Program Notes
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
In this engaging and entertaining talk, Terence McKenna shares a mind-bending theory about the universe, combining astronomy, ancient civilizations, and quantum physics. He suggests that a catastrophic event 32,000 years ago at the galactic core could have triggered the development of human language.
His discussion covers quasars, gamma rays, and the concept of non-locality in quantum physics, suggesting that the universe communicates important messages across vast distances instantly.
The talk also explores the potential for time travel, the significance of the Mayan calendar, and the role of humans in preserving novelty and life in the universe.
As is often the case, Terence emphasizes the importance of skepticism, urging listeners to critically evaluate information and seek the truth, while weaving in personal anecdotes and humor to keep the audience engaged. As he says, “I’m not interested in selling a line here. I’m interested in triggering self-reflective and analytical thought.”
Previous Episode
Podcast 704 - Terence McKenna: Drugs, Computers and Other Stuff
Next Episode
Podcast 706 – Terence McKenna “One Last Timewave Rap”
Similar Episodes
- 539 - Novelty and Technology - score: 0.85169
- 412 - Permitting Smart People To Hope - score: 0.83949
- 109 - Hazelwood House Trialogue (Part 3) - score: 0.83822
- 250 - The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring) Part 3 - score: 0.83558
- 429 - Leprechauns, Elves, or Dead Souls_ - score: 0.83175
- 002 - Linear Societies and Nonlinear Drugs - score: 0.82784
- 353 - Inflationary Evolution - score: 0.82742
- 248 - The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring) Part 1 - score: 0.82495
- 423 - Is There Hope In All Of This_ - score: 0.82247
- 029 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 3) - score: 0.81978
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional transforming musical linguistic objects.
00:00:09 ►
Helvetians.
00:00:14 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:22 ►
And, as you will hear in just a moment,
00:00:28 ►
Terrence McKenna begins this talk by saying that,
00:00:30 ►
well, we shouldn’t take his new ideas seriously because he doesn’t even believe it.
00:00:34 ►
But then, of course, he goes on to unravel an idea
00:00:37 ►
that I’ve never heard of expound before,
00:00:39 ►
and, well, as my mother used to say,
00:00:42 ►
it’s a real doozy.
00:00:44 ►
Basically, Terrence presents a new and very speculative theory that intertwines the mysterious forces of quasars and non-locality with the sudden emergence of language on Earth.
00:00:56 ►
Really, he does.
00:00:58 ►
Rather than reveal a spoiler here, I think I should just get on with it because, well, I want to listen to it once again myself.
00:01:04 ►
But to be honest, this one is really, really far out, even for me, at least in the
00:01:10 ►
beginning. But to give it a little perspective, just yesterday I read an article about a recently
00:01:17 ►
published paper from scientists at Harvard University, and they speculate that a technologically
00:01:24 ►
advanced civilization may be hiding
00:01:26 ►
here on Earth and might be responsible for the recent rash of UFOs.
00:01:32 ►
I’d sure like to get my hands on some of that stuff those guys have been smoking.
00:01:36 ►
But now let’s hear what came to Terrence’s mind while I assume he was smoking a little something himself
00:01:42 ►
because I think that he was already talking about AI
00:01:46 ►
in October of 1995.
00:01:49 ►
See if you agree.
00:01:51 ►
I had recently a breakthrough on this matter,
00:01:58 ►
which is new material.
00:02:00 ►
And whenever I present new material,
00:02:03 ►
I’m uncertain with it,
00:02:05 ►
and also the implications of this one are a mind-boggler,
00:02:09 ►
and it also gives a certain amount of comfort
00:02:11 ►
to people I consider screwballs.
00:02:15 ►
So I will tell you this,
00:02:18 ►
but this is marked perishable speculation,
00:02:23 ►
not for export.
00:02:25 ►
Don’t take this one seriously, folks.
00:02:29 ►
But the way my mind works is I constantly,
00:02:33 ►
I have certain things I’m trying to explain.
00:02:37 ►
And if I can create a model that explains them,
00:02:41 ►
no matter how nutty it is,
00:02:44 ►
I feel a certain obligation to wonder if it might not be true
00:02:49 ►
so here’s this here is a story this is not true I don’t believe this you shouldn’t
00:02:58 ►
believe this but here is a story.
00:03:06 ►
It has a great beginning.
00:03:11 ►
In a galaxy far, far away, and long, long ago,
00:03:16 ►
here’s, first of all, a little bit of backgrounding,
00:03:19 ►
or this won’t make any sense at all.
00:03:23 ►
There are these things in the universe called quasars,
00:03:27 ►
and what they are, as far as we can tell,
00:03:35 ►
is they are very large, very dense gravitational objects into which a large gas cloud or something like that
00:03:40 ►
that has been captured by the local gravity of one of these things is falling.
00:03:47 ►
And as matter falls into this kind of an object, its last message to the surrounding cosmos
00:03:55 ►
is a lot of hard radiation, gamma rays and that sort of thing, which are very devastating
00:04:04 ►
to life.
00:04:07 ►
Quasars are rare.
00:04:10 ►
One galaxy and a thousand has one in its heart.
00:04:16 ►
Now, if quasars are something which occurs at a certain stage in a galaxy’s life,
00:04:26 ►
like let’s say early in its life,
00:04:29 ►
most quasars have a, most galaxies have a quasar in them.
00:04:34 ►
If that were true, you know, out seven, eight, ten billion light years,
00:04:42 ►
it logically follows that we should see more quasars
00:04:46 ►
because we’re seeing deeper into time.
00:04:49 ►
We’re seeing a younger universe.
00:04:52 ►
This is not what the data shows.
00:04:55 ►
The data shows that the deeper into time you look,
00:05:00 ►
the distribution of quasars remains constant.
00:05:04 ►
What is the conclusion from this? The conclusion is that quasars remains constant. What is the conclusion from this?
00:05:07 ►
The conclusion is that quasars are not a stage in the evolution of a galaxy.
00:05:14 ►
They are something that can happen to a galaxy at any time in its lifespan
00:05:21 ►
and without reference to its age or its senescent.
00:05:30 ►
Okay, so are we all on the same page here?
00:05:33 ►
All right.
00:05:34 ►
Now, when I was writing this book about the evolution of language, or I’m still writing it,
00:05:42 ►
but when I did the research, this number kept coming up
00:05:47 ►
32,000 years for the invention of language, which surprised me when I started looking into this.
00:05:57 ►
I assumed, for some reason, that the orthodox position would put it much further back
00:06:03 ►
because that’s so dramatically near to the present that I’ve just amazed that an academic field could entertain such a radical notion that language emerged almost overnight and for the purposes of this morning’s argument I speech. The sudden emergence of this new technology
00:06:27 ►
which pushed us into hyperdrive
00:06:30 ►
toward technical civilization
00:06:33 ►
occurred just 32,000 years ago.
00:06:37 ►
Well, there’s a funny coincidence operating here.
00:06:42 ►
We happen to be
00:06:43 ►
just about
00:06:46 ►
32,000 light
00:06:48 ►
years from the galactic core
00:06:50 ►
so
00:06:51 ►
as Ross
00:06:54 ►
Perot says here’s the deal
00:06:56 ►
I want to test you
00:06:58 ►
right through our small intestines
00:07:00 ►
no sure
00:07:01 ►
I’m all yours.
00:07:07 ►
This is the myth.
00:07:08 ►
This is the story.
00:07:10 ►
Imagine that
00:07:11 ►
32,000 years
00:07:13 ►
ago, there was a
00:07:15 ►
catastrophe of some sort
00:07:17 ►
that caused disequilibrium
00:07:19 ►
at the galactic core
00:07:21 ►
and an enormous cloud of
00:07:23 ►
gas, which had been previously in stable orbit around the
00:07:28 ►
black hole near alpha in Sagittarius fell in to the into the galactic core and a quasar ignited in the
00:07:40 ►
center of our galaxy now in the relativistic universe,
00:07:47 ►
it would take 32,000 years
00:07:50 ►
before the news would get here,
00:07:53 ►
moving at the speed of light.
