[00:00:00 - 00:00:03]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:03 - 00:00:06]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:06 - 00:00:10]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:10 - 00:00:13]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:13 - 00:00:17]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:17 - 00:00:20]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:20 - 00:00:24]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:24 - 00:00:27]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:27 - 00:00:31]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:31 - 00:00:34]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:01:00 - 00:01:02]	 Hello.
[00:01:02 - 00:01:03]	 All right.
[00:01:03 - 00:01:14]	 Have you ever noticed how there's
[00:01:14 - 00:01:25]	 this quality to reality which comes and goes and kind of ebbs
[00:01:25 - 00:01:27]	 and flows.
[00:01:27 - 00:01:32]	 And nobody ever mentions it or has a name for it,
[00:01:32 - 00:01:37]	 except some people call it bad hair day.
[00:01:37 - 00:01:42]	 Or some people say things are really weird recently.
[00:01:42 - 00:01:50]	 And I think we never notice it and we never talk about it
[00:01:50 - 00:01:55]	 because we're embedded in a culture that
[00:01:55 - 00:02:01]	 expects us to believe that all times are the same
[00:02:01 - 00:02:09]	 and that your bank account doesn't fluctuate except
[00:02:09 - 00:02:16]	 according to the vicissitudes of your own existence.
[00:02:16 - 00:02:21]	 In other words, every moment is expected to be the same.
[00:02:21 - 00:02:26]	 And yet, this isn't what we experience.
[00:02:26 - 00:02:33]	 And so what I noticed was that running through reality
[00:02:33 - 00:02:38]	 is the ebb and flow of novelty.
[00:02:38 - 00:02:43]	 And some days and some years and some centuries
[00:02:43 - 00:02:46]	 are very novel indeed.
[00:02:46 - 00:02:48]	 And some ain't.
[00:02:48 - 00:02:52]	 And they come and go on all scales differently,
[00:02:52 - 00:02:56]	 interweaving resonantly.
[00:02:56 - 00:03:02]	 And this is what time seems to be.
[00:03:02 - 00:03:11]	 And science has overlooked this, this most salient of facts
[00:03:11 - 00:03:18]	 about nature, that nature is a novelty
[00:03:18 - 00:03:21]	 conserving engine.
[00:03:21 - 00:03:26]	 And that from the very first moments
[00:03:26 - 00:03:31]	 of that most improbable Big Bang,
[00:03:31 - 00:03:37]	 novelty has been conserved.
[00:03:37 - 00:03:42]	 Because in the very beginning, there
[00:03:42 - 00:03:48]	 was only an ocean of energy pouring into the universe.
[00:03:48 - 00:03:54]	 There were no planets, no stars, no molecules, no atoms,
[00:03:54 - 00:03:56]	 no magnetic fields.
[00:03:56 - 00:04:02]	 There was only an ocean of free electrons.
[00:04:02 - 00:04:09]	 And then time passed, and the universe cooled.
[00:04:09 - 00:04:18]	 And novel structures crystallized out of disorder.
[00:04:18 - 00:04:27]	 First, atoms, atoms of hydrogen and helium
[00:04:27 - 00:04:31]	 aggregating into stars.
[00:04:31 - 00:04:34]	 And at the center of those stars,
[00:04:34 - 00:04:39]	 the temperature and the pressure created something
[00:04:39 - 00:04:43]	 which had never been seen before, which was fusion.
[00:04:43 - 00:04:48]	 And fusion cooking in the hearts of stars
[00:04:48 - 00:04:54]	 brought forth more novelty, heavy elements, iron, carbon,
[00:04:54 - 00:04:57]	 four-valent carbon.
[00:04:57 - 00:05:03]	 And as time passed, there were not only then
[00:05:03 - 00:05:09]	 elemental systems, but because of the presence of carbon
[00:05:09 - 00:05:11]	 and the lower temperatures in the universe,
[00:05:11 - 00:05:14]	 molecular structures.
[00:05:14 - 00:05:24]	 And out of molecules come simple subsets of organisms,
[00:05:24 - 00:05:29]	 the genetic machinery for transcribing information,
[00:05:29 - 00:05:36]	 aggregating into membranes, always binding novelty,
[00:05:36 - 00:05:44]	 always condensing time, always building and conserving
[00:05:44 - 00:05:53]	 upon complexity, and always faster and faster and faster.
[00:05:53 - 00:05:59]	 And then we come to ourselves.
[00:05:59 - 00:06:04]	 And where do we fit in to all of this?
[00:06:04 - 00:06:11]	 Five million years ago, we were an animal of some sort.
[00:06:11 - 00:06:17]	 Where will we be five million years from tonight?
