:23:58 ►
statue, which is a perfect example of multi-model thinking. All of modern art, Joyce’s, Ulysses, Citizen Kane,
00:24:07 ►
every field of modern art
00:24:08 ►
has this multiple vision.
00:24:10 ►
But that Picasso statue,
00:24:12 ►
you walk around it
00:24:13 ►
and you see a great big Afghan dog
00:24:15 ►
and you stand at another angle
00:24:17 ►
and you see a male and female face
00:24:19 ►
looking at each other.
00:24:20 ►
And you get to another angle
00:24:21 ►
and you see a praying mantis.
00:24:24 ►
And to the extent that praying mantis and to the
00:24:26 ►
extent that people are getting used to the idea that you can see things in a
00:24:29 ►
variety of ways we are getting more sophisticated but there are still a lot
00:24:34 ►
of people out there who can only see things one way there’s all those all
00:24:38 ►
together too many of them still left around I collect not literature it’s a
00:24:44 ►
hobby with me.
00:24:46 ►
One of my favorites that I received in the last month
00:24:49 ►
comes from Christians Awake in Montgomery, Alabama.
00:24:55 ►
Boy, if they were awake, I’d rather be asleep.
00:24:59 ►
I got a beautiful pamphlet from them
00:25:01 ►
called The Washington Monument and AIDS.
00:25:04 ►
And that title in itself is so beautiful.
00:25:07 ►
It takes a very special mentality to see the connection.
00:25:11 ►
The connection between the Washington Monument and AIDS as well.
00:25:15 ►
In the first place, if you look at the Washington Monument from above, what do you see?
00:25:20 ►
You see a circle with a dot in the middle.
00:25:22 ►
Now, that’s the symbol of the Illuminati.
00:25:25 ►
It really was. That was the symbol the Illuminati used for themselves. And who does the Washington Monument
00:25:30 ►
commemorate? George Washington, a renowned and notorious Freemason. And when was it built? 1833.
00:25:37 ►
Why 33? Because there are 33 degrees in Freemasonry. And then they go on and prove the United States
00:25:43 ►
from evidence like that. The United States has been ruled by a
00:25:46 ►
Freemasonic cabal ever since
00:25:48 ►
the beginning. And therefore
00:25:50 ►
Freemasonry are behind gay pride.
00:25:52 ►
Therefore we’ve got the AIDS epidemic.
00:25:54 ►
See, you never realized George Washington’s
00:25:56 ►
role in creating AIDS, did you?
00:26:01 ►
Then there’s the truth missionaries of positive
00:26:04 ►
accord.
00:26:06 ►
I get literature from them.
00:26:08 ►
They make sense.
00:26:11 ►
I think they’re right.
00:26:12 ►
Not that I believe them, but I think they understand the Bible better than Jerry Falwell
00:26:16 ►
or most of these televangelists.
00:26:18 ►
According to the truth missionaries of positive accord,
00:26:21 ►
Elohim in the first book of the Bible is plural.
00:26:24 ►
Well, I’ve heard that from a lot of Hebrew scholars. Elohim in the first book of the Bible is plural. Well, I’ve heard that from
00:26:25 ►
a lot of Hebrew scholars. Elohim is plural. So there’s not one God, there’s at least two.
00:26:31 ►
And then on the basis of a great deal of analysis of the biblical verses, they show God is corporeal,
00:26:37 ►
not spiritual. The whole idea of God as spiritual is totally unbiblical. In the Bible, God walks through the Garden of Eden in the afternoon.
00:26:46 ►
God has a voice. God has eyes and ears. God has a womb. God has breasts to suckle with.
00:26:53 ►
And it turns out that God is two, Mr. God and Mrs. God. And Mrs. God has been deliberately
00:27:03 ►
suppressed by a male conspiracy throughout the ages.
00:27:06 ►
But she’s right there when you start analyzing the Hebrew.
00:27:09 ►
And she got into the Christian church, too.
00:27:11 ►
Hagia Sophia in Greek, which gave us the English word Holy Spirit.
00:27:15 ►
Hagia Sophia is female.
00:27:17 ►
The Trinity is God, Mrs. God, and their little boy, Yeshua.
00:27:21 ►
And I think they’re absolutely right.
00:27:24 ►
But it sounds pretty weird
00:27:26 ►
when they start explaining it.
00:27:28 ►
How big is God?
00:27:29 ►
Well, they think he’s about 18 feet tall
00:27:31 ►
because if Godzilla walked
00:27:34 ►
through the Garden of Eden,
00:27:35 ►
there wouldn’t be a tree left standing.
00:27:37 ►
You know what happens when Godzilla
00:27:37 ►
walks through Tokyo?
00:27:39 ►
God is not quite as big as Godzilla
00:27:42 ►
or King Kong.
00:27:44 ►
And God is male and female.
00:27:46 ►
It says in the Bible, male and female.
00:27:49 ►
God, God’s plural, creates the human race.
00:27:54 ►
Male and female created the gods, the human race.
00:27:59 ►
And so the gods are male and female.
00:28:02 ►
And we are made in the image of Elohim, the gods, male and female. And we are made in the image of Elohim, the gods, male and female.
00:28:07 ►
And then they demonstrate how the Immaculate Conception occurred.
00:28:13 ►
God could not masturbate because that’s a sin.
00:28:17 ►
So God has sucked him off.
00:28:19 ►
And then the sperm was conveyed to Mary.
00:28:22 ►
And this makes much more sense than anything
00:28:25 ►
I’ve ever heard from Jerry Falwell.
00:28:28 ►
These may be the only people in the Christian world
00:28:31 ►
who understand the Bible.
00:28:32 ►
A lot of Kabbalists will whisper things like that to you,
00:28:35 ►
but these people have figured it out on their own
00:28:38 ►
and are trying to enlighten the rest of the Christian world.
00:28:41 ►
I fear their path will be a thorny one.
