Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon. So how's this season coming along? If you live in the northern hemisphere I hope you're keeping warm but if you live down under I already know how your summer is going. It's going very hot from what I hear and since these podcasts reach fellow salonners in over a hundred countries and in almost every weather pattern on earth I guess I have to say to all of our fellow salonners stay warm, stay cool and I'm glad the weather is perfect where you are. I guess that should cover most bases huh? Now let's get on with today's program. Two weeks ago I played the first of two cassette tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned to me. They were recordings of a private trialogue between him and Terrence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake and unless like me you are interested in history, particularly the history of the Internet, you may not find today's talk all to your liking because it took place 15 years ago and dealt with this newfangled thing called the World Wide Web. The recording was made at Terrence's home on the Big Island of Hawaii and at the time he still wasn't connected to the Internet there. However it does sound like Terrence was very much up to speed on the potential of the Net and Ralph as we all know has been at the forefront of the evolution of the Net since long before the web was invented. However as you will hear Rupert wasn't all that convinced that people would actually contribute content to the web unless they were getting paid for it. Of course today Rupert also provides a lot of free content on the web. What a difference a few years make huh? And just so you know I edited out a lot of the beginning of this recording because it was mainly Ralph Abraham describing to Rupert what the Internet was. The date was sometime in 1994 which means that the World Wide Web was less than two years old at the time, although the Internet itself was around 25 years old by then and Ralph's description of and enthusiasm for the web when it was still in such a primitive state marks him as one of its earliest prominent proponents and I have to say that his foresight was truly amazing. When you hear Ralph winding up his introduction by saying that there are already tens of thousands of people creating web pages on the Internet, think about where we are today with tens of millions of people pouring their creativity into the web every hour of every day of the year. So where were you back in 1994? Were you already connected to the net and up to speed with where Ralph already was at the time? Just keep in mind that the World Wide Web was less than two years old when this conversation was held and most of us were, if we were connecting to it at all, we're connecting to it through 1,500 baud modems and that was the world that these three amigos were living in when they had this little conversation in Hawaii. And that means there are tens of thousands of people essentially devoting all of their waking hours for creative works for which there is no return except the joy of creativity. We have a region of absolutely unbridled, unrestricted creativity on a scale that boggles the mind, a scale never before seen and what are people doing? Why are they doing this? It's all because I think that people involved in this feel, as I feel, a unique window of opportunity for the creation of a new future. So that brings me to my particular focus for our conversation on the World Wide Web. This seems to me and to other people who are careful observers of the scene, that the miracle for which we've been waiting, the Aquarian conspiracy, the descent of the supermind, the Omega Point and so on, is actually happening now. The Internet is the physical substrate or the aphysical substrate as it were for the creation of a new future and of all the people who have predicted this event in some detail in the past, the one that impressed me the most for understanding what's actually happening now is Teilhard de Chardin's concept that he began publishing in 1924, mostly in Saint-Rigues until 1954 when his first book was published posthumously, "The Phenomenon of Man." There he described the World Wide Web without using these terms, without any reference to an electronic aphysical substrate, described in great detail what I think is happening in a metaphor. Now I would use the metaphor of the neural net. The neural net is kind of an abstraction of neurophysiology concepts, where the individual souls in the picture of Teilhard de Chardin are the nodes of a neural net and they're connected by links and his vision of the Omega Point was a process taking up to 500 years in which the quality of the links between the individual nodes and the number of links between the individual nodes suddenly began to grow substantially in a kind of a paranormal phenomenon. If not telepathy then intuition or just sensitivity, consideration, love or something would amplify the strength of the connection between different minds and souls and so on. And in this neural net analog picture would be created the supermind, the noosphere and so on. This is the process that he called "Noah Genesis." So I believe that the World Wide Web is as a matter of fact the Noah Genesis of the noosphere of the future. This is it. Now what's happening, what could happen, I mean there's a spectrum of possibilities. The cessation of this creative activity within the internet, which is the self-organization of new reality, is not one of the possibilities for the future that I imagine. The creation of this thing is going forward. Everybody in the world will be connected to it. Anybody who has a television