[00:06:17 - 00:06:27]	 What we represent is not a sideshow or an epiphenomenon
[00:06:27 - 00:06:33]	 or an ancillary something or other on the edge of nowhere.
[00:06:33 - 00:06:41]	 What we represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty
[00:06:41 - 00:06:45]	 that has been moving itself together,
[00:06:45 - 00:06:51]	 complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself
[00:06:51 - 00:06:55]	 for billions and billions of years.
[00:06:55 - 00:07:00]	 There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced
[00:07:00 - 00:07:03]	 than what is sitting behind your eyes.
[00:07:03 - 00:07:07]	 The human neocortex is the most densely
[00:07:07 - 00:07:10]	 ramified and complexified structure
[00:07:10 - 00:07:12]	 in the known universe.
[00:07:12 - 00:07:18]	 We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation
[00:07:18 - 00:07:22]	 of matter in this cosmos.
[00:07:22 - 00:07:27]	 And this has been going on for a while
[00:07:27 - 00:07:34]	 since the discovery of fire, since the discovery
[00:07:34 - 00:07:37]	 of language.
[00:07:37 - 00:07:44]	 But now, and by now, I mean for the last 10,000 years,
[00:07:44 - 00:07:48]	 we've been into something new.
[00:07:48 - 00:07:55]	 Not genetic information, not genetic mutation,
[00:07:55 - 00:08:01]	 not natural selection, but epigenetic activity, writing,
[00:08:01 - 00:08:06]	 theater, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body
[00:08:06 - 00:08:09]	 piercing, and philosophy.
[00:08:09 - 00:08:14]	 And these things have accelerated the ingression
[00:08:14 - 00:08:21]	 into novelty so that we have become an idea excreting force
[00:08:21 - 00:08:28]	 in nature that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines,
[00:08:28 - 00:08:33]	 social engines, plans, and spreads over the Earth
[00:08:33 - 00:08:37]	 into space, into the microphysical domain,
[00:08:37 - 00:08:40]	 into the macrophysical domain.
[00:08:40 - 00:08:45]	 We, who five million years ago were animals,
[00:08:45 - 00:08:50]	 can kindle in our deserts and, if necessary,
[00:08:50 - 00:08:54]	 upon the cities of our enemies the very energy which
[00:08:54 - 00:08:58]	 lights the stars at night.
[00:08:58 - 00:09:03]	 Now, something peculiar is going on here.
[00:09:03 - 00:09:09]	 Something is calling us out of nature
[00:09:09 - 00:09:14]	 and sculpting us in its own image.
[00:09:14 - 00:09:19]	 And the confrontation with this something
[00:09:19 - 00:09:22]	 is now not so far away.
[00:09:22 - 00:09:28]	 This is what the impending apparent end of everything
[00:09:28 - 00:09:30]	 actually means.
[00:09:30 - 00:09:35]	 It means that the denouement of human history
[00:09:35 - 00:09:40]	 is about to occur and is about to be revealed
[00:09:40 - 00:09:46]	 as a universal process of compressing and expressing
[00:09:46 - 00:09:52]	 novelty that is now going to become so intensified that it
[00:09:52 - 00:09:57]	 is going to flow over into another dimension.
[00:09:57 - 00:10:07]	 You can feel it.
[00:10:07 - 00:10:15]	 You can feel it in your own dreams.
[00:10:15 - 00:10:19]	 You can feel it in your own trips.
[00:10:19 - 00:10:24]	 You can feel that we're approaching
[00:10:24 - 00:10:30]	 the cusp of a catastrophe and that beyond that cusp
[00:10:30 - 00:10:36]	 we are unrecognizable to ourselves.
[00:10:36 - 00:10:41]	 The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken
[00:10:41 - 00:10:47]	 since the birth of the universe has now focused and coalesced
[00:10:47 - 00:10:51]	 itself in our species.
[00:10:51 - 00:10:56]	 And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is
[00:10:56 - 00:11:02]	 about to transform itself, then think of it this way.
[00:11:02 - 00:11:09]	 Think of a pond and think of how if the surface of the pond
[00:11:09 - 00:11:15]	 begins to boil, that's the signal that some enormous protean
[00:11:15 - 00:11:20]	 form is about to break the surface of the pond
[00:11:20 - 00:11:22]	 and reveal itself.
[00:11:22 - 00:11:29]	 Human history is the boiling of the pond surface
[00:11:29 - 00:11:31]	 of ordinary biology.
[00:11:31 - 00:11:35]	 We are flesh which has been caught
[00:11:35 - 00:11:39]	 in the grip of some kind of an attractor that
[00:11:39 - 00:11:44]	 lies ahead of us in time and that is sculpting us
[00:11:44 - 00:11:50]	 to its ends, speaking to us through psychedelics,
[00:11:50 - 00:11:55]	 through visions, through culture and technology.