00:28:45 ►
Next question.
00:28:46 ►
Yes.
00:28:48 ►
When you talk about the people working out of their homes,
00:28:52 ►
do you foresee there are going to be some changes in the type of places people live?
00:28:57 ►
Because one of the first things you think about, particularly if people are hooked into all these machines,
00:29:02 ►
is that you have all these new ideas, yet you’re getting ants antsy and you’re getting kind of a cabin fever type thing happen.
00:29:08 ►
So is there a way that we’re going to be able to design things,
00:29:12 ►
homes and buildings that are going to be…
00:29:14 ►
Yes, Buckminster Fuller started designing homes 50 years ago
00:29:20 ►
that could be taken apart, put in a can and moved anywhere.
00:29:24 ►
When you don’t have to go to an office every day,
00:29:27 ►
you can live anywhere you want.
00:29:29 ►
And the idea of buying land is becoming obsolete.
00:29:35 ►
The capitalists themselves realize it.
00:29:38 ►
What’s behind all this big condominium movement?
00:29:41 ►
It’s not just another scam to transfer money from our pockets to theirs.
00:29:45 ►
It’s they realize land isn’t worth shit anymore. So they’re selling it to us, finally,
00:29:51 ►
because what’s really important is information. And that’s why they keep building in more and
00:29:56 ►
more safeguards on their computers to keep the information from getting out. It’s information
00:30:00 ►
that’s important, not land. And people will be traveling more and more every year.
00:30:06 ►
The first one to fly the Atlantic was Lindbergh, 1928.
00:30:11 ►
In 1978, 200 million people flew the Atlantic.
00:30:15 ►
I don’t know what it is in 88, but it’s probably about 4 million by now.
00:30:18 ►
These things are all exponential.
00:30:20 ►
People are traveling more and more,
00:30:22 ►
and people will be carrying their houses with them in big aluminum cans.
00:30:26 ►
Put the house together and they arrive where they want to be.
00:30:29 ►
Spend a year in Maui and then spend a year in British Columbia and then spend a year in Amsterdam, and I like it.
00:30:40 ►
Yes?
00:30:41 ►
It requires tremendous resources to sustain life in space.
00:30:47 ►
How are you going to support space colonies
00:30:49 ►
when the Earth is polluting itself to death?
00:30:55 ►
That question has about a dozen assumptions in it,
00:30:59 ►
all of which I challenge.
00:31:02 ►
Let’s see, where do we start on that one?
00:31:08 ►
In the first place, we can build whole ecological systems. There are millions of people who have ecological systems inside their houses.
00:31:16 ►
They’re known as fish tanks. And you don’t need to build an ecological system to keep a dog.
00:31:23 ►
But if you want to keep tropical fish, you got to build an ecological system to keep a dog. But if you want to keep tropical fish, you’ve got to build an ecological system for them.
00:31:27 ►
We’ve been practicing that for a long time.
00:31:31 ►
We have gotten to the stage where we are building ecological systems for many animals.
00:31:36 ►
And there are experiments of this sort being done in Australia and Arizona and many other places.
00:31:41 ►
A space colony will be designed in such a way that it will
00:31:46 ►
be a balanced ecological system.
00:31:48 ►
And the designs, there are many alternative designs, and they’re being improved all the
00:31:52 ►
time.
00:31:54 ►
There’s a project in Australia called the Healthy City, in which people, scientists
00:32:02 ►
from all over Australia, and some from as far away as Norway
00:32:05 ►
are involved in designing a city
00:32:08 ►
that will be totally healthy
00:32:10 ►
for the people who live in it,
00:32:11 ►
that will not only be free of health hazards
00:32:14 ►
such as are built into current-day cities,
00:32:17 ►
but will have healthy, positively health-beneficial effects
00:32:22 ►
built into their very architecture.
00:32:24 ►
Buckminster Fuller started thinking that way as far back as the 1920s.
00:32:28 ►
His houses were intended to be healthy houses,
00:32:32 ►
and he was talking about building healthy cities.
00:32:35 ►
The fact that under the present monetary system,
00:32:39 ►
things are done in a stupid way doesn’t mean that things have to be done in a stupid way.
00:32:43 ►
There are more intelligent ways to do things. Most of human history shows that we only do things
00:32:48 ►
in the intelligent way after we’ve tried every possible stupid way and found out that none
00:32:52 ►
of them work. But we’ve just about gotten to that point. There aren’t that many more
00:32:57 ►
stupid things we can do. So we are gradually learning to do things in a more intelligent way.
00:33:11 ►
One of the major benefits of space colonization,
00:33:19 ►
almost certainly, will be making solar power available 24 hours a day all over the planet.
00:33:23 ►
The people who have their money invested in atoms and oil keep telling us solar power will take another 40 years to develop.
00:33:28 ►
That’s because they have their investment in atoms and oil and they want to get their money back on their investment.
00:33:33 ►
But solar power is practical right now, today.
00:33:37 ►
My friend Carl Hess has an 85% solar powered house that he built himself in West Virginia.
00:33:46 ►
percent solar powered house that he built himself in West Virginia. A few years ago, I met a former district attorney of Santa Barbara who has a solar powered house. I think that was 90 percent
00:33:54 ►
solar powered. There’s a solar powered neighborhood or suburb of Dallas right now.
00:34:02 ►
In places like Ireland and Norway and lots of northern latitudes solar power
00:34:07 ►
is not very practical because of the high number of days per year in which it’s raining and overcast
00:34:14 ►
and dark and gloomy and that’s why they have the highest suicide rate in the world in those
00:34:19 ►
countries and it’s depressing to live there Those places can have solar power too if we
00:34:26 ►
have space stations up there collecting solar power 24 hours a day and beaming it down to
00:34:31 ►
the Earth for however it’s needed. And when we’ve got cheap solar power coming from space,
00:34:38 ►
there’ll be no incentive to use polluting energy sources such as coal and oil and all those things that we’re running out of anyway.