00:07:55 ►
It would take 32,000 years.
00:07:57 ►
And how would the news arrive?
00:08:01 ►
It would arrive as a new, brilliant blue star at 23 degrees Sagittarius the very place in the sky that the Maya have fixated on with their calendar well now
00:08:20 ►
Well, now.
00:08:27 ►
This requires a slight digression.
00:08:31 ►
Ordinary physics is done,
00:08:34 ►
I’m sure you’ve heard this ad nauseum,
00:08:40 ►
using the Bohr-Einstein version of things, which has, at its center,
00:08:42 ►
this really weird idea of the uncertainty principle.
00:08:47 ►
And, you know, how many new agers and how many muddle-headed scientists have made a killing off of
00:08:55 ►
beating the drum for the uncertainty principle?
00:08:58 ►
I mean, it’s been held up as the place where science and mysticism meet and so forth and so on and it’s this wonderful
00:09:06 ►
achievement and so forth and so on let us take a different view how about if it’s just baloney
00:09:13 ►
it’s the it’s the product of a very sloppy thinking it turns out that it’s been known in the physics community for decades
00:09:28 ►
that there is an alternative to the Heisenberg-Bor model.
00:09:33 ►
It was developed by David Bohm, God rest his soul.
00:09:40 ►
And Bohm’s theory of quantum gravity and so forth and so on
00:09:45 ►
gives just as good results as the Bohr Heisenberg model.
00:09:53 ►
In other words, as an experimental theory, it’s as good.
00:09:57 ►
Why was Bohr Heisenberg chosen over David Bohm?
00:10:02 ►
It was chosen because David Bohm’s theory has a really
00:10:07 ►
counterintuitive notion built into it so fundamentally that it cannot be
00:10:14 ►
eliminated without this theory collapsing. Excuse me. And this quality is called
00:10:22 ►
non-locality. bore the the the the the
00:10:26 ►
the ball model says that below the ordinary universe of space and time
00:10:33 ►
there is a mysterious kind of connectivity that is instantaneous across
00:10:42 ►
infinite distances if if necessary.
00:10:46 ►
Well, that seemed so nuts to the physicists of 1923 through 35 or so,
00:10:55 ►
that they were willing to accept the squirrelly part of the Bohr Heisenberg model,
00:11:02 ►
this strange bit of business about the uncertainty principle.
00:11:07 ►
And what the uncertainty principle says is, as you gain knowledge about the position of a particle,
00:11:14 ►
you lose data about its velocity. As you gain knowledge about its velocity,
00:11:21 ►
you begin to lose hold of its position. And so you have to choose which one you want to know and
00:11:28 ►
the Bohr Heisenberg model says you cannot know both simultaneously this is a basic
00:11:35 ►
property of the universe not not at all in the Bohm model you can know the exact position and the exact velocity with no
00:11:49 ►
no side of hand, no tricks, but you have to swallow this non-locality thing, which seems
00:11:58 ►
so counterintuitive that they threw it out. Well, now in the past 20 years, has come a guy named John Bell.
00:12:08 ►
And he had what he called Bell’s theorem.
00:12:12 ►
And he said that any two particles
00:12:14 ►
that have ever been associated with each other
00:12:17 ►
maintain a bizarre quantum,
00:12:24 ►
sub-quantum connection, that for instance if one is spinning with
00:12:29 ►
north pole up and the other is spinning with north pole down and they are now
00:12:37 ►
separated by a gazillion light years, if you can flip A, instantly B will flip two.
00:12:49 ►
And this was just thought to be madness and that there was something wrong with the mathematics
00:12:54 ►
and it was called a thought experiment and, you know, all the usual folder all was brought out
00:13:02 ►
when the chicken house is excited. Well now people have gone past this and they’ve built apparatus and they have performed real
00:13:14 ►
experiments and it’s true. The implications are very complicated. It’s buried in a lot of mathematics. We who only speak English shouldn’t assume
00:13:26 ►
we’re entirely in command of what’s happening here, but it is now perfectly respectable in
00:13:33 ►
physics to maintain that non-locality is a real principle. Well, so then the question becomes,
00:13:41 ►
well, then what we’re talking about here is a form of faster than light communication.
00:13:46 ►
Because any message can be broken down to a binary code, and if you’ve got a switch here
00:13:52 ►
and a switch linked to it over here by sublight instantaneous non-local connection,
00:14:00 ►
then by switching this switch, we can cause the message to appear over here instantly.
00:14:08 ►
Okay, so suppose, and again, I’ve talked to Rupert, Sheldrake, a lot about this,
00:14:15 ►
and one of the interesting questions we like to kick around is if there is a morphogenetic field,
00:14:21 ►
what is its propagation speed?
00:14:24 ►
And Rupert maintains that its propagation speed is infinite,
00:14:29 ►
that it, in other words, can cross the universe in a single moment.
00:14:33 ►
Well, now remember that Bell’s theorem says that any two particles
00:14:38 ►
which were ever sharing the same space in the past
00:14:42 ►
maintain this quantum non-local connection throughout eternity,
00:14:48 ►
add that to the fact that if you believe in the Big Bang, all particles once shared the same space.
00:14:56 ►
So what does that mean?
00:14:58 ►
It means all points in this enormous kiliocosm that we’re caught in are non-locally instantaneously connectable
00:15:08 ►
through Bell Superspace.
00:15:11 ►
Okay? Are we all still on the same page?
00:15:14 ►
Good. All right.
00:15:16 ►
So,
00:15:17 ►
here’s the end of the little story I’m trying to tell you.
00:15:23 ►
32,000 years ago, the core of the galaxy destabilized and went quasar, and moving outward at the
00:15:32 ►
speed of light from that explosion near Alpha in Sagittarius is an enormous shell of lethal
00:15:40 ►
radiation.
00:15:41 ►
We’re talking about an extinction event that doesn’t waste a planet or like the
00:15:49 ►
explosion of a star would destroy a solar system. We’re talking about an extinction event that
00:15:56 ►
places at risk 11 billion stars and their associated planets and satellites.
00:16:06 ►
We’re talking about a galaxy-wide extinction event for life as we know it,
00:16:12 ►
because biological organisms cannot persist in the presence of hard radiation.
00:16:20 ►
So imagine that this happened and that this shell of energy, of lethal energy, is moving outward.
00:16:29 ►
Well, then, civilizations near the galactic core, if there were any, had no warning.
00:16:41 ►
It was upon them within minutes, hours, days, at most years.
00:16:46 ►
If you were one light year from the explosion, one year after it happened, the wave hit.
00:16:53 ►
If, and I’m not friendly to, you know, surgically obsessed space aliens and all that.
00:17:05 ►
But when you talk about a galaxy,
00:17:07 ►
when you talk about 11 billion stars,
00:17:11 ►
the possibility of high civilization
00:17:14 ►
becomes, in my mind, close to a certainty.
00:17:17 ►
And by high civilization,
00:17:19 ►
I don’t mean what we’re messing around with.
00:17:22 ►
I mean real technologies.
00:17:26 ►
The kind of technologies
00:17:27 ►
that can move a star cluster,
00:17:30 ►
that sort of thing.
00:17:31 ►
Big technology.
00:17:33 ►
Surely, if there is
00:17:35 ►
any commonality
00:17:37 ►
in life at all,
00:17:39 ►
a kind of general evacuation
00:17:41 ►
order would have been issued.
00:17:44 ►
And essentially the message would be,
00:17:48 ►
you, you who are reading this message,
00:17:52 ►
you have X amount of time to prepare a strategy
00:17:57 ►
for dematerializing yourself,
00:18:01 ►
leaving this galaxy at hyper-light speed,
00:18:04 ►
or in some other way, guarding your rear-end
00:18:08 ►
from this blast, which is on its way.
00:18:12 ►
And this answers, well, there’s one more thing I want to say.