or a telephone for example will automatically be connected to this without them asking or doing anything. There it is. It may have a fee or may not have a fee. These are among the spectrum of possibilities for the future. So that's an idea what the World Wide Web is about and how I see it as an opportunity to amplify, create, trigger, participate in the spiritual revolution. All what we've talked about, the motivation for a lot of our books, writing, speaking and so on. Suddenly this, our opportunities in ordinary media pale in comparison with the opportunity presented us if we choose to take it. On the internet in the form of this World Wide Web on the physician ship level 4. Well it's very interesting. I love hearing you talk about it because your enthusiasm is infectious. I mean it's the kind of ultimate technophilia that we've embraced here. God as computer. I agree completely. I think this is the compressions we've been waiting for. This is the outer shell of the Omega point that history has been moving toward. The implications are mind-boggling and difficult to discern. Is this biology preparing to shed itself and de-camp into another dimension? Isn't it interesting that it is ultimately wires, bolts, electrons, but its profits and its adherents reach for the language of theology to describe what is happening. This is nothing less than the manifestation of the incorporeal body of God in human society. It is the end of history as far as I can see. We've been talking since the 60s about boundary dissolution, interconnectivity, so forth and so on. Assuming these things would arise in pharmacological clothing, but it appears that this is a very powerful practical competitor for that. It is disturbing, you put your finger on it, the absence of the feminine. I wonder if perhaps the first world wide web was 100% female and has existed for millennia and that in a sense that the engineering mentality is doing is simply hardwiring the information. Yeah, bringing the guys up to speed and introducing them to the reality of boundaryless communication, empathy, a sense of wholeness, completion, so forth and so on. So you think we should call it the second web? The men's web. Sort of a duel of the second sex. Yes, women have always spun and moved in these webs and now men are in the process of being feminized are learning this trick but implementing it in the way they know best, which is through technique. I just cannot see the edges of this. I think you're right that the thing we have caroled that seems so unlikely, that seemed in fact to require, and no puns intended, a day of sex mockery. The day of sex mockery is now with us and what's wonderful is that it cuts down no forests, it creates no new slums, it is in fact invisible and so the people who might, for various reasons, seek to slow it down, subvert it, manage it, are in fact unaware of it. They are perfectly in control of the land masses of the planet, its plutonium resources, its petroleum resources. They do not understand that these are not the key to the game. The key to the game is information and connectivity and in that domain this thing has to have a morphogenetic, it seems to have a morphogenetic impulse of its own as a morphogenesis. I would be interested in what you have to think about it and Rupert, as the proponent of the morphogenetic field, I wonder how this fits into your stream. Is it relevant, irrelevant, a shining example or metaphor of what you're talking about or is it in fact a part of the processes that you're interested in? Honestly I don't know what to make of it because I find, I'm very sorry to say, my skeptical impulses being activated because my own experience is that I already have access to vast amounts of information, libraries, the whole of London's libraries at my feet, Cambridge University Library, incredible information through newspapers, mail, stacks of unread magazines and so forth. I'm very aware of an incredible information overload. My problem is having time to read what's already there and the state that Ralph has described with people browsing idly through the net, you know, finding out amazing nuggets of information here and there, presupposes a vast amount of leisure in which people, altruistic leisure, in which people are just connecting things up and being creative for its own sake without hope of reward and without need of recompense. And somehow I can't get this picture into focus because it doesn't correspond with the reality I know. It may be a failure of the visionary instincts, it may just be British cynicism surfacing, but I can't quite see how this fits into the lives of people who have to make a living. I can see it as a leisure of pursuit, a hobby like hand radio. I can't quite get this noosphere, kind of a shingle, deus ex machina aspect of it. Well, in the past if you sought information you would seek only as far as you had to, and that was usually your local library, and the quality of your conclusions would inevitably be infected with this kind of parochialism. For instance, in the old world, if you wanted a picture of the Mona Lisa, you would look up Leonardo da Vinci in the Encyclopedia Britannica. On the World Wide Web, if you want a picture of the Mona Lisa, you call up the camera in the gallery that is staring at the Mona Lisa. You don't call up an image of the Mona Lisa, you call up a picture of the Mona Lisa. You call up the thing itself. I can't imagine that... I mean, human beings are defined by localisms. What kind of world would it be if there were no localisms? In other words, if concepts like British, Somali, Chinese were utterly meaningless, because everyone moved in the same