00:34:49 ►
Like I say, we always do the intelligent things when we run out of stupid things to do,
00:34:53 ►
and we’re going to run out of coal and oil in the near future,
00:34:56 ►
so we’re going to have to start doing more intelligent things.
00:35:01 ►
Yes?
00:35:02 ►
Can you talk a little bit about how quickly or how rapidly
00:35:06 ►
you would see the evolution of the legalization of drugs?
00:35:10 ►
That’s a hard one.
00:35:12 ►
If you asked me that 20 years ago, I’d say, oh, in the next five years.
00:35:18 ►
And I was obviously wrong,
00:35:21 ►
which illustrates the cosmic schmuck principle.
00:35:26 ►
The cosmic schmuck principle the cause of the cosmic schmuck principle is if you realize you’ve been a cosmic schmuck a
00:35:31 ►
lot of times in your life you’ll begin to get the glint of a suspicion you
00:35:35 ►
might be a cosmic schmuck now too and you won’t be too sure of yourself I find
00:35:40 ►
this a very useful principle and keeping me from taking myself too seriously.
00:35:46 ►
It’s like Gary Jeff’s distinction between objectively hopeless idiots and subjectively hopeless idiots.
00:35:51 ►
The subjectively hopeless idiot knows he’s a cosmic schmuck and is trying to do something about it.
00:35:57 ►
The objectively hopeless idiot thinks he has the answer to everything
00:36:00 ►
and therefore isn’t trying to do anything about changing himself.
00:36:04 ►
So I’m happy to be a subjectively hopeless idiot.
00:36:07 ►
I’ve arrived at that stage anyway.
00:36:09 ►
I know how often I’ve been wrong.
00:36:11 ►
And so making a specific prediction about a thing like that, I don’t know.
00:36:16 ►
But there are things, in spite of the increasing violence and stupidity
00:36:24 ►
of the government’s, quote, war on drugs,
00:36:28 ►
there are signs of the opposite sort appearing,
00:36:30 ►
like more and more conservatives are coming out for legalization.
00:36:34 ►
William Buckley, the intellectual giant of the right wing of America,
00:36:39 ►
has been in favor of legalization for five or seven years now,
00:36:43 ►
and he writes columns about it more and more frequently.
00:36:46 ►
And Milton Friedman, the economist of the Reagan administration,
00:36:52 ►
the Nobel Prize winner in right-wing economics,
00:36:55 ►
monetarist theory,
00:36:57 ►
Milton Friedman has come out for legalization.
00:37:00 ►
And the arguments have nothing to do with the First Amendment
00:37:02 ►
or libertarian theory or anything.
00:37:05 ►
It comes down to the very concrete, practical, pragmatic fact that you can’t enforce these laws.
00:37:14 ►
And keeping these laws on the books is only making the mafia richer every year.
00:37:19 ►
When my father was young, the mafia was a small gang of Italians in one neighborhood in New York who made their
00:37:28 ►
living by extorting money from other Italians who owned little shops like groceries and
00:37:34 ►
butcher shops and whatnot, bar rooms.
00:37:37 ►
And the Mafia got to be a national and international multi-billion dollar mega corporation on the basis of these laws.
00:37:47 ►
The mafia now has its own hotels, its own gambling casinos.
00:37:51 ►
It runs a large part of the restaurant business.
00:37:53 ►
You can’t get in the restaurant business without buying your linens from the mafia.
00:37:57 ►
They own their own banks.
00:37:59 ►
They own shares of banks.
00:38:00 ►
They own shares of movie studios.
00:38:03 ►
If we keep these laws on the books for another 10
00:38:06 ►
years, another 15 years, we’re eventually
00:38:08 ►
going to reach the point where the mafia owns
00:38:10 ►
fucking everything.
00:38:12 ►
And even
00:38:13 ►
conservatives are beginning to see that.
00:38:16 ►
The only way to prevent
00:38:18 ►
the total Sicilianization
00:38:19 ►
of the United States,
00:38:22 ►
the whole
00:38:24 ►
system of Omerta.
00:38:27 ►
You know, Miami is getting like Chicago
00:38:29 ►
was under alcohol prohibition.
00:38:32 ►
The drug enforcement agents carry machine guns.
00:38:35 ►
The drug runners carry machine guns.
00:38:36 ►
You can’t walk out on the street.
00:38:38 ►
The innocent victims are getting killed
00:38:40 ►
more than the drug dealers
00:38:41 ►
or the drug enforcement officers.
00:38:46 ►
And the only way we’re going to stop that is by taking the profit motive out of it,
00:38:50 ►
by legalizing everything.
00:38:52 ►
And then taking all the money they’ve been spending on trying to enforce these idiotic laws
00:38:56 ►
and putting it into rehabilitation programs for people who do have drug problems.
00:39:01 ►
And that makes so much sense that it’s bound to be recognized eventually. But considering
00:39:06 ►
that the American people have eaten 1.8 times 10 to the 10th power McDonald’s hamburgers
00:39:13 ►
and elected Richard Nixon twice and Ronald Reagan twice and George Bush and Quayle more recently,
00:39:20 ►
I don’t know how long it will take common sense to get across.
00:39:26 ►
recently. I don’t know how long it will take common sense to get across. Yes? Yes, where do you see Christianity evolving in the 21st century? Will it
00:39:32 ►
continue to play a heavy role in political institutions? All I can give you is an opinion.
00:39:48 ►
Christianity has been falling apart for about 500 years.
00:39:53 ►
The United States was originally founded to be a non-Christian country.
00:39:58 ►
The Christian religion is conspicuously absent from the Declaration of Independence,
00:40:03 ►
which is a deist document that invokes nature’s God,
00:40:07 ►
a term of the free-thinking deist philosophers of the 18th century.
00:40:11 ►
The Constitution doesn’t mention the Christian God once,
00:40:14 ►
and specifically prohibits the establishment of a religion.