00:18:20 ►
Given the complexity of linguistics and the difficulty of psychology and so forth and so on,
00:18:25 ►
when we come to the question of exo-communication,
00:18:30 ►
communication between non-human intelligent species and ourselves,
00:18:36 ►
you have to, I think it’s pretty obvious,
00:18:39 ►
it’s easier to communicate some things than others.
00:18:44 ►
And the simplest things that would be possible to communicate
00:18:49 ►
across the vast gulf of assumptions that might exist
00:18:53 ►
between two intelligent species,
00:18:55 ►
the easiest things to communicate are where data and when data.
00:19:03 ►
But what’s really difficult to communicate is what data?
00:19:08 ►
Because that requires, you know, a knowledge of the capacities of your intended,
00:19:17 ►
the intended recipient of the message.
00:19:23 ►
So it has occurred to me that though it requires the
00:19:27 ►
imagining of this enormous improbability and galactic-wide catastrophe, it still is
00:19:34 ►
less than the intervention of God Almighty, it may be that this message is out there
00:19:43 ►
and that it began being, it arrived here from the galactic center
00:19:48 ►
instantaneously 32,000 years ago and the message was to anyone who can hear this start building
00:19:59 ►
canoes start talking to each other start smting metals, start using symbols to convey data, start building machines because, you know, the lease has been canceled.
00:20:16 ►
And so, and this explains then how the Maya, with a very rudimentary knowledge of galactic architecture and so forth and so on,
00:20:27 ►
could have found the place in the sky and could have found the place in time.
00:20:34 ►
They found the place in space and the place in time.
00:20:38 ►
The only thing that I have in common with the Mayan civilization is that we both used psilocybin.
00:20:48 ►
And it’s almost as though when you purge the viruses off your disk,
00:20:54 ►
there is at the bottom line and written in assembly code that cannot be expunged
00:21:01 ►
a discard date that says, you know,
00:21:06 ►
abandon this locality
00:21:09 ►
before December 21st,
00:21:11 ►
2012,
00:21:11 ►
AD.
00:21:15 ►
This would explain something else
00:21:17 ►
which troubles me a lot,
00:21:19 ►
as you can probably tell
00:21:20 ►
from my several references to it.
00:21:22 ►
It would explain why there are all these naive and somewhat, well, let’s leave it at naive,
00:21:30 ►
people running around with the conviction that the world is about to end,
00:21:35 ►
and that space aliens are trying to off-lift us by the millions
00:21:40 ►
and pull our chestnuts out of the fire and so forth.
00:21:44 ►
What this is is a not terribly bright person responding to the general evacuation order from Alpha
00:21:54 ►
Sagittarius, which says, you know, go to your lifeboats.
00:21:59 ►
And what’s interesting to me is the only kind of organism that could survive this kind of a
00:22:07 ►
quasar episode is a non-biological life form. In other words, a machine. These quasar
00:22:18 ►
episodes, when they’re triggered, they can last 10 million years. That would not be
00:22:24 ►
unusual. Well, 10 million years. That would not be unusual.
00:22:25 ►
Well, 10 million years of having the surface of this planet
00:22:29 ►
bathed in high gamma radiation
00:22:32 ►
is not going to leave much biology intact.
00:22:35 ►
Maybe the tube worms out there at the sulfurous vents
00:22:40 ►
a mile and a half under the Pacific could pull through,
00:22:44 ►
but that’s pretty slim
00:22:46 ►
pickings
00:22:47 ►
considering what we’ve got here
00:22:51 ►
so it actually shows us
00:22:55 ►
where we should be going
00:22:56 ►
this fantasy dream
00:22:59 ►
whatever it is of dematerializing
00:23:02 ►
of downloading
00:23:04 ►
ourselves into machines,
00:23:06 ►
may in fact be the only way out,
00:23:10 ►
because we just don’t have a technology that can move the entire planet
00:23:16 ►
and its population at the speed of light out of danger.
00:23:21 ►
So our only hope is essentially to go into the solid state matrix of the earth and our
00:23:29 ►
technology and abide there for some millions and millions of years. So the technological push
00:23:38 ►
that has seemed so relentless and so brutal and so difficult to deflect is in fact we are doing the right thing
00:23:49 ►
and the only question is whether we’ll make it in time and it looks like you know it’s going to be a
00:23:55 ►
flash photo finish we basically have 18 years to figure out how to load, download all human DNA and all other forms of DNA on this planet
00:24:10 ►
into some kind of indestructible storage mode. I view it, I imagine it as a gold
00:24:18 ►
eturbium cube buried 200 miles beneath Tico on the surface of the moon and bathed in a permanent bath of
00:24:29 ►
liquid hydrogen and so forth and so on. Then there’s a chance to ride out this catastrophic
00:24:39 ►
wave of extinction. Well, so that’s just a fable. It’s just a model.
00:24:47 ►
But it answers
00:24:48 ►
a number of interesting
00:24:50 ►
questions, and you may be sure we
00:24:52 ►
will be paying close
00:24:54 ►
attention to 23 degrees
00:24:56 ►
Sagittarius as the whole
00:24:58 ►
thing swings into
00:25:00 ►
alignment.
00:25:02 ►
Where the Mayans
00:25:04 ►
resigned to the end of the calendar
00:25:06 ►
being the end of the Mayans?
00:25:10 ►
Well, no, we don’t know what the Mayans thought.
00:25:13 ►
We have only five Mayan books
00:25:16 ►
and out of tens of thousands.
00:25:20 ►
They were a people of books.
00:25:22 ►
They had books upon books upon books, and none of these survived.
00:25:28 ►
One of the curious things about the Maya is that they had this calendrical system
00:25:33 ►
where they had these periods of time called Bok tunes, which are about 560 years long, I think.
00:25:42 ►
Don’t hold me to that.
00:25:44 ►
But anyway, their calendar is composed of
00:25:47 ►
13 of these bachunes. But what’s weird is they start their calendar long before there’s any
00:25:55 ►
evidence of Mayan civilization. And their calendar ends centuries after Mayan civilization has completely disappeared.
00:26:06 ►
So they erected their own civilization in a very uninteresting part of their calendrical system.
00:26:14 ►
The other thing that’s really weird about the Mayan calendar,
00:26:18 ►
and no other people on Earth have ever done this,
00:26:22 ►
calendars have start dates,
00:26:27 ►
not end dates.
00:26:30 ►
The Mayan calendar begins on a slow Thursday in August.
00:26:33 ►
No
00:26:33 ►
equinox, no solstice, no planetary
00:26:37 ►
alignment, no nothing, just Joe
00:26:39 ►
Day.
00:26:40 ►
And that’s
00:26:42 ►
day one of the Mayan
00:26:44 ►
calendar.
00:26:50 ►
Well, then it rolls forward 5,000 and plus years and ends, you know, on a winter solstice,
00:26:55 ►
not simply a winter solstice,
00:26:58 ►
but the one winter solstice in 26,000 years,
00:27:04 ►
when the heliical rising of the galaxy
00:27:08 ►
will be obscured by the solstice sun.
00:27:12 ►
This is a neat piece of calculation.
00:27:15 ►
I mean, it’s not at all clear
00:27:17 ►
that they could do it
00:27:19 ►
with the kind of mathematics we think they had.
00:27:24 ►
It looks much more like somebody told them.
00:27:28 ►
It can’t be coincidence,
00:27:31 ►
but how they were able to so perfectly align their calendar,
00:27:35 ►
I don’t know, unless they were using the equivalent
00:27:38 ►
of subspace radio, bell non-local communication,
00:27:43 ►
to communicate with civilizations closer to the core who could
00:27:51 ►
pass along information about what is happening and it may be that the fate of life in the galaxy
00:28:00 ►
rests with the rim civilizations,
00:28:05 ►
meaning the civilizations far from the center.
00:28:09 ►
And we are one.
00:28:10 ►
You know, what we’ve always browbeat ourselves about
00:28:13 ►
is, oh, well, here we are, clear out at the rim,
00:28:17 ►
the stars are getting thinner and thinner.