cultural superspace. Now, what's been said about capitalism, which also tries to create a homogenous cultural superspace, is that it does it by appealing to the lowest common denominator, by forcing Bedouins in their huts to watch Dallas or something like that. It seems to me the argument for this is that it preserves diversity. It really celebrates all information without bias. And Ralph neglected to mention, although I'm sure he's aware, the original Internet was constructed by the American military as a system of communication specifically designed to survive a thermonuclear attack. Hence, it has been designed to be indestructible. There is no central control to bomb or blow up. Hence, the very people who created it find it impossible to control. So, it's a cultural... His great appeal is that it's out of control. Yes. It's totally out of control. It's chaotic, friends, and we... We always wondered what would happen if you let creativity go in an infinite sphere of resources. What would happen? And here it is. Well, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not really comparable to the traditional sources of information like books and magazines that comprise your familiar world. But suppose it were. Suppose that there was nothing on it but books and magazines. Then, it still fits very closely to T.R. Deschenes' description of Noah's Genesis process because the access to all that information has suddenly changed. Now, all those books in the British Museum are not really accessible. We know that. We went there together and we saw that we couldn't actually request a book without getting a card, which is very difficult to get. I mean, access is severely restricted. There are, you know, six million... six billion people in the world and they just won't fit through the door there. But on the Internet, people can have free access to all these materials. It's true at the more popular sites at the moment. You have to wait in line up to a minute, sometimes even two minutes, to get the certain book. But just think that everything is the same. The same information exactly, but the access is amplified by factors of hundreds of thousands. That's the strength of the link. The numbers of the links. That's the most obvious thing that's changing is access. There are all these books on it. You see, a lot of books I want and information is very obscure. They're things I have to find in obscure libraries. And even if you go and look through their computerized index, you find it only goes back to 1960 or 1970 or something. The University of London, if I want to look up books prior to 1970, I have to go to some ancient card index. Now, the idea that all those scientific journals, all those books that one person every three or four years looks at, are actually someone who came to take all the expense of entering all this information, is very unlikely. No, they're not. It would be very limited information. However, at the rate that the books are being published now, there's almost every year so many books are published that that's as many books as were ever published before in the history of time. So obviously five to ten years from now, most books will be digitally available. They will. And they're not optically driven, optical characters. But I'll tell you one book that's available now on the World Wide Web. Terence, I don't know if you know this, but the most obscure book in the world, the Voynich Manuscript, is available on the World Wide Web. The most obscure and rare manuscript in the world has been totally digitized and is full of pictures as well as text. The other thing I think it's very hard to predict the impact of is no matter how obscure your field of interest or your self-definition, you can find the others. Third-world handicapped lesbian mothers will all be able to communicate with each other. New communities. Ukrainian-speaking morphogenesis under 30 with a history of ketamine abuse will be able to find and discuss this with each other. So some genetic processes run amok. Well it seems fine if you know what you're looking for, you see. But I think the point about the ordinary media and the way they work, so when I read the Guardian newspaper in the morning, I'm in particularly interest in certain kinds of things. There's a whole lot of other things that I see that I wouldn't normally look for. I would never dial up half these things. Well the Guardian newspaper is on the World Wide Web and furthermore it's indexed. Now you read a book, many of us start reading a book from the back. We like to have a look at the index, see if it's a large one or a small one. I see this book on island ecology, it's got 60 pages and indexed to three columns. I think this is a great book. Many books on the World Wide Web are indexed. Completely every single word is in the index. That means it's much easier to find what you're looking for. Okay, well let's say that it has this amazing resource. The next question really is what kind of research projects or creativity do you want to do on it? I mean I can think of several examples right now. I think the main areas that it would be useful for is Terence's chosen sphere, a sphere as a matter of fact. One thing I'm very interested in is the quality of time. I'm interested in the way the physical constants may fluctuate. And this is something Terence has interested me not, I have to say, primarily focused on the time wave itself, but on the general possibility that the time wave is an example of a quality of time phenomenon. I'm interested in the empirical side of it. So I'd be interested in sunspot data, tide data, deviations from, you know, things from power companies and so