00:40:21 ►
Most of Europe is secular.
00:40:24 ►
In Sweden, it’s almost impossible to find a churchgoer, for instance.
00:40:29 ►
Of course, the whole communist world is officially atheistic, even though people still sneak off to Russian Orthodox churches.
00:40:38 ►
I would say in the next hundred years only the most austere and intellectual forms of Buddhism are likely to survive.
00:40:49 ►
I think fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist everything,
00:40:55 ►
they’re all going to collapse as the information acceleration accelerates further.
00:41:02 ►
That’s my guess, anyway.
00:41:05 ►
Yes?
00:41:07 ►
Do you see a collapse of the monetary system as it is?
00:41:11 ►
And if so, what will replace it?
00:41:15 ►
I’ve thought about that for a long time.
00:41:18 ►
And I’ve heard all sorts of interesting proposals
00:41:21 ►
about what should replace the present monetary system.
00:41:26 ►
A lot of people,
00:41:34 ►
you know, the bankers didn’t always control money. They didn’t always create money. Lord Cook in the Institutes of English Law says sovereignty adheres in the right to issue
00:41:39 ►
coinage because the king was the only one who could issue coinage under the traditional system.
00:41:46 ►
And that broke down in the 18th century and even more in the 19th century
00:41:50 ►
because so many governments were in the habit of debasing their coinage
00:41:54 ►
that they wouldn’t trust one another.
00:41:57 ►
And into that vacuum moved the Rothschilds, who had paper money that they would bank.
00:42:03 ►
And gradually the governments found they trusted the bankers
00:42:07 ►
more than they trusted one another.
00:42:09 ►
And so the bankers acquired the franchise on issuing money
00:42:17 ►
which previously belonged to governments.
00:42:19 ►
And a lot of people think if we just gave the franchise back to governments
00:42:22 ►
all our problems would be solved.
00:42:24 ►
But since it was the government screwing up that turned it over to the bankers, I don’t think that’s
00:42:28 ►
a step forward. There’s a lot of proposals that we use computer money and we just make notations
00:42:34 ►
in our computers about who owes who what and abolish the banking system entirely. I think
00:42:39 ►
that’s very likely going to happen eventually. I think in the meanwhile, we’re going to go through an evolution.
00:42:46 ►
They’ve been talking in the European Parliament for about 15 years now about creating a European
00:42:51 ►
currency, so you don’t have to keep changing paper every time you cross a border in Europe.
00:42:56 ►
European countries are so small compared to the United States, that until you’ve lived there,
00:43:00 ►
you don’t realize how often you cross a border and have to change your money.
00:43:04 ►
you’ve lived there, you don’t realize how often you cross a border and have to change your money.
00:43:11 ►
And I think there will be a European currency. And then I think there’ll be a United Nations currency. And the whole profit will come out of jiggling currencies against each other,
00:43:16 ►
which is how banks managed to become so bloody rich and get so much power is the constant
00:43:22 ►
jiggling of one currency against another
00:43:25 ►
now when i lived in ireland my checks would come from new york from my agent in new york to ireland
00:43:31 ►
and then i’d cash them in an irish bank and since the mail comes late in ireland i’d cash them the
00:43:38 ►
next day and i used to think gee well i’m sleeping those bastards in hong kong are changing the value
00:43:43 ►
of what i’m going to get at the bank tomorrow morning
00:43:45 ►
because they’re all night long there negotiating on the values of currencies.
00:43:51 ►
Right now we have reached the point where most countries cannot pay the interest on the national debt anymore.
00:43:57 ►
Most countries owe the banks more than they can ever pay back.
00:44:00 ►
And that’s been going on for nearly ten years.
00:44:06 ►
back and that’s been going on for nearly 10 years and with the increasing publicity in the last five years what the banks have been doing is loaning
00:44:10 ►
money to countries to allow them to pay the national debt which means that the
00:44:14 ►
national debt gets larger and the interest goes on mounting and it’s
00:44:18 ►
turning more and more into a gloomy imitation of the loan shark business
00:44:23 ►
that you find in the slums where the interest will eventually devour everything and there’s more and more
00:44:28 ►
talk about who’s going to default first will it be Brazil Argentina Mexico who’s
00:44:34 ►
it going to be right and maybe it’ll be the United States with a number one
00:44:38 ►
debtor nation in the world right now thanks to what George Bush called who do
00:44:43 ►
economics before we had a religious
00:44:45 ►
conversion, he decided he could believe in magic, too.
00:44:52 ►
Somewhere down the line, there’s going to be a point at which nations just cannot pay
00:44:57 ►
the interest of the bankers, and there’s got to be another backing for currency besides
00:45:01 ►
our faith in the magic of the banking system.
00:45:05 ►
for currency besides our faith in the magic of the banking system. And I imagine it will go by way of the UN currency to eventually to some kind of
00:45:10 ►
system where we abolish money entirely. We just keep records on our computers of
00:45:14 ►
who owes who what. And of course there’ll be no interest on that. The computer
00:45:21 ►
programmers have no way of convincing us that when we make a notation in our computer,
00:45:26 ►
we’ve got to pay interest to somebody on that.
00:45:29 ►
So I think interest will disappear.
00:45:31 ►
And it’s interest, by and large, that eats up the wealth of the world
00:45:36 ►
and creates so much poverty in the midst of ever-increasing wealth.
00:45:42 ►
So I see interest disappearing along with rent in the next hundred years
00:45:47 ►
yes
00:45:48 ►
several weeks ago
00:45:51 ►
a couple
00:45:52 ►
people from Psycop
00:45:54 ►
were on Hour 25 and I happened to tape it
00:45:57 ►
and I listened to it before reading
00:45:59 ►
the New Inquisition and after it
00:46:01 ►
and
00:46:02 ►
with that in mind would you say a few words about Carl Sagan
00:46:06 ►
and perhaps throw in Martin Gardner and James Randi
00:46:09 ►
while you’re at it?