[00:11:55 - 00:12:00]	 Consciousness, the language forming capacity in our species
[00:12:00 - 00:12:04]	 is propelling itself forward as though we're
[00:12:04 - 00:12:09]	 going to shed the monkey body and leap
[00:12:09 - 00:12:14]	 into some extra surreal space that surrounds us
[00:12:14 - 00:12:17]	 but that we cannot currently see.
[00:12:17 - 00:12:22]	 Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF,
[00:12:22 - 00:12:27]	 you name it, they know that the history is ending.
[00:12:27 - 00:12:31]	 They know by the reports which cross their desks
[00:12:31 - 00:12:36]	 that the disappearance of the ozone hole,
[00:12:36 - 00:12:40]	 the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rainforest,
[00:12:40 - 00:12:44]	 what this means is that the womb of the planet
[00:12:44 - 00:12:50]	 has reached its finite limits and that the human species has
[00:12:50 - 00:12:59]	 now, without choice, begun the descent down the birth canal
[00:12:59 - 00:13:04]	 of collective transformation toward something
[00:13:04 - 00:13:12]	 right around the corner and nearly completely unimaginable.
[00:13:12 - 00:13:16]	 And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes in
[00:13:16 - 00:13:19]	 because I believe that what we really
[00:13:19 - 00:13:26]	 contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace.
[00:13:26 - 00:13:30]	 And from that hyperspace, we look down on--
[00:13:30 - 00:13:40]	 we look down on both the past and the future
[00:13:40 - 00:13:42]	 and we anticipate the end.
[00:13:42 - 00:13:47]	 And a shaman is someone who has seen the end
[00:13:47 - 00:13:50]	 and therefore is a trickster because you don't
[00:13:50 - 00:13:52]	 worry if you've seen the end.
[00:13:52 - 00:13:55]	 If you know how it comes out, you go back
[00:13:55 - 00:13:58]	 and you take your place in the play
[00:13:58 - 00:14:02]	 and you let it all roll on without anxiety.
[00:14:02 - 00:14:05]	 This is what boundary dissolution means.
[00:14:05 - 00:14:10]	 It means nothing less than the anticipation of the end
[00:14:10 - 00:14:16]	 state of human history, a return to the archaic mode,
[00:14:16 - 00:14:20]	 a rediscovery of the orgiastic freedom of the African
[00:14:20 - 00:14:26]	 grasslands of 20,000 years ago, a techno escape forward
[00:14:26 - 00:14:31]	 into a future that looks more like the past than the future
[00:14:31 - 00:14:37]	 because materialism, consumerism, product fetishism,
[00:14:37 - 00:14:40]	 all of these things will be eliminated
[00:14:40 - 00:14:44]	 and technology will become nanotechnology
[00:14:44 - 00:14:48]	 and disappear from our physical presence.
[00:14:48 - 00:14:54]	 If we have the dream, if we allow the wave of novelty
[00:14:54 - 00:14:58]	 to propel us toward the creativity that
[00:14:58 - 00:15:01]	 is inimical to the human condition,
[00:15:01 - 00:15:05]	 this is what we're talking about here, psychedelics
[00:15:05 - 00:15:09]	 as a catalyst to the human imagination,
[00:15:09 - 00:15:14]	 psychedelics as a catalyst for language
[00:15:14 - 00:15:19]	 because what cannot be said cannot be created
[00:15:19 - 00:15:21]	 by the community.
[00:15:21 - 00:15:27]	 So what we need then is the forced evolution of language.
[00:15:27 - 00:15:30]	 And the way to do that is to go back
[00:15:30 - 00:15:33]	 to the agents that created language
[00:15:33 - 00:15:35]	 in the very first place.
[00:15:35 - 00:15:40]	 And that means the psychedelic plants, the Gaian logos,
[00:15:40 - 00:15:44]	 and the mysterious beckoning extraterrestrial minds
[00:15:44 - 00:15:48]	 beyond, hooking ourselves back up
[00:15:48 - 00:15:53]	 into the chakras of the hierarchy of nature,
[00:15:53 - 00:15:58]	 turning ourselves over to the mind of the total other that
[00:15:58 - 00:16:03]	 created us and brought us forth out of animal organization.
[00:16:03 - 00:16:08]	 We are somehow part of the planetary destiny.
[00:16:08 - 00:16:13]	 How well we do determines how well the experiment of life
[00:16:13 - 00:16:18]	 on Earth does because we have become the cutting
[00:16:18 - 00:16:20]	 edge of that experiment.