on, rate of accident reports, you know, suicide rate statistics, all these things which could reflect changing qualities of time. I myself wouldn't be able to do much with them because I wouldn't have the mathematical means to do correlation analyses and all the things that you can do by comparing vast data sets. But that kind of research would be possible. A new kind of time, quality of time research would be possible through the World Wide Net. I can easily see that possibility. I can also see a number of people who may be interested in this, but they're very small. Not hundreds of thousands or millions, maybe a dozen or so. Yes. Well, one thing worth talking about is, and it seems clear that this is a general quality of the late 20th century, that opportunity creates opportunities and releases. And that as some of us are moving off into accessing the central computers of Kiev State University and so forth, some of us can't read the ingredients of the cereal boxes. And a lot of people are going to fall through the web. They've fallen through every web in history. And so then an issue emerges of, is this something being created for an elite? And what kind of an elite is it? It's certainly not an elite of wealth. It's an elite of intelligence. Now, notice that throughout history, the most oppressed group has not been the Jews, the Irish, the Black. They've taken their hits. But the most consistently oppressed group of people throughout human history has been smart people. And now comes a tool for smart people, utterly incomprehensible to dullards, that is essentially the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb. And if in fact consciousness expansion is to be our salvation, then this must be, this is chaotic as the web is. What it is, is a controlled psychedelic experience spreading through the populace at the highest levels of the intelligentsia. It's more like a one-way psychedelic experience, that after one hit of LSD or something, your mind is altered permanently. After you have browsed and gotten used to this phenomenon, it's almost impossible to forget it. Or ever go back to it. Or ever go back. So since you can speak from experience, and I certainly can't, what breakthroughs in your life have happened other than the vision of the world widening, what it could be in the future, the visionary side of it, what actual benefits have you derived from it? Well, I think in our context of our common activities and so on, I would say the most evident and significant aspect in my life affected by the world wide web is my motivation for authoring. I certainly am ready to give up writing books or intellectual activity other than sitting in a garden speaking as we are right now. If the only result is publishing a book that's read by 1,000 people or publishing an article that's read by 100 people, this is an awful lot of work for no result, whatever, even though I love the process of making a book. And there's nothing more I want to do. I have a thousand ideas for writing. There's just no reason to continue. Now, however, I see that I can freely self-publish all my creative energy and reach my world wide website has been cruised by probably 100,000, 100,000 people just in one year. And he sells advanced mathematical software. What if he were selling Bilbo's? So the opportunity of reaching people, which people may be unaffected by what I write, and that's OK, but at least there will be the possibility that somehow motivates me to do more work. Furthermore, using electronic tools, preparing material to be published electronically is very seamless. So I find I can go at a much greater rate. I'm planning to do about four volumes a year. I have a dozen ideas waiting, as I always have, but for the first time I anticipate completing them all shortly and making them available to people who will actually access them, discuss them, and do something similar in response. They'll publish a book back. Heaven forbid. I mean, I have the dreadful prospect awaiting me when I return home next week from Hawaii of a stack of mail, several feet high, which I know will contain at least 20 bulky envelopes which will contain exactly the kind of thing you're talking about. People's creative work in progress, theories of the universe, why Einstein went wrong, why evolution should be understood in a new way. I have a stack, too. You don't have to read them. Every set has insights on a great many things that I ought to be interested in. The idea of a torrent of this stuff pouring into my computer is enough to put me off totally, because the amount of creativity around already is far too much, in my opinion. I don't know that we need more. But out of this stack of 30 feet high of manuscripts, you might find one valuable one. But then one would be... Out of all these crates, there'll be one Steve Ruck. I know, but then one would be in the unenviable position of the editor of a magazine. I mean, I know we get a lot of this mail through the Post, but talk to people like Noetic Sciences or New Age Magazine, and what comes into them, in terms of unsolicited manuscripts, is enormous. And the editor has the unenviable task of looking through all this stuff and trying to decide which is which. I'm grateful they do it, and that I don't have to do it myself. On the World Wide Web, we each have to be our own editor. That's a lengthy... People will publish whatever they please, without restraint, and then people will browse whatever they please without restraint. What we're talking about is a thousand-fold increase of creativity all over the planet, by people who've never had the opportunity before to create anything. They put a window into