00:28:19 ►
We can sense that all the hot action
00:28:22 ►
is 20,000 light years that way, but it’s our misfortune to be
00:28:28 ►
rubs. Well, maybe not. Maybe we country folk out here on the rim are the only people who were given
00:28:38 ►
enough warning to be able to get our act together. I said last night, or at some point, that I think of speech as a technology, an invention,
00:28:54 ►
not an emergent property out of biology.
00:28:59 ►
Well, then if you put this rap in place with that rap, then the question becomes, aha, okay, so speech is a technology, but the question is, is it a human technology?
00:29:12 ►
Was this just fought up by some bright person among us? Or is it a little weirder than that? Is it a teaching, in other words, a teaching whose entire purpose is to accelerate the evolution of technical civilization
00:29:31 ►
toward the ability to digitize itself and escape from three dimensions and the catastrophe that is going to sweep over it?
00:29:42 ►
Isn’t this amazingly weird stuff?
00:29:45 ►
I find it so.
00:29:47 ►
I must say, yeah.
00:29:48 ►
At the end of this fable,
00:29:50 ►
what happens to the ball?
00:29:52 ►
Does it open itself when it’s ready?
00:29:55 ►
Was there a ball in the fagre?
00:29:56 ►
Well, the cube.
00:29:58 ►
Oh, you mean what happens after 10 million years?
00:30:02 ►
The alarm goes?
00:30:03 ►
No, I really think that it’s forcing us to evolve out of matter,
00:30:09 ►
that there’s no going back.
00:30:14 ►
It’s just, in a sense, our habitat is in danger,
00:30:19 ►
but our habitat is Newtonian space time,
00:30:22 ►
and it’s being cleansed by gamma radiation I think that we can
00:30:29 ►
carry a simulacrum of our world with us into hyperspace we don’t know what
00:30:37 ►
hyperspace exactly looks like there are other possibilities too we could
00:30:43 ►
escape not into digitized
00:30:46 ►
microspace.
00:30:48 ►
We could escape into
00:30:50 ►
time. This is what
00:30:52 ►
this is all about.
00:30:53 ►
The technologies that are being
00:30:55 ►
elaborated right now,
00:30:58 ►
time travel has gone
00:31:00 ►
from a you can’t be
00:31:02 ►
serious proposition
00:31:03 ►
in physics to an entirely reasonable branch of physics.
00:31:11 ►
There was an article in of all places scientific American about a year ago on time machines.
00:31:18 ►
We can conceive of time machines that would work.
00:31:27 ►
We can imagine time machines that would work. We can imagine time machines that would work.
00:31:39 ►
The problem is they require technical feats that we’re not capable of. For example, if you could build a cylinder several hundred miles long and about ten miles thick of the material that neutron stars
00:31:51 ►
are made of and spin it at a very high rate in the area far from the ends of that cylinder
00:32:02 ►
moving over its surface would move you through time.
00:32:08 ►
You could travel forward in time, and you could travel backward in time as far as your starting
00:32:14 ►
point. And this has been known for a long time. Gerdle, good old Kurt, the incommensurability guy
00:32:24 ►
that we talked about last night,
00:32:26 ►
proved this in 1948.
00:32:30 ►
Now there are many other schemes for traveling in time,
00:32:34 ►
and they involve technologies beyond our reach,
00:32:38 ►
but obviously, or we’d have it now.
00:32:41 ►
But it’s by no means in principle impossible and I think maybe this
00:32:47 ►
technological attractor that is exerting such an influence over our world and
00:32:54 ►
pulling us into it at a faster and faster rate the ultimate technological
00:33:00 ►
breakthrough will be travel in time and then we can escape where we will go I don’t know
00:33:10 ►
I think a really neat thing to do would be to establish ourselves a million years
00:33:15 ►
before the planetesimal impact 65 million years ago and in that area we can
00:33:23 ►
later evacuate backward in time from there but then when the
00:33:27 ►
planetesimal hits it’ll leave no evidence to confuse this civilization with machines
00:33:35 ►
mingled with dinosaur bones and that sort of thing I mean there are more holes in the
00:33:42 ►
sieve than you might think there are many ways to skin a cat, so to speak.
00:33:49 ►
Backlots may be the only way.
00:33:51 ►
Stephen Hawking came out a few weeks ago,
00:33:54 ►
but backward time travel may be.
00:33:58 ►
The future time travel may not be possible backward time travel.
00:34:04 ►
He’s an interesting guy. This is all being furiously debated. I think the form of time travel that I assume will come to be
00:34:17 ►
is a very special kind of time travel. I think we’re going to discover a way to travel forward in time
00:34:26 ►
and backward in time,
00:34:28 ►
but you can’t travel
00:34:29 ►
further back in time
00:34:31 ►
than the moment of the invention
00:34:34 ►
of the first time machine.
00:34:36 ►
That should be perfectly
00:34:37 ►
obvious. The reason for that
00:34:40 ►
is there aren’t any
00:34:42 ►
time machines there.
00:34:53 ►
You see. is there aren’t any time machines there you see but time travel may not be what we think it is one of the things that has occurred to me and many science fiction
00:34:58 ►
writers have used this as a theme that time travel well you know how the people who discovered radiation
00:35:08 ►
all died from it Madame Curie and her husband and a lot of Baccarell and all
00:35:17 ►
those people because they didn’t know what it was at first and so they handled it
00:35:22 ►
and messed with it and then they all died of
00:35:26 ►
radiation poisoning. Well, in a sense, part of the reason I think our world is so fraught with
00:35:34 ►
synchronicity and coincidence and why the skies of Earth are haunted by strange lights
00:35:41 ►
and why the minds of earthlings are haunted by strange tales is because as you get
00:35:47 ►
closer and closer to the invention of time travel, it’s giving off a backwash into history.
00:35:56 ►
And so there is this strange anticipation, precognition intuition
00:36:05 ►
that grows stronger and stronger
00:36:07 ►
and stronger and stronger and I imagine
00:36:09 ►
as we approach the moment
00:36:11 ►
of breakthrough
00:36:13 ►
if this is what it is
00:36:15 ►
things will get wiggier and wiggier
00:36:18 ►
we are being pulled
00:36:19 ►
into the future
00:36:21 ►
literally pulled into the
00:36:24 ►
future by this enormous hyper-tool
00:36:27 ►
attractor, which is, it is the human soul freed from matter. It is a time machine, a faster-than-light
00:36:39 ►
vehicle, a supercomputing hyper-mind. It’s everything we can possibly imagine it to be, and much more.
00:36:51 ►
A religious sensibility would call it God itself,
00:36:55 ►
but I find that just complicating,
00:36:57 ►
and why use a primitive concept
00:36:59 ►
when we can get so much more closer to the pith essence of the thing
00:37:04 ►
by thinking of it in technological terms.
00:37:07 ►
You know, in the 16th century, there was a virus
00:37:11 ►
that had an epidemic outbreak.
00:37:15 ►
It had been in the population at a low level for centuries.
00:37:19 ►
But this is the idea of the philosopher’s stone.
00:37:23 ►
The philosopher’s stone was conceived of as a union of spirit and matter,
00:37:30 ►
where matter and spirit would somehow become commingled in such a way that matter would behave like spirit,
00:37:41 ►
and spirit would behave like matter.
00:37:44 ►
And you would create what they
00:37:46 ►
called the universal panacea it would confer immortality it would fun it would be
00:37:54 ►
stronger than any metal it would be nurturing you could eat it it would cure all
00:38:00 ►
diseases you could look into it and see the past, the present, and the future. You could
00:38:07 ►
see things at a distance. Well, these alchemical dreams were thought to have died with the
00:38:14 ►
birth of scientific rationalism out of Descartes and Newton. But in fact, and Mersilliard makes
00:38:22 ►
this point in his book on alchemy called The Forge and the Crucible.
00:38:30 ►
Here in the secular 20th century, we’ve done all this, or we’re working on it.
00:38:37 ►
We have transmuted lead into gold.
00:38:41 ►
We have created drugs of longevity.