00:46:15 ►
Yes.
00:46:15 ►
I got an interesting letter today from a friend in Arizona.
00:46:20 ►
He said he started reading Martin Gardner
00:46:23 ►
because of reading my polemic against Martin Gardner
00:46:26 ►
and he’s decided to canonize Martin Gardner
00:46:28 ►
he’s made Martin Gardner a saint in his church of universal agnosticism
00:46:33 ►
and he refers to him as Saint Martin
00:46:35 ►
and what converted him was
00:46:37 ►
Gardner’s essay on Bell’s theorem
00:46:41 ►
in which Gardner explains what Bell’s theorem means pretty clearly and then says this has no implications whatsoever for the real world.
00:46:48 ►
This only refers to the subatomic world.
00:46:51 ►
And he decided that Martin Gardner is a Sufi, an enlightened Sufi master who is teaching
00:46:58 ►
us by pretending to be a fool.
00:47:00 ►
And as we see through these logical fallacies he keeps putting out,
00:47:08 ►
we are forced to become more enlightened.
00:47:10 ►
Well, that’s one interpretation of Martin Gardner.
00:47:12 ►
Another interpretation is he really does believe the things he writes.
00:47:17 ►
Gardner is on record as saying he thinks Stanford Research Institute
00:47:20 ►
should be burned to the ground because of the kind of research they were doing there.
00:47:23 ►
Institute should be burned to the ground because of the kind of research they were doing there I wrote the New Inquisition because I felt there was
00:47:29 ►
increasingly in psych up that kind of spirit that they they want to destroy
00:47:34 ►
the research they don’t like they want to drive researchers out of their jobs
00:47:38 ►
if they don’t like the results of the research they they have that attitude
00:47:43 ►
which we were talking about a little while ago, of
00:47:46 ►
we’ve got the one correct map, and it never has to be revised.
00:47:50 ►
And I call that fundamentalism.
00:47:52 ►
And I think the scientific world has entirely lost that, except for a few cases like Carl
00:47:58 ►
Sagan.
00:47:59 ►
But there is a sociological study of psychop has been done,
00:48:06 ►
and the majority of members are not scientists.
00:48:08 ►
The majority of members are lay entities.
00:48:11 ►
The single profession most widely represented in psychop is stage magicians
00:48:17 ►
who have a hard job making a living these days.
00:48:21 ►
Psychop is giving them an additional source of income.
00:48:24 ►
Well, that’s vulgar Marxism,
00:48:26 ►
isn’t it, looking into things like that. But there is not really much scientific, they’ve
00:48:32 ►
never done any scientific research. They call the Committee for Scientific Investigation
00:48:37 ►
of Claims of the Paranormal, but they never do scientific investigation. What they do
00:48:42 ►
is write polemics against people whose ideas they don’t like.
00:48:46 ►
They did one scientific
00:48:47 ►
study on astrology
00:48:50 ►
and the fellow who wrote the study
00:48:52 ►
for them has been claiming ever since that they
00:48:53 ►
distorted what he wrote and they would not print
00:48:56 ►
the letter he wrote trying to correct their distortions.
00:48:58 ►
And that argument is still going on.
00:49:01 ►
But that’s the only attempt
00:49:02 ►
they ever made at doing a scientific report
00:49:04 ►
and they bungled it
00:49:06 ►
and
00:49:07 ►
but I like PSYCOP
00:49:10 ►
because they provide
00:49:12 ►
a satirist needs targets
00:49:14 ►
and if PSYCOP did not exist
00:49:16 ►
I would create them
00:49:17 ►
that’s sort of the way I feel about Dan Quayle
00:49:20 ►
I feel Dan Quayle, PSYCOP
00:49:22 ►
the Ayatollah Khomeini
00:49:23 ►
people like that were put here to inspire me to flights of rhetoric and irony and sarcasm that I would not achieve on my own without this inspiration.
00:49:34 ►
So I’m very grateful to all of them.
00:49:37 ►
And I mean that sincerely.
00:49:40 ►
A satirist cannot survive without targets to satirize.
00:49:44 ►
Yes.
00:49:45 ►
How valid is free energy?
00:49:47 ►
What?
00:49:48 ►
You know, the free energy movement, the Joseph Newman free energy movement.
00:49:51 ►
Oh, Joseph Newman and his, yeah, I don’t, don’t ask me about that.
00:49:56 ►
I don’t know what the hell to make of that.
00:49:59 ►
Some people make great discoveries, and when they’re not recognized, they turn gradually paranoid,
00:50:06 ►
like Wilhelm Reich, maybe, possibly. Joseph Newman sounds increasingly paranoid. And yet,
00:50:16 ►
on CBS, I saw a car move, which CBS said, as far as they could find out, there was nothing inside. It was running on Joseph Newman’s magical machine.
00:50:29 ►
Unless CBS goofed up, maybe he did make a real discovery.
00:50:33 ►
I don’t know.
00:50:35 ►
I’m even more agnostic about that than I am about most things.
00:50:39 ►
I would like to see more tests of Newman’s claims.
00:50:41 ►
I’d like to see more tests and less rhetoric.
00:50:44 ►
I think that
00:50:45 ►
goes for all
00:50:45 ►
controversial
00:50:46 ►
ideas.
00:50:47 ►
I’d like to
00:50:47 ►
see more
00:50:47 ►
tests and
00:50:48 ►
less rhetoric
00:50:49 ►
about them
00:50:50 ►
all.
00:50:50 ►
Reich’s
00:50:51 ►
argon box,
00:50:52 ►
Newman’s
00:50:52 ►
machine,
00:50:53 ►
the Tesla
00:50:54 ►
antennae that
00:50:57 ►
was supposed
00:50:57 ►
to bring
00:50:58 ►
infinite energy
00:50:59 ►
to the
00:50:59 ►
earth,
00:51:00 ►
and all
00:51:01 ►
these ideas.