the World Wide Web in a public place in Los Angeles, and who crowded around it were gang members who felt that they had the opportunity to participate in society for the first time. This creativity can't be bad. As an informational environment, what's being said is you get much more interesting evolutionary situations out of species-dense environments than very sparsely inhabited environments. And I think what Ralph is saying is that the ideological environment is about to turn into the equivalent of the Amazonian rainforest... Exactly. ...where it has been an Arctic tummy-dump. Exactly. Well, yes, but it means that the amount of time somebody's going to have to spend doing this editing function... I mean, when there's a vast overload of information... Nobody has to edit anything, because this is all... They have to select, though. Only the readers. Exactly, but it means each... I mean, I just give thanks every day for the fact there are editors filtering out the vast amount of stuff from newspapers and magazines, so I don't have to read all the stuff that's submitted to them. And I'm sure sometimes they make mistakes, and sometimes they have fascist inclinations, and sometimes they're... Well, you've been edited out a lot of the time. I've been edited out a lot myself. I'm a victim of this process, but so have lots of other people. And I just don't see how anyone could navigate through this total overload of creativity. Well, you know, it's the thing, Ralph, or I mean, Rupert. You've been edited out a lot. If someone's interested in Rupert Sheldrake, their only choice now is to approach you through your critics who have published widely. If they could simply enter the word "Sheldrake" and have your words before them, rather than the interpretation of your words by a hostile media, many people would come to you. They wouldn't say, "Well, he must be a prank," or "Nature magazine doesn't approve," or so forth and so on. Well, they can right now just look up Sheldrake in books in print, or at a book in a bookstore, which isn't already there. And if everyone can get... This is a trivial point compared with the elevated tone of our discourse so far, but if everybody could get copies of all our books free of charge on the World Wide Web, how are we going to pay for the grocery bills that will enable us to have enough metabolic energy to switch on the computer? Well, my publisher is... My publisher is petrified that I'll put my book on the World Wide Web on the World Wide Web, and of course his fear is justified because I am going to put it on the World Wide Web. But here is my idea about that that I'm trying to reassure my publisher with. If anyone goes into the bookstore and finds your book on the shelf, they can stand there and read it on the hook and not buy it. Their only reason for buying it is they really want to buy it and take it home, and it would be exactly the same on the World Wide Web, because it's very uncomfortable to sit in front of a terminal and read an entire book. That's just not the idea of the thing. If you browse a book and you like it, you'll go to the bookstore and buy it. That's what I think. Meanwhile, there will be many manuscripts which publishers and editors have rejected. Some of your books were rejected, and then they waited for a long time. Meanwhile, they could have been read by everybody on the World Wide Web who wouldn't mind standing on the hook in the bookstore, as it were, if there was simply no alternative. So I think personally that my book sales, my royalty statements, will be enhanced by putting entire books on the World Wide Web. There are these informatic robots going around indexing things, and this is a terrific relief of individual people. For example, in the past, I've had -- I get stacks of mail where people are requesting the reprint of an article in some journal which is inaccessible to them, and I've usually responded by making a copy and sending it. In fact, I've been spending over these past years the average of $6,000 a year just copying materials and having them mailed out. That's the cost of the secretary, the postage, and the copying. Now, all of that will be rendered unnecessary because people are not even going to write to me asking for the article because they know it's on the World Wide Web. Well, some of them know it already, but they soon will because I'm going to have business cards made that contain nothing but my name and my World Wide Web address. Yes, okay, but now, going to your point about the no-sphere and trying to show that, I can't quite get, again, how more information, more interactively, will lead to this, since, as I understand, at least through the more mystical aspects of human nature, they're not things that are necessarily mediated by information transfer, either digital or text or audio. Well, now you're disagreeing with Teilhard de Chardin, not with me, but I agree that there's a terrific possibility that this opportunity I'm talking about turns out to be a big flop, maybe the biggest flop in history. I don't think it will, but that's one of the dangers, and that's why our responsibility is to at least check it out, to browse around there, and see if we think, after that, that there's an opportunity or no, and if so, to give it some creative energy, because what it will be in the future will depend on what kind of people, with whatever motives, actually go there. Okay, well, I ought to be in instant contact, because what I'm in the process of doing through the Seven Experiments book is trying to launch a whole grassroots research project, a site resurgence of anitarian grassroots science. Perfect opportunity for you. That