00:38:44 ►
We can see events
00:38:46 ►
happening on the other side
00:38:48 ►
of the planet. We can speak
00:38:50 ►
to people on the other side of the planet
00:38:52 ►
in real time. One by
00:38:54 ►
one, the dreams of the
00:38:56 ►
alchemical renaissance have
00:38:58 ►
been perfected by secular
00:39:00 ►
science. Well, this process
00:39:02 ►
is not going to end.
00:39:04 ►
And with the rise of the computer, psychedelic drugs, room temperature, superconductivity,
00:39:11 ►
nanotechnology, implants, radio astronomy, extremely powerful methods of mathematical description
00:39:20 ►
and data compression, we are moving toward the absolute
00:39:25 ►
conquest of
00:39:27 ►
ordinary reality.
00:39:30 ►
This is what we talked about last night.
00:39:32 ►
We are going to be able
00:39:34 ►
to do anything.
00:39:36 ►
And the thing that we will
00:39:38 ►
do in that context, I think,
00:39:40 ►
is save ourselves
00:39:42 ►
from our past
00:39:43 ►
and whatever dangers, quasars, or otherwise,
00:39:48 ►
that might lurk in our present and immediate future.
00:39:52 ►
And this is what is rolling the water in the pond,
00:39:57 ►
is the fact that, you know, this process has been funneling toward itself
00:40:01 ►
since before the bust-up of Pangaea,
00:40:08 ►
but now it’s less than 18 years in the human future.
00:40:13 ►
This is kind of a pedestrian question, but do quasars just occur in galactic centers?
00:40:22 ►
They occur wherever a black hole suddenly swallows a large amount of matter
00:40:28 ►
but not necessarily only in galactic centers
00:40:32 ►
at the center of dense star clusters this could happen
00:40:35 ►
but the commonest place is embedded in a galaxy
00:40:39 ►
and was there a connection between the
00:40:42 ►
birth of this quasar and the birth of language?
00:40:47 ►
Yes, that was essentially the initiation from the core.
00:40:56 ►
They are attempting to issue a general evacuation order.
00:41:01 ►
You know in Star Trek how, what is the prime directive? Thou shalt not interfere. Isn’t that
00:41:08 ►
the prime directive? Well, but if the galaxy goes quasar, the prime directive is canceled and you issue
00:41:16 ►
a general evacuation order because it’s no longer about doing the equivalent of anthropology, it’s about
00:41:23 ►
trying to save your ass. So then
00:41:25 ►
the prime directive is canceled, and the message is broadcast in all languages, in all dimensions.
00:41:34 ►
If you get this message, prepare to evacuate. Whatever that means to you, evacuate. Those who
00:41:42 ►
can’t understand the message, it’s a write-off. Those can’t understand the message it’s a write-off those who
00:41:47 ►
partially understand the message it’s a race with catastrophe those who fully
00:41:52 ►
understand the message will smoothly slide off in another dimension just as the
00:41:59 ►
shock wave hits this would explain this strangely counterintuitive proposition
00:42:06 ►
that is embedded in most
00:42:08 ►
religions and certainly all
00:42:10 ►
Western religions, the idea
00:42:12 ►
that the world will end,
00:42:14 ►
that God will enter
00:42:16 ►
history in a dramatic
00:42:18 ►
and definitive way. I mean,
00:42:20 ►
if you’re trying to sell an
00:42:21 ►
idea system to people,
00:42:24 ►
this is an incredible piece of baggage to take on.
00:42:28 ►
And yet Western religion from the very beginning
00:42:30 ►
has never released its grip
00:42:33 ►
on this completely bizarre proposition
00:42:36 ►
that God would enter history at a given moment.
00:42:40 ►
And I think the reason we are haunted
00:42:44 ►
by intimations of transformation,
00:42:47 ►
apocalypse, and eschaton is because we are in communication with a profound instability
00:42:57 ►
at the core of matter, of some sort. And the awareness is driving us to do what we do yeah the
00:43:12 ►
sense of this message know that the quasar happened before the quasar destroyed them
00:43:16 ►
is there some pre-cur there’s some delay between being aware of the quasar and then having the
00:43:22 ►
impact of the quasar well yes the impact of the quasar moves at the speed of light.
00:43:28 ►
The awareness of it moves through the bell medium instantaneously.
00:43:34 ►
But if somebody sent this message, so the senders know that they were impacted by a quasar.
00:43:40 ►
Well, that’s a part of the story I haven’t figured out in my own mind.
00:43:44 ►
It may simply be that there are no senders, and that we sense, we sense the bell medium,
00:43:55 ►
and the bell medium is now vibrating with catastrophe, or it may be that there is actually a sender.
00:44:09 ►
The reason I’m willing to entertain a sender is because so much of human history is revelation and so much of technology is the product of revelation
00:44:21 ►
including modern science itself.
00:44:26 ►
I mean, you know, I’ve told the story many times about how Rene Descartes,
00:44:32 ►
he was this 21-year-old guy hoaring and soldiering his way across Europe
00:44:39 ►
and participating, in fact, in the military operation that brought down the winter king and queen in Prague
00:44:47 ►
and destroyed the alchemical, the Rosicrucian Renaissance that was happening there.
00:44:54 ►
Well, then after that, that all happened in the spring and early summer of 1619.
00:45:03 ►
the spring and early summer of 1619,
00:45:08 ►
then that army retreated back across southern Germany.
00:45:12 ►
And I love the irony of this.
00:45:17 ►
On the evening of, I believe, August 18th,
00:45:20 ►
they reached the little town of Ulm.
00:45:22 ►
I’ve been there,
00:45:27 ►
nice cathedral railroad station, Germany, Ulm.
00:45:38 ►
Centuries in the future, Einstein would be born there. But this particular night in August, after a long evening of carousing and ribaldry at the local gas house, Descartes goes back to his billet
00:45:50 ►
and lies down and has a dream and an angel appears. And the angel says,
00:45:59 ►
the conquest of nature will be achieved through measurement and number that’s what the angel said he wrote it in his diary
00:46:11 ►
that is the founding moment of modern science de cart created empiricism Newton is following along right there they don’t tell you this
00:46:23 ►
when they give you the ordinary history of science,
00:46:26 ►
that it was founded by an angel. They don’t tell you that the benzene ring came to Kikula in a dream.
00:46:36 ►
The very ring that is embedded in the molecules we are so fond of.
00:46:43 ►
He fell asleep on a bus, right? He fell asleep on a bus, right?
00:46:47 ►
If you want to read about this,
00:46:48 ►
read Thomas Kearn’s book
00:46:50 ►
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
00:46:53 ►
and it shows you that the scientists
00:46:55 ►
always try to present their findings
00:46:58 ►
as a very rational argument,
00:47:00 ►
and then I moved from point A to B.
00:47:02 ►
This is all after the fact.
00:47:04 ►
That’s the pretty story you concoct to convince your colleagues.
00:47:10 ►
But these things actually arrive fully cooked in your face,
00:47:16 ►
and you just have to deal with it.
00:47:18 ►
And that could be interpreted as bell communication
00:47:22 ►
with some kind of central authority that is dropping clues,
00:47:27 ►
you know, now invent a phonetic alphabet, now movable type, now split the atom, now sequence DNA,
00:47:39 ►
now build computers, now, now, now, all leading toward this opportunity to step out of three-dimensional
00:47:49 ►
yes they’re trying to drop them as fast as they could yes they’re trying to drop them as fast as they
00:47:56 ►
could because there is a sense of urgency and the wonderful thing about this myth and I can
00:48:04 ►
think of it as a myth but one of the things I’m always
00:48:07 ►
puzzled by is, is it possible to redeem history? Is it possible to somehow horrible as it has been
00:48:17 ►
make it the best it could have possibly been? In other words, say, well, it was a mess, and a lot of
00:48:24 ►
people died, but it had to be
00:48:27 ►
this way and with something like this idea you see you know it wasn’t orderly evacuations never are
00:48:36 ►
and some people got trampled and some people got squashed because there was great haste over the past 32,000 years.
00:48:46 ►
We didn’t have time to unpack all this stuff and be at all times and in all places
00:48:54 ►
kind to each other. But if we reach the doorway one millisecond before the catastrophe reaches
00:49:02 ►
us, it will all be redeemed, and we will be heroes,
00:49:08 ►
and everybody who participated in the process
00:49:11 ►
will have played their role.
00:49:13 ►
It seems to me like the moment of this significance of it
00:49:17 ►
is at least in part based on our sort of collective assumption
00:49:23 ►
that there are certain materialist things
00:49:26 ►
that we all agree in
00:49:27 ►
and at root, in spite of non-locality
00:49:32 ►
and so forth, our
00:49:33 ►
intuitive materialist
00:49:35 ►
conceptions are what really matter.
00:49:38 ►
I remember six or eight years ago
00:49:40 ►
gave in this room and there was some spiritualist
00:49:43 ►
gal talking about the
00:49:45 ►
impending
00:49:46 ►
arrival
00:49:48 ►
of physical
00:49:50 ►
immortality
00:49:50 ►
on this planet
00:49:51 ►
and I can’t
00:49:53 ►
remember what a rap
00:49:54 ►
was how we were
00:49:55 ►
going to reach this
00:49:56 ►
stage because I was
00:49:57 ►
taken up with
00:49:58 ►
wondering about
00:49:59 ►
the assumption
00:50:00 ►
of whether that
00:50:01 ►
would actually be a
00:50:01 ►
good idea or not
00:50:02 ►
of what benefit
00:50:04 ►
would it be to me to or not, of what benefit would it be
00:50:05 ►
to me to indefinitely preserve me in this form? And it seems to me like if there is
00:50:12 ►
possibly some sort of end state, then this is more than anything else an invitation to begin
00:50:21 ►
to reconsider my constituent properties and set aside such notions as,
00:50:30 ►
well, I really do have a serious vested interest
00:50:34 ►
in keeping this thing fed
00:50:36 ►
and in all the different ways that it has to eat
00:50:40 ►
for as long as possible.
00:50:42 ►
I’m not at all sure why
00:50:45 ►
how I would go about
00:50:48 ►
benefiting as a person or a society
00:50:50 ►
member by some
00:50:52 ►
sort of extravagance that allowed
00:50:54 ►
me to escape
00:50:56 ►
the physical
00:50:58 ►
arrival of gamma rays
00:50:59 ►
from the solar system.
00:51:02 ►
Well, I don’t think it’s for your
00:51:04 ►
benefit.
00:51:10 ►
In other words, we can reach so exalted point of view that we say,
00:51:13 ►
whoa, it doesn’t matter.
00:51:16 ►
There are billions of galaxies.
00:51:18 ►
So what if life and intelligence is snuffed out
00:51:22 ►
in this galaxy?
00:51:24 ►
That’s a very broad-based view, but I think biology
00:51:30 ►
is unbelievably tenacious in hanging on to what it has achieved, and it doesn’t practice
00:51:37 ►
that kind of philosophy. It wants to survive. That’s how it’s persisted for 4.3 billion years.
00:51:47 ►
And if it persists, that’s the value it will maximize.
00:51:52 ►
So it wants to survive.
00:51:56 ►
And physical immortality might be a very uncomfortable and unpleasant situation.
00:52:02 ►
Physical non-immortality is a very unpleasant situation under some
00:52:08 ►
circumstances. It’s really not, I think, entirely for our benefit. I think we are like atoms
00:52:15 ►
in some enormous process that is taking place. You know, one idea that I’ve had, or other people have had it as well,
00:52:26 ►
is that if there are aliens,
00:52:29 ►
they don’t talk to people in trailer courts
00:52:32 ►
and to places like species are addressed.
00:52:37 ►
Aliens don’t talk to individuals.
00:52:40 ►
They talk to species,
00:52:42 ►
and they don’t say things like, you know, be vegetarian or something.
00:52:46 ►
They say things like now do language, now physics.
00:52:55 ►
Ultimately, everything is a mystery.
00:53:00 ►
And, you know, it’s good, after such an exalted, plodding journey toward explanation,
00:53:06 ►
to remember that nowhere is it writ in adamantine that higher apes should be able to divine cosmic purpose.
00:53:17 ►
I mean, why should they?
00:53:18 ►
We don’t inquire of the muscles down on the seashore or the ants busy up on the hill what their opinion is on all of this.
00:53:29 ►
And it may be that our opinions count approximately this much.
00:53:34 ►
I imagine if this scenario I laid out is anything close to fact that what wants to save itself is biology.
00:53:43 ►
And we’re simply a kind of specialized cell that can work at high temperatures or can code data.
00:53:52 ►
And so we’ve been deputized.
00:53:56 ►
Go back to the little story, I told.
00:53:59 ►
If the quasar had not ignited in the center of the galaxy, perhaps to this day we would be worshipping the great horned goddess
00:54:08 ►
and holding our lunar orgies and wandering across the plains of Africa,
00:54:14 ►
singing our songs and tattooing each other,
00:54:17 ►
and living in perfect happiness and harmony.
00:54:21 ►
But it’s as though a signal was sent,
00:54:24 ►
saying to the most advanced animal on this planet, saying, you know, you were it. We have a job for you. You know, knock off with the orgies, the cattle herding and all that. The long march to, you know, hyperspace is going to fall on your shoulders
00:54:48 ►
not for your salvation but for the salvation
00:54:52 ►
of everything because I’m sure we’re as expendable
00:54:56 ►
as any other species and as clueless as any other
00:55:02 ►
species but there is something is talking to us. We are special. We are haunted.
00:55:11 ►
We are, we have a friend and a companion of some strange sort. Could be God, could be extraterrestrials,
00:55:22 ►
could be the dear departed. We don’t know who it is.
00:55:26 ►
But unlike the birds and the bees, we have voices whispering mathematical formula in our dreams.
00:55:34 ►
The implicitness, though, is we are biology.
00:55:40 ►
And this has meaning if we allow that.
00:55:47 ►
It seems to me if we say we may be biology or we are in one dimension biological
00:55:52 ►
or we have a choice if we wanted to, we could go to biology.
00:55:57 ►
Any of these prospects open up other realms and basically suggest, well, smile at it comes.
00:56:11 ►
Well, the problem is that so much novelty will be lost, and the universe doesn’t like that.
00:56:20 ►
It wants to conserve novelty at all costs.
00:56:23 ►
That seems to be more important to it than conserving biology.
00:56:29 ►
It will sacrifice biology, if necessary, to save novelty.
00:56:36 ►
Novelty is the top of the value hierarchy, as I see it.
00:56:42 ►
And biology, culture, technology, all physics, all of these things are
00:56:50 ►
simply means to an end. Why the universe is interested in novelty? I don’t know. I have to almost
00:56:58 ►
go back to the Baltimore Catechism number two. Why did God make us? God made us to show forth
00:57:05 ►
his wisdom and glory.
00:57:07 ►
In other words, somehow
00:57:09 ►
the universe
00:57:11 ►
is in love with its own
00:57:13 ►
self-expression.
00:57:15 ►
It wants to
00:57:17 ►
express itself in every way possible.
00:57:20 ►
And when there is a process
00:57:21 ►
or a local situation
00:57:23 ►
that impedes or retards that, it designs itself around it.
00:57:31 ►
And I think this process will go on virtually forever in higher and higher dimensions impossible for us to conceive or imagine.
00:57:43 ►
I think that time extends infinitely into the past
00:57:47 ►
and infinitely into the future.
00:57:50 ►
But time in the presence of matter
00:57:53 ►
began 12 to 25 billion years ago
00:57:59 ►
and will end some time in the future,
00:58:03 ►
even the thermodynamicsists say that,
00:58:06 ►
and I say soon, because we have organized ourselves for a quantum leap.
00:58:15 ►
You know, it was Ilya Prigogian, the Belgian thermodynamicist who discovered and
00:58:22 ►
mathematicized the principle of order through fluctuation.
00:58:27 ►
Change is not slow and incremental.
00:58:31 ►
When change comes, it always has this quantized and unexpected dimension to it.
00:58:40 ►
And I think that’s just built in.
00:58:43 ►
So when it finally happens, you know, you’ll hardly know what hit you.
00:58:49 ►
Just like the appearance of life was very sudden.
00:58:54 ►
The appearance of language was very sudden.
00:58:58 ►
The emergence from the sea was very sudden.
00:59:03 ►
That seems to be how the business of change is done.
00:59:07 ►
Incrementalism is simply an illusion at large scale,
00:59:12 ►
but whenever you analyze any system into its constituent parts,
00:59:16 ►
you meet this quantized quality to change.
00:59:30 ►
I don’t really see a lot of evidence for it.
00:59:33 ►
I mean, in other words, people say,
00:59:35 ►
well, where did the Maya go?
00:59:37 ►
Well, they didn’t go anywhere.
00:59:39 ►
They’re all still there.
00:59:46 ►
15 million people speak Maya as a primary language in the Americas.
00:59:53 ►
What they did was they abandoned civilization.
00:59:56 ►
And why they did that, we don’t know.
01:00:01 ►
I mean, this is a very hot topic in Mesoamerican archaeology.
01:00:05 ►
It may be that there was a century of hurricanes,
01:00:09 ►
and they just could not sustain these city-states.
01:00:15 ►
It also may be, it was clearly a very steep social hierarchy,
01:00:20 ►
and it may be that a lot of people got sick and tired of working their asses off to support a few very pretentious rich people in their pursuit of poetry, city building, art, magic, and so forth.
01:00:32 ►
When I look at societies scattered through history that seem to me like they might be like the Maya,
01:00:40 ►
the civilization that always attracts my attention is Fujiwara Japan.
01:00:46 ►
You know, very strict codes of behavior, very strict class designations,
01:00:53 ►
a very cultured and civilized nobility,
01:00:57 ►
but operating on a platform of enormous cruelty.
01:01:05 ►
The Maya were a great blank slate
01:01:10 ►
for the New Age to project its fantasies upon.
01:01:15 ►
The only stumble there was,
01:01:18 ►
right in the middle of this orgy of fantasizing,
01:01:22 ►
a bunch of very smart people figured out how to read the Mayan
01:01:27 ►
writing and the suddenly the vision of these philosopher astronomers cultivating the
01:01:38 ►
jungle and living in perfect egalitarian peace was completely shattered I, the Maya were not like the Toltecs.
01:01:48 ►
They weren’t into wholesale blood sacrifice requiring thousands of deaths per day.
01:01:58 ►
But they definitely were tweaked in some fairly profound way.
01:02:04 ►
We now know that the central display in their religion
01:02:11 ►
were these genital bloodlettings by the royalty
01:02:16 ►
that were horrific.
01:02:19 ►
I mean, if you were a Mayan king,
01:02:21 ►
you know, the calendar is full of feast days
01:02:24 ►
and what you were expected
01:02:27 ►
to do to hold the society together was, first of all, take a lot of drugs, we’re not exactly
01:02:35 ►
sure what, but not simply including psilocybin, but probably solonaceous-based drugs.
01:02:42 ►
And then the kings would stand on top of these pyramids
01:02:51 ►
and in front of the people mutilate their genitals
01:02:55 ►
and sop up the blood on these special pieces of paper,
01:03:00 ►
which would then be ceremonially burned in front of the people
01:03:04 ►
in order to evoke
01:03:06 ►
invoke these ancestor spirits, which are appalling in the depiction.
01:03:13 ►
I mean, more horrifying than anything in the iconography of Mahayana Buddhism are these enormous
01:03:21 ►
ancestral snakes which rear up over the Lord or Lady in the depiction.
01:03:28 ►
And then out of that, out of the mouth of this enormous serpent is vomited, the ancestor,
01:03:35 ►
who is pretty weird looking too.
01:03:38 ►
And the whole thing looks pretty horrific.
01:03:42 ►
The queens, and the Maya did have queens, especially at Palenke, women were able to command
01:03:50 ►
great power, and this is a whole complicated issue that we don’t have time to talk about,
01:03:55 ►
but it was very interesting.
01:03:57 ►
The queens did not mutilate their genitals, but the equivalent ceremony was they would braid these ropes around a certain kind of vine which has very sharp thorns in it.
01:04:17 ►
And then the queens would pierce their tongues and draw these ropes through them.
01:04:24 ►
And then the blood would be spat onto these
01:04:27 ►
pieces of bark paper and burned in front of the yeah it’s ordeal is one way to enter into
01:04:37 ►
an altered state so the the Maya are a paradox.
01:04:45 ►
I think that what we need to learn from them,
01:04:48 ►
that they don’t offer a model for how we should live.
01:04:52 ►
They offer a model for how we should not live.
01:04:55 ►
Many people think that what undid them
01:04:58 ►
was that they destroyed their ecosystem.
01:05:03 ►
The populations of these cities at the end of the classic were huge.
01:05:10 ►
Palenke had a population of 120,000 people.
01:05:14 ►
Tikal had four times that many people,
01:05:18 ►
and they were cutting the forests for charcoal,
01:05:22 ►
and they were polluting their water supply.
01:05:28 ►
From the mid-classic hiatus on, even the royal skeletons show signs of nutritional deficiency.
01:05:38 ►
So it looks like they, in a sense, were a microcosm of our civilization they were ruled by abstractions we can’t even
01:05:48 ►
imagine and we’re ruled by the same kinds of abstractions and they destroyed their environment
01:05:55 ►
and eventually there was essentially I think a slave revolt and people just they killed the
01:06:04 ►
database the database of the culture was held among so few
01:06:09 ►
people that you could, by killing 5% of the population, the ruling class, you completely
01:06:18 ►
broke your connection. This probably also happened in Vedic civilization. You know, one of the
01:06:24 ►
real problems in that area is they had this fantastic intoxicant soma sounds like as good as anything we’ve got.
01:06:35 ►
The entire Rig Veda is about Soma and how wonderful it is, 95 hymns to Soma, greater than Indra, pillar of the sky, Soma, and then they lost it.
01:06:50 ►
Well, how the hell can you lose such a central mystery, such a central piston in the engine of your civilization?
01:06:58 ►
Well, the only way you can lose something like that is if the knowledge was very closely held by a tiny group of people
01:07:06 ►
who could be exterminated either by an epidemic or by a slave uprising or something like that and
01:07:14 ►
then nobody understands how it works an interesting thing about the Maya collapse was
01:07:21 ►
we can trace it not only in time but in space because whatever was happening
01:07:29 ►
in these city states the people would push over the date stila as they abandoned the city so as
01:07:39 ►
these cities fell into chaos and disease and became an anarchy spread, the dated stila would be pushed
01:07:48 ►
over face down into the jungle. And by looking at these stila and the last dates carved,
01:07:56 ►
we can see what happened. It began at Copan, which is now in Honduras. That was their
01:08:04 ►
Alexandria. If Tikal was their Rome and Palen, that was their Alexandria.
01:08:06 ►
If Tikal was their Rome and Palenque was their Athens,
01:08:11 ►
then Copan was their Alexandria,
01:08:15 ►
it was where the advanced astronomy and mathematics was happening.
01:08:19 ►
And around AD 760, things went haywire there,
01:08:27 ►
and it took about 100 years to reach the outer fringes of the empire.
01:08:34 ►
The last long-count date in existence was carved on a stila at Tonina behind Palenca,
01:08:43 ►
Mastila at Tonina behind Palanke, a hundred and twenty years after the collapse at Coppana.
01:08:50 ►
And then these people just returned to the rainforest.
01:08:54 ►
I mean, they had an archaic revival with a vengeance down there.
01:08:59 ►
Well, this is a tough question.
01:09:02 ►
I mean, it’s almost like a touring machine question.
01:09:06 ►
You all know what the Turing test is.
01:09:09 ►
Turing test is, it was Alan Turing was a cyberneticist.
01:09:15 ►
And the Turing test is how do you tell whether you have a telephone?
01:09:22 ►
And how do you tell whether the person on the other end
01:09:26 ►
is a human being or a machine?
01:09:29 ►
If you can’t tell,
01:09:32 ►
then whosoever on the other end has passed the touring test.
01:09:36 ►
And this is a real thing.
01:09:38 ►
It’s not an idea.
01:09:39 ►
They have a contest every year
01:09:43 ►
and in which experts talk to somebody
01:09:48 ►
and you can ask any question.
01:09:52 ►
Actually, now I think you’re restricted
01:09:54 ►
in the rules of the contest
01:09:55 ►
that the subject is set.
01:09:58 ►
And then everybody votes.
01:10:00 ►
Well, at some point in the future,
01:10:03 ►
it will fail and we won’t be able to tell.
01:10:06 ►
I, you know, aliens are very interesting.
01:10:09 ►
I don’t know if they exist in 3D, but they certainly exist in mind space.
01:10:15 ►
And the hardest thing to figure out is, am I talking to myself or not?
01:10:22 ►
And it’s a deep philosophical and logical problem I mean try to
01:10:28 ►
imagine that you’re talking to somebody on the telephone and you’re trying to
01:10:33 ►
imagine a way to trap them through conversation into revealing whether they
01:10:39 ►
are not you but somebody else and it’s never been really satisfactorily settled.
01:10:47 ►
I don’t know what to make of all that.
01:10:51 ►
I mean, I certainly have experienced plenty of alien communication.
01:10:57 ►
I don’t like aliens who have homicidal or sexually perverse
01:11:03 ►
or silly things on their mind.
01:11:10 ►
And that’s what I hold against the aliens of communion land and all that.
01:11:18 ►
They just seem to, it’s an aesthetic call.
01:11:22 ►
And often in the touring test, aesthetics is all you have left.
01:11:25 ►
And to my mind, those aliens are hokey, and therefore not to be taken seriously.
01:11:33 ►
And we’re now over time, but I’ll just say one more thing on this subject,
01:11:38 ►
because it’s the best advice anybody ever gave me.
01:11:41 ►
I was a flying saucer, enthusiast and all these things, but always from
01:11:45 ►
a rational, you know, wanting to know,
01:11:48 ►
what’s, is it real? What’s going on?
01:11:50 ►
If somebody comes to you
01:11:52 ►
with an anomaly,
01:11:54 ►
Bigfoot,
01:11:56 ►
Loch Ness monster,
01:11:58 ►
flying saucer, alien
01:12:00 ►
abduction, face on Mars,
01:12:03 ►
channeling, you name it.
01:12:07 ►
Don’t get caught up in the logic of it or the factualness of it.
01:12:13 ►
The thing to concentrate on is the personality, past history, and integrity of the messenger.
01:12:23 ►
In nearly every case,
01:12:25 ►
10 minutes of that will settle the issue.
01:12:28 ►
If the messenger has previous convictions for car theft
01:12:34 ►
or has spent time in a mental hospital
01:12:37 ►
or was previously with another group
01:12:40 ►
believing something completely the opposite
01:12:42 ►
or can’t meet your gaze, or uses drugs
01:12:48 ►
that you haven’t used, then it is reasonable to proceed with great caution. I mean, that doesn’t
01:13:00 ►
mean you should blow them out of the water but I it is never fails that the people
01:13:07 ►
who bring the message are flawed in some horrible horrible way and you can apply that to me
01:13:15 ►
because I I am not interested in selling a line here I’m interested in triggering
01:13:24 ►
self-reflective and analytical thought. I believe I said
01:13:29 ►
last night or sometime recently, the truth need not be defended. You don’t have to genuflect
01:13:38 ►
before it. The truth can handle your attack, believe me. The truth can handle any pressure you can bring to bear on it.
01:13:49 ►
So, you know, people are selling all kinds of ideas,
01:13:52 ►
and I’m spieling out these ideas.
01:13:55 ►
You’d be a fool to believe any of this.
01:13:57 ►
You’re tossing away your freedom for a story somebody tells you.
01:14:03 ►
But learn the rules of evidence. Learn what the how somebody tells you. But learn the rules of evidence,
01:14:06 ►
learn what the,
01:14:08 ►
how you tell shit from Shinola.
01:14:11 ►
That’s all.
01:14:12 ►
And then you can move among all these vendors
01:14:16 ►
in the ideological marketplace
01:14:18 ►
and make your decision about
01:14:21 ►
what is quality goods
01:14:22 ►
and what is in fact
01:14:24 ►
ersatz.
01:14:27 ►
And that’s, I’m absolutely convinced, the shortest path to freedom and understanding.
01:14:35 ►
And my method is scientific.
01:14:38 ►
I may, I am radical and I am willing to entertain hypotheses that most scientists wouldn’t but the effort is always
01:14:48 ►
to smash it not to make converts but to have somebody come forward from the crowd and say you know I didn’t
01:14:57 ►
want to say this with everybody in the room but you’re just full of shit did you know that what you
01:15:03 ►
said was is not true and that in fact it’s this way and
01:15:06 ►
this way and this way? I’ve been waiting for 25 years for somebody to poke holes and I’m still
01:15:12 ►
waiting and I want that to happen because I want to know the truth. The truth is more important
01:15:20 ►
than anybody’s opinion or myth or story or hope or fear about how the universe is put together.
01:15:30 ►
But we seek the truth by formulating hypotheses creatively and valiantly, and then by leaning into them with every tool and resource at our disposal.
01:15:47 ►
And when we do that, we’re not going to come out to far wrong
01:15:52 ►
from as much as can be known at the moment
01:15:56 ►
concerning whatever it is we’re looking at.
01:16:00 ►
As the church lady on Saturday Night Live would have said,
01:16:05 ►
now isn’t that interesting?
01:16:06 ►
But before we begin a journey to look into this new idea of Terrances,
01:16:11 ►
just a little further anyway,
01:16:13 ►
it may be good to remember the words that he used in the beginning.
01:16:17 ►
So here is a story.
01:16:21 ►
This is not true.
01:16:23 ►
I don’t believe this.
01:16:30 ►
You shouldn’t believe this. But here is a story.
01:16:37 ►
However, we should also remember that near the end of this talk, he also said, and I quote,
01:16:43 ►
I’m not interested in selling a line here. I’m interested in triggering self-reflective and analytical thought, end quote.
01:16:46 ►
So, in the interest of not trying too hard to push these ideas any further uphill, I’m going
01:16:52 ►
to do my best to refrain from commenting on what Terrence said about 20 minutes into this talk.
01:16:58 ►
But do you remember him saying that only a non-biological life form could survive a quaser
01:17:04 ►
blast like the one he was describing.
01:17:06 ►
He then went on to say,
01:17:08 ►
Downloading ourselves into machines may be the only way out.
01:17:12 ►
Now, what do you think that could mean today?
01:17:15 ►
I’ve listened to this recording twice now,
01:17:17 ►
and while the big event that Terrence was talking about back then was the 2012 event,
01:17:22 ►
which actually turned out to be a non-event,
01:17:26 ►
of course it could be argued that he was also foretelling the advent of artificial intelligence, even though it
01:17:31 ►
wasn’t remotely in the news back then. Now, if you’re interested, listen to it again and
01:17:36 ►
spend a little time thinking about the hunch that Terence must have had in order to believe
01:17:41 ►
that we should escape the planet by uploading ourselves into some sort of a machine.
01:17:47 ►
I know that he said download, but in my opinion he got it backwards.
01:17:51 ►
Also, it would be fun to further explore his idea that aliens don’t talk to individuals.
01:17:57 ►
They talk to species, giving them language and other such things.
01:18:01 ►
Actually, there were several other new ideas here that I don’t remember hearing him say in some of the later workshops.
01:18:08 ►
And while I’d like to explore all of this a bit more, I’ll save it for one of our live salons where we can
01:18:14 ►
ignore Terrence’s warning to not take these ideas seriously.
01:18:18 ►
So now it’s your turn to explore some of these new thoughts that Terrence has once again triggered in us.
01:18:25 ►
Until next time, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:18:30 ►
Namaste, my friends.