[00:16:20 - 00:16:26]	 We define it, and we hold in our hands the power
[00:16:26 - 00:16:29]	 to make or to break it.
[00:16:29 - 00:16:32]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:16:32 - 00:16:44]	 This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse.
[00:16:44 - 00:16:48]	 This is not a pseudo-millennium.
[00:16:48 - 00:16:50]	 This is the real thing, folks.
[00:16:50 - 00:16:52]	 This is not a test.
[00:16:52 - 00:17:01]	 This is the last chance before things become so dissipated
[00:17:01 - 00:17:04]	 that there is no chance for cohesiveness.
[00:17:04 - 00:17:07]	 We can use the calendar as a club.
[00:17:07 - 00:17:11]	 We can make the millennium an occasion
[00:17:11 - 00:17:15]	 for establishing an authentic human civilization,
[00:17:15 - 00:17:18]	 overcoming the dominator paradigm,
[00:17:18 - 00:17:22]	 dissolving boundaries through psychedelics,
[00:17:22 - 00:17:27]	 recreating a sexuality not based on monotheism, monogamy,
[00:17:27 - 00:17:28]	 and monotony.
[00:17:28 - 00:17:38]	 All these things are possible if we
[00:17:38 - 00:17:43]	 can understand the overarching metaphor which
[00:17:43 - 00:17:47]	 holds it all together, which is the celebration of mind
[00:17:47 - 00:17:53]	 as play, the celebration of love as a genuine social value
[00:17:53 - 00:17:55]	 in the community.
[00:17:55 - 00:17:58]	 This is what they have suppressed so long.
[00:17:58 - 00:18:02]	 This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics,
[00:18:02 - 00:18:05]	 because they understand that once you
[00:18:05 - 00:18:10]	 touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being,
[00:18:10 - 00:18:15]	 you can't be led into thing fetishism and consumerism.
[00:18:15 - 00:18:18]	 The message of psychedelics is that culture
[00:18:18 - 00:18:23]	 can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values
[00:18:23 - 00:18:25]	 rather than products.
[00:18:25 - 00:18:28]	 This is terrifying news.
[00:18:28 - 00:18:34]	 And if we are able to make this point, then we can pull back.
[00:18:34 - 00:18:37]	 We can pull back, and we can transcend.
[00:18:37 - 00:18:41]	 Nine times in the last million years,
[00:18:41 - 00:18:46]	 the ice has ground south from the poles,
[00:18:46 - 00:18:49]	 pushing human populations ahead of it.
[00:18:49 - 00:18:52]	 And those people didn't fuck up.
[00:18:52 - 00:18:54]	 Why should we then?
[00:18:54 - 00:18:56]	 We are all survivors.
[00:18:56 - 00:19:01]	 We are the inheritors of a million years of striving
[00:19:01 - 00:19:03]	 for the unspeakable.
[00:19:03 - 00:19:07]	 And now, with the engines of technology in our hands,
[00:19:07 - 00:19:11]	 we ought to be able to reach out and actually
[00:19:11 - 00:19:16]	 exteriorize the human soul at the end of time,
[00:19:16 - 00:19:20]	 invoke it into existence like a UFO,
[00:19:20 - 00:19:24]	 and open the violet doorway into hyperspace,
[00:19:24 - 00:19:28]	 and walk through it out of profane history
[00:19:28 - 00:19:33]	 and into the world beyond the grave, beyond shamanism,
[00:19:33 - 00:19:38]	 beyond the end of history, into the galactic millennium that
[00:19:38 - 00:19:44]	 has beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time.
[00:19:44 - 00:19:46]	 This is the moment.
[00:19:46 - 00:19:51]	 A planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once
[00:19:51 - 00:19:52]	 in its lifetime.
[00:19:52 - 00:19:56]	 And we are ready, and we are poised.
[00:19:56 - 00:20:01]	 And as a community, we are ready to move into it, to claim it,
[00:20:01 - 00:20:03]	 to make it our own.
[00:20:03 - 00:20:05]	 It's there.
[00:20:05 - 00:20:06]	 Go for it.
[00:20:06 - 00:20:08]	 And thank you.
[00:20:09 - 00:20:12]	 [HOWLING]
[00:20:12 - 00:20:15]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:20:15 - 00:20:19]	 [HOWLING]
[00:20:20 - 00:20:23]	 [HOWLING]
[00:20:24 - 00:20:28]	 [HOWLING]
[00:20:28 - 00:20:53]	 [APPLAUSE]
[00:20:54 - 00:20:57]	 [CHEERING]
[00:20:57 - 00:21:01]	 [APPLAUSE]
[00:21:01 - 00:21:04]	 [APPLAUSE]
[00:21:04 - 00:21:06]	 (applause)