00:51:02 ►
There should
00:51:02 ►
be more
00:51:03 ►
investigation
00:51:03 ►
and less
00:51:04 ►
name-calling, and then we might find out which of these ideas. There should be more investigation and less name-calling.
00:51:06 ►
And then we might find out
00:51:07 ►
which of these ideas are any good.
00:51:11 ►
Yes?
00:51:12 ►
Most of our themes tonight
00:51:13 ►
have been pretty widespread and global.
00:51:15 ►
I ask you to be a little bit more personal.
00:51:19 ►
What if the parents of a five-year-old child
00:51:22 ►
came to you and showed you a child
00:51:23 ►
whose brain was much bigger
00:51:25 ►
than a normal kid’s and showed other signs of basically conforming with a lot of expectations
00:51:30 ►
of the next evolutionary jump for the human species how would you advise them to raise the
00:51:35 ►
kid and this isn’t a hypothetical question how to raise a super child i would advise them to consult somebody who knows more about that than i do
00:51:48 ►
who knows about that
00:51:59 ►
just because i’m up here on a platform doesn’t mean i have the answer to every question
00:52:03 ►
anybody can think of.
00:52:06 ►
Yes?
00:52:09 ►
Could you tell us a little about what you’ve been working on in the past year,
00:52:12 ►
your newest books, and what you’re working on now?
00:52:23 ►
I’ve been writing a lot of articles for Gnosis magazine and for Critique and for Magical Blend.
00:52:27 ►
I’ve been working on a screenplay for Axiom Entertainment.
00:52:31 ►
I’ve been developing a television series,
00:52:33 ►
which may or may not get off the ground.
00:52:37 ►
And I finished the third of my historical novels, which is not called Nature and Nature’s God anymore.
00:52:40 ►
It’s just called Nature’s God.
00:52:42 ►
I decided I liked the shorter title better.
00:52:44 ►
God anymore. It’s just called Nature’s God. I decided I liked the shorter title better.
00:52:53 ►
And I just wrote an article on connection machines for a German magazine. Tomorrow I’m teaching a workshop at the Mandela Bookstore. Then I go back to work on the screenplay.
00:53:02 ►
I have, I’m doing my Cosmic Conspiracy game
00:53:05 ►
in January
00:53:06 ►
and in February
00:53:07 ►
I start traveling
00:53:08 ►
across the country
00:53:09 ►
on the lecture circuit again.
00:53:12 ►
I find it an interesting life.
00:53:13 ►
I think talking about it
00:53:14 ►
anymore would bore
00:53:15 ►
most of the audience.
00:53:16 ►
However,
00:53:18 ►
next question.
00:53:21 ►
Yes.
00:53:22 ►
Yes.
00:53:22 ►
What inspired you
00:53:23 ►
to write
00:53:23 ►
the Alistair Crowley scrapbook
00:53:26 ►
it’s not out there for sale
00:53:28 ►
the Alistair Crowley scrapbook
00:53:31 ►
is that yours
00:53:31 ►
that’s Colin Wilson
00:53:34 ►
oh no
00:53:36 ►
that’s cooked Wilson
00:53:39 ►
I’m raw Wilson
00:53:40 ►
you gotta keep the two of us distinct
00:53:42 ►
and it will be Gurdjieff at various stages of evolution Wilson. You’ve got to keep the two of us distinct.
00:53:48 ►
And it will be Gurdjieff at various stages of evolution. That’s the earliest stage
00:53:49 ►
of Gurdjieff. There’s another
00:53:51 ►
one later on, which is Gurdjieff
00:53:53 ►
as a mammal, and that’s a whole bunch of
00:53:55 ►
sheep busy munching away, and one
00:53:57 ►
sheep is standing up and saying, wait, wait,
00:54:00 ►
listen to me, we don’t have to be just
00:54:01 ►
sheep.
00:54:03 ►
And as the delay factor increases
00:54:08 ►
the cortical delay as kushinsky called it as the cortical delay increases you you’re not
00:54:13 ►
living in an aristotelian either or stimulus response behaviorist net you see a phalanx of
00:54:20 ►
possibilities very much like the parallel universe theory in quantum mechanics,
00:54:28 ►
and you have more opportunity to choose which realities you want to go into and which you want to stay out of.
00:54:31 ►
And that’s the whole purpose of work on consciousness.
00:54:35 ►
Maurice Nicole, who was a physician, a Jungian therapist, and a student of Gary Jeff,
00:54:41 ►
said the only reason that consciousness research is so important is because we need
00:54:46 ►
to decrease the amount of violence in the world.
00:54:49 ►
And it will not decrease until people are more conscious of who they are, where they
00:54:54 ►
are, and what’s going on around them.
00:54:57 ►
In the most positive view, then, we could take the machines to get to a better level of relating to everyone around and proceed
00:55:07 ►
beyond it rather than use it to over stimulate like a drug or well actually
00:55:12 ►
there was research with rats where they kept pushing a button on a machine that
00:55:17 ►
stimulated the pleasure center but the machines that I was talking about early
00:55:23 ►
the neuropeptide machines they they don’t work that way.
00:55:28 ►
They have a very definitely limiting factor on them.
00:55:31 ►
There hasn’t appeared anywhere any tendency in people to overuse the machines.
00:55:37 ►
You find out that after a few days,
00:55:40 ►
your consciousness is staying at a certain level
00:55:44 ►
and you have no desire to go back to the machine.
00:55:47 ►
And two weeks later or three weeks later, you suddenly decide, gee, what’s the matter with me?
00:55:54 ►
Oh, yeah, I’m feeling kind of glum today.
00:55:57 ►
So you take another dose of the machine and you move your consciousness around.
00:56:01 ►
And if you have your brainwave done a couple of times a year, like I
00:56:05 ►
have been lucky enough to have lately,
00:56:08 ►
I keep running into researchers who are
00:56:09 ►
very eager to measure my brain. That’s a wonderful
00:56:12 ►
thing. I keep getting cross-sections
00:56:14 ►
of my brain.
00:56:15 ►
I see how I’m learning
00:56:17 ►
to go into theta more and more quickly
00:56:20 ►
and how to move
00:56:22 ►
from alpha down to
00:56:23 ►
delta fairly rapidly and move from alpha down to delta fairly rapidly
00:56:25 ►
and move from the right hemisphere to the left and so on.
00:56:28 ►
And it’s obvious that these machines will lose their all interest from me
00:56:34 ►
in the next couple of years because I’m learning the machines are teaching devices.
00:56:39 ►
And after you’ve learned the lesson,
00:56:40 ►
you give the machine away to a friend who could use it.
00:56:43 ►
Pet scan your brain a few times.
00:56:45 ►
What? Pet scan your brain a few times. What?
00:56:46 ►
PET scan your brain next.
00:56:48 ►
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
00:56:50 ►
Yes?
00:56:51 ►
These neuropeptide machines here,
00:56:54 ►
I’m hearing about,
00:56:55 ►
are those accessible to like the regular Joe like me,
00:56:59 ►
or are they just a search device?
00:57:01 ►
Yes.
00:57:02 ►
Omni magazine carries ads for them. So does Magical Blend. Reality Hackers has a lot of ads for them. Go to a good large magazine store, buy Omni, Reality Hackers, and Magical Blend. Read the advertisements and decide for yourself which one you want to invest in.
00:57:26 ►
I do not recommend
00:57:28 ►
any particular machine because I
00:57:30 ►
don’t want to lose my, I don’t want to sound
00:57:32 ►
like a salesman for some machine company.
00:57:34 ►
So I’m just talking about the general
00:57:36 ►
area. I have my own favorite, but I’m
00:57:38 ►
not going to tell anybody what it is.
00:57:40 ►
Besides, there are better ones coming along
00:57:42 ►
all the time. The thing I’m worried about
00:57:44 ►
is I’ve ran across them before and some of them didn’t measure brain waves at all.
00:57:49 ►
They just measured like perspiration or something like that.
00:57:51 ►
I didn’t know that there was an inexpensive machine that could measure your theta waves, say, that you could actually buy.
00:58:00 ►
But you’re saying there are those out now.
00:58:03 ►
No. A machine to measure your brain waves is still rather expensive. but you’re saying there are those out now no
00:58:05 ►
machines to measure your brain waves
00:58:07 ►
are still rather expensive
00:58:08 ►
but machines that will change your brain waves
00:58:11 ►
are getting cheaper and cheaper
00:58:13 ►
there are machines that
00:58:15 ►
run in the 400 range
00:58:18 ►
that very definitely
00:58:20 ►
move you from beta to alpha
00:58:22 ►
or down to theta or down to delta.
00:58:27 ►
And I’ll mention the names of some of the machines.
00:58:32 ►
There’s the Pulsar, the NuStar, the Isis, the MC2, the Tranquilite,
00:58:40 ►
the Endomax, the NeuroPep, the Synchro Energizer, and a few dozen others.
00:58:48 ►
And the advertisers all will tell you that their machine is the latest and the best.
00:58:53 ►
So you’ve got to use your own intelligence to pick out, to find out more about the field.
00:58:59 ►
You can try reading Michael Hutchison’s book, Mega Brain.
00:59:02 ►
That’ll give you a lot of useful information and leads.
00:59:07 ►
And you can try subscribing
00:59:08 ►
to my newsletter, Trajectories,
00:59:10 ►
which I review these machines
00:59:12 ►
fairly regularly.
00:59:15 ►
And you can talk
00:59:17 ►
to other people
00:59:19 ►
who investigate in the field.
00:59:22 ►
Yes?
00:59:23 ►
Yeah, I want to ask you about your play were you the production it was done in Dublin
00:59:29 ►
Were you pleased with it? And why hasn’t been done hasn’t it been done here?
00:59:34 ►
I was pleased with the production
00:59:40 ►
The director of the Dublin production is trying to get a production on in New York right now
00:59:45 ►
There’s also a group in Portland, Maine, who want to do it.
00:59:50 ►
And I’m very eager to see that production come off,
00:59:53 ►
even though Portland, Maine is not the center of the theatrical universe,
00:59:57 ►
but it’s where Reich actually stood trial.
01:00:00 ►
And I think it would be a wonderful thing to have the play about Reich done in the city
01:00:03 ►
where he stood trial and was condemned.
01:00:06 ►
And there’s also two groups in L.A. who are trying to get the money together to put it on.
01:00:12 ►
I don’t know which one of them will get there first.
01:00:14 ►
So I’m expecting an American production in the near future.
01:00:19 ►
Maybe more, probably more than one American production.
01:00:23 ►
Yes?
01:00:24 ►
In Ireland, did they do the play in Gaelic?
01:00:29 ►
Well, I always saw plays in Gaelic when I was in Ireland.
01:00:34 ►
Only 5% of the people in Ireland speak Gaelic.
01:00:38 ►
But the theaters, they all do it in Gaelic.
01:00:42 ►
No, most of the plays in Dublin are done in Irish-English.
01:00:46 ►
The only ones I saw were in Gaelic.
01:00:48 ►
Oh.
01:00:49 ►
Well, yeah, there are theatrical groups who do plays in Gaelic,
01:00:53 ►
but most of the theatres in Ireland do plays in Irish-English,
01:00:57 ►
which I happen to consider the most beautiful language ever invented in human history.
01:01:02 ►
Vastly superior to English English, Australian
01:01:05 ►
English, and American English. Gaelic they tell me is a beautiful language but I
01:01:11 ►
don’t know enough about it to pass judgment. Irish English to me is the
01:01:16 ►
most beautiful language ever created and the greatest works of literature are all
01:01:20 ►
written in Irish English. From Jonathan Swift to James Joyce to Flann O’Brien.
01:01:27 ►
That’s another lecture.
01:01:28 ►
I have another lecture.
01:01:29 ►
The Land Where Bulls Are Pregnant,
01:01:31 ►
where I explain all about Irish literature.
01:01:33 ►
But that’s an entirely different lecture.
01:01:35 ►
And this has gone on pretty long tonight already.
01:01:37 ►
I think I will take two more questions
01:01:40 ►
and then take the rest of the evening off.
01:01:43 ►
Okay.
01:01:44 ►
What is the play To Start a Riot about?
01:01:47 ►
Excuse me?
01:01:48 ►
The play To Start a Riot, what is that about?
01:01:51 ►
Oh, that was a play about Ezra Pound,
01:01:55 ►
who made propaganda broadcasts over Rome radio
01:01:59 ►
and was condemned for treason.
01:02:00 ►
And the play is on a stage in which actors keep coming in talking about
01:02:06 ►
a riot that’s going on outside the theater. I wrote this in the 60s, where a bunch of
01:02:11 ►
peace demonstrators were attacked by the police. And then a race riot breaks out in a nearby
01:02:17 ►
neighborhood, and the race riot, the police riot, the peace riot, and all of this all
01:02:23 ►
gets tangled up with the pound plate
01:02:25 ►
I was called the caged panther
01:02:27 ►
and several people were interested in a production
01:02:29 ►
but a production never happened
01:02:30 ►
and then I lost the script
01:02:32 ►
I guess I got disgusted
01:02:33 ►
maybe I’ll rewrite it someday
01:02:37 ►
I lost the script of the rake plate
01:02:38 ►
and I rewrote that
01:02:40 ►
maybe I’ll rewrite the pound plate someday
01:02:42 ►
one more question.
01:02:45 ►
There you are.
01:02:47 ►
Do you feel that psychedelics have served their purpose as a catalyst in the human species,
01:02:54 ►
or do you think that today there is still a purpose for these substances?
01:02:59 ►
Culturally, they’ve served their purpose.
01:03:02 ►
Culturally, they’ve done some good and some damage,
01:03:05 ►
and they send the signal around the world
01:03:08 ►
that human consciousness can be radically changed quickly.
01:03:14 ►
Scientifically, they have not exhausted.
01:03:16 ►
They were just barely tapping into it.
01:03:19 ►
I am not in favor of more widespread use of psychedelics.
01:03:23 ►
I am very much in favor of reopening scientific investigation
01:03:29 ►
under controlled conditions with skilled therapists
01:03:35 ►
using Leary’s general principles and Groff’s general principles
01:03:39 ►
about how to program a good trip.
01:03:42 ►
I think that what was accomplished
01:03:46 ►
in the research of the 60s
01:03:47 ►
was so astounding
01:03:49 ►
in terms of the previous history of psychology
01:03:51 ►
that I think reopening that area
01:03:54 ►
to scientific research
01:03:55 ►
would be a tremendous benefit.
01:03:58 ►
But I am not particularly thrilled
01:04:00 ►
by the drug culture.
01:04:02 ►
I’m not particularly thrilled
01:04:03 ►
by all the bad stuff that gets sold
01:04:06 ►
under the wrong
01:04:08 ►
name and all the profits that are being
01:04:10 ►
made out of it and all that crap.
01:04:13 ►
Okay, that’s it.
01:04:14 ►
Thank you all for your
01:04:16 ►
patience.
01:04:23 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:04:25 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
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As I was listening with you just now,
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it dawned on me that this recording must have been made
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at a private gathering of some sort,
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and I guess probably the type of gathering that I call a salon.
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And for what it’s worth, the informality of the conversation
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is much like
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what we have in the live salons every Monday night. And while sometimes I have a guest join
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us for the Monday night salon, on most nights we have more of a free-for-all conversation.
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For example, tonight we’ll be discussing some of the ramifications that Ben Gortzel put forth in
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his TEDx talk about artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence.
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I know that some of our fellow slaughters are actually working in this field,
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and I also know that many of us are already aware of what’s coming our way in the form of AI.
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In fact, much of it is already here, yet most people are paying no attention to what AI is going to bring.
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Of course, a lot of it’s going to be spectacularly good.
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However, there are a few detours that could lead to a nightmare scenario once ASI comes into play.
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So, even if you aren’t geeky and don’t care about future tech,
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I think it’ll be worth your while to begin paying attention to the rapidly expanding field of artificial intelligence. And I guess that I should also say something about why these live salons are
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only available to my supporters on Patreon. Well, the answer to that is simple. Without their support,
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these podcasts would have come to an end over a year ago. You see, my only source of income is my social security check and the
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monthly donation that 425 of my favorite fellow salonners contribute via Patreon each month.
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Now, a couple of years ago, I tried to hold these live salons for anyone who wanted to attend,
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and so they were open to the public, but they also were a disaster because trolls soon filled the room and took it over.
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So now, every Monday morning, I reserve a new Zoom conference room, and then I send an email
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invite to all of my Patreon supporters with the link for that night’s conference. And the other
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thing I guess I should point out is that to get an invite to the live salon, it only takes the
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pledge of a dollar a month. And while that may not seem like
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a lot, well, my plan is to keep these live salons going for another 10 years. I’ll be 87 years old
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by then, and well, it seems like maybe that would be a good time for me to retire. However, if you
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figure one dollar a month for 10 years, well, that’s a total of $120 over the life of these
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live salons. And well, I consider that to be a significant donation
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to help keep a roof over my head
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so that I can keep these podcasts coming your way
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and for those donations and for all of the other support
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that I’ve received over the past 15 years of podcasting
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from here in the salon
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well I thank all of you from the bottom of my heart
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and for now this is Lorenzo signing
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off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.