involves going directly to people and around institutions. And also people who are doing similar research things, networking up with each other. I only have this to say, though, as I mentioned before, my experience so far with the Internet, trying to find people who have telepathic cats, but that know when they're telephoning a specific request, was that mostly what I got was junk comments about it from armchair sceptics. Two pieces of information irrelevant from people who failed to respond rather than inquire. So I haven't been in... Most of the people who are my most active and interesting informants about their pets at the moment are people who would be the last to join the web, word by word. They're not computer nerds. They're people who like keeping dogs. Well, we're talking here about a creative process that I imagine would be on the scale of three to five years before coming to fruition. And I can well imagine a website called Animal Magic, where a lot of the things that you'll be paying your secretary to do will take place automatically. It's called Alt.Pets and Alt.Cats, and it already exists. Those exist. What is Alt.Pets? A huge conference on the internet. Oh, what's that? It's a news group. How this works is you write a letter and it's posted there, and everyone's letters ever written are posted there in sequence. You can read them or not. You can scan them for keywords and only read the interesting ones. And you can ask for stories of telepathic pets. Well, that's what happened. It was in the cat network. This question was asked about telepathic cats, and it was much less successful than my peers through BBC radio programs, newspapers, magazines, etc. Well, the World Wide Web is a totally different structure than news groups, because you can post things which elicit responses without doing any work. I mean, you have your articles and books and so on on the subject, the experiments that you've suggested, and the description of information that you would like to collect and where to send it, which might not be you, and all of this is posted there. It's sort of a much more horizontally diffuse structure. But I'm surprised, Ralph, that you say you think it could be subverted or derailed. I think it's just built into the evolutionary and morphogenetic unfolding of the cosmos, and that it could no more be stopped than mitochondria or societal organization. There is some powerful faith. Yes, I agree to a point. I think that, as you said, the Internet began as a military network, and it depended on... Well, first came the Unix operating system. This was made by the people working for the telephone company. I think that these different bits of creativity that finally we see assembled into the World Wide Web, something of tremendous importance, that each of these things was done in such a way, almost unconsciously by the people, with various elements that are inexplicable at the moment, that were the essential elements to make the next step possible. For example, Unix's multitasking. It automatically has network protocols built in. All these things were necessary, and I think that the creative people, for example, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web idea, all of these people were inspired by angels. That is to say, that a divine mandate is somehow manifest, consciously or unconsciously, through them, so that when they are doing their constructive, creative work with these hardware and software bits, they do it in such a way that eventually they can be plugged in and all this will work. So it does seem to be, actually, a divine architecture which is manifesting this thing, just like in the orders of nature, in biological evolution. It's so much like biological evolution, and it's so appropriate that we should discuss it here in Hawaii, which has one of the more recent islands. And yet still you doubt the apotheosis of 2012. I'm not going to carry on about the battle of good and evil and the fallen angels and so on, but I do think it's quite possible that something very, very disappointing will happen to this Internet in the future. For example, it's recently under discussion whether every access should be charged as a long-distance call by the phone company. That right away would destroy the democracy that makes the World Wide Web so exciting. I think if they made that decision, a parallel organization would offer an alternative service. Alternet. There is alternate already. Alternet. There you see. It's unstoppable. It's unstoppable. It's like DNA. Once it's there, stand back. But I can see it leading to a great proliferation, like speciation in the Amazon, which you compared it with. A vast number of species. Already we have an incredible speciation of interest. Just go into any magazine store, and there's tens of thousands of magazines on incredible specialist topics. Rabbit breeding, orchid growing, the yachting world. Of course it does. But the thing is that this Internet, which could lead to vast proliferation of special interest groups, and speciation of subcultures and so on, it doesn't have what Dierdre Chaudo had in his vision of the Neosphere, which is not just thousands and thousands of little groups of special interest communicating worldwide, but some unifying principle of humanity. And that I don't get. I can easily see how there could be groups discussing experiments with psychic dogs and cats. That's why we've got to get busy and put some out there. Well, because the whole nature of it is based on an endless proliferation of fragmentation or differentiation, which is actually one of the processes in evolution, leads to millions of species of beetles in the Amazon. But what does that add up to? It's one of the biggest and most puzzling problems for all theorists of evolution. What's the reason for all this diversity? Why do we need, or why does evolution need this incredible diversity? Since we like to think that they have telepathic cosmic evolution for billions of years as ourselves, heading towards this crucial point in 2012. And this seems to be, you know, there's a human focus based in our thinking about evolution. Dierdre Chaudo exhibited this humanistic bias very strongly. The Neosphere was to do with some human process. Well, that rather leaves out all the millions of species of beetles. Now, here we have something that's like a sort of vast speciation within the human world of information transfer, made possible by this net. But where is any unifying principle that could be... And what the whole modern world seems to be based on is, you know, there's two principles. One is global capitalism and unification of markets and that kind of thing. And the other is endless fragmentation of special interest groups, nationalist groups, and that kind of thing. And it's rather hard for me to see where the unifying pole would be in this, other than the technology that makes it possible, which will be aimed by Rupert Murdoch. Well, I think it creates a super-organism. It dissolves national boundaries, it dissolves class controls, religious controls. It creates a super-organism. It may not be that it's going to make the world better for white male intellectuals. It may be that that's not its purpose at all. It may be that it has an emergent telos of its own, and that asking what it's for would be like amoebas asking what is evolution for. I think it will supersede us. I don't know how much monkey meat will be connected to the World Wide Web when the Web is complete. It may shed the monkey meat somewhere along the way. Here we diverge. I don't think that at all. I think that the goal, in my own little view here, of what's coming of all this, and this is why I said it's possibly a huge flop, it'd be a huge disappointment if Rupert's fantasy turned out to be the actual future of the computer revolution. What I see as the future is that somehow the exalted self-image of humanity will be corrected, that we will end up after a spiritual transformation in a better relationship with the biosphere, so that we can have a future. How to achieve that depends on fantastic acceleration in the process of education, so that people get information. I'm struggling to put on the World Wide Web as fast as possible ecological models that people can actually play in ecological games like SimCity, in which you see what happens if you cut down the Amazon jungle completely, and so on, and this information becomes widely accessible in a form that doesn't even require literacy. And the World Wide Web itself, I think, will become extinct in a very short time. This is a transitional phase in which a divine process is set in motion, giving us the necessary ingredients now missing in our system, to allow us to evolve to a species which can actually coexist sensitively with the environment. Yeah, I think you're putting a finger on it. We're not going to be downloaded into this virtual reality, I don't think, so we're going to end up without electricity and having a stable population. The population explosion could end, let's say, because of the World Wide Web. This is my greatest dream. I can't quite see how, actually. By making people aware of the population explosion. And giving them information. Many people don't know, don't know anything. In many cultures you can't even ask, because to ask would be to draw attention to yourself and get great programming laid upon you. Yes, here it's arriving in a brown wrapper. I can't quite see how in the most impoverished villages of East Africa, access to the World Wide Web is going to leap over primary education, literacy, and all these things which they don't have. And you've got to be literate, you've got to speak English. You've got to have the access to this technology, you've got to be trained. I think this is always going to be a... That's all today. You should think of this, it's on a parallel track with many other greatly innovative processes. For instance, nanotechnology. Today to access the Web you need a desk full of equipment. Tomorrow something will be glued to your thumb nail. And I think we're retreating from three-dimensional space. And that nanotechnological robots, such as we discussed the other night, are going to give us an incredible insight into how nature works. Nature is taking it all back. And all that will survive of the human world are those portions that are able to mirror nature sufficiently to survive the windowing. And, you know, gasoline engines, plutonium technologies, these things will not survive the windowing. But nature is a world-wide Web. That was the first world-wide Web. And in a sense what this is, is a kind of integration. I think you can think anything you want, if you're a hummingbird, an ant, a beetle. But we build in 3D. And this has set off an avalanche of problems for ourselves, for the environment. If we retract from three-dimensional space and move into this informational space, virtual space, cyber space, the planet will heave an enormous cyber- The pressure is released. And we avoid extinction. This thing we find so precious, our humanness, can be preserved along with nature. But only at the expense of abandoning the mechanistic three-dimensional technologies that have carried us this far. And the world-wide Web begins to look like a mind. It begins to look like a virtual reality. I think it's probably equivalent to animals leaving the sea. We are leaving 3D. Occasionally we leap into cyber space, gulp the rich oxygen there of information for a few minutes, then turn off the computer and fall back. This may be the demonic journey of the future. So we have to collapse into the 2D of the TV screen in order to reach out. No, no, the 2D of the TV screen is simply a door, a gate, a window. It's a window pane. You go through the window, and then you're in this fantastic multi-dimensional space which has all the dimensions of a DMT trip or something. It's like astonishingly rich. And its feeling of reality is enormous. You can travel around, although things are changing fast. You know where you are. You recognize certain mainstays, skeletal structures that don't change. You learn your way around traveling on this skeleton. And we will have a different relationship to memory. I mean, by the time you're 25 years old, if you've been working on your virtual environment, which is a sense, your self, your unique self, experientially the thing will be the size of Manhattan. Yes. You know? Your hobbies, your trips. My private Manhattan. Private fantasy. It will be vast. And every human being on Earth will have one of these. And it won't require the cutting of a single tree, the extracting of a single drop of petroleum. The trouble is, I think there's something lacking with this vision. And I think that's probably the reason why 98% of the people on Earth are male nerds. Because there's two points. Firstly, it would be great if what you say is true, and it could mean that people could live in local communities. It seems to me the way forward is local economies. And most green theoreticians think that the only way forward is to localize economies, minimize travel, minimize movement, and so on, and to minimize our impact on the environment, have more food produced locally, and so forth. Local economies. That could be that this virtual space you're talking about, and this traveling around the world, and these computers would remove people's need to travel around so much, and to have global access without going there. But the fact of the matter is that I find myself that I actually like coming in person to Hawaii, and like being in person talking to you two, even though this involves expending vast amounts of aviation fuel. But this is your vacation. People have found in New York to hassle, I mean, life danger. No, but the thing is that I think that this need for not just a multidimensional virtual experience, but actual experience of bodily being there is very, very deep in human beings. And I can't quite see how this is going to replace it. Not replace it. It may just decrease it slightly. Do you think so? I mean, is there any evidence that people on the world wide web actually spend less on travel, spend less on living more ecologically? No, no, no. This is not a matter of evidence, you see, because the thing is in the process of creation, but what it will become is what we dream it to be. We're going to participate in its creation, if it has any potential whatsoever, for good, which I think is potential. Not only is potential enormous, but we have nothing else which compares. In fact, one thing it does is illuminate how feeble are all other proposed solutions, because they are just theories involving nobody on the planet. So you have a theory, an interesting one, for limiting the population explosion. Terence has another theory. We've said these theories, we've put them in books that are read by a few people, and we've seen that we are totally impotent, in fact, in participating in the future, in the creation of the future, in whatever we think we do. Fly on the airplane or not is actually not going to influence the outcome whatsoever, but participation in the world wide web might, even if it's only a long shot, a 1% chance. It dwarfs enormously any other chance that we've got. I'll do a proof of concept experiment out here. I'm going to create a life that makes it unnecessary for me to leave this island, indeed practically unnecessary for me to leave this hill, and yet I am determined to, at the same time, continue to expand my influence, be read by more people, discussed by more people, and influence more people, because I will cease to speak to groups of 45 people in people's living rooms, and I will begin to speak to hundreds of thousands of generally more intelligent people, who are accessing me and my ideas through the net. Yes, well, free of charge, yes. I see you next year reduced to digging up barely edible roots from this forest. [laughter] Gnawing at the bark of trees. Well, it is possible to sell things on the web, and it is possible to ask for donations on the web and so on, and these are the two principal ways we have bought groceries in the past, so that we don't have to dig tubers. And our request, I mean, writing grant proposals is terrible bore. I've given it up completely. At the same time, I'd really like to receive a grant. I'm very low to waste a minute asking for one. So I think that the enhancement of my visibility on the World Wide Web, and if there is any merit whatsoever in what I'm doing, and as is realized by people, I mean philanthropists, will be cruising the World Wide Web. Looking for opportunities to get money away. Looking for opportunities to get the most bang for the buck. Well, I think it's very important to plan the parameters, but I think one should expect that it will exceed all plans and blueprints. I think it has--it's part of the culture. It is culture, and in that sense, it has a life and a morphology of its own. No technology in human history has ever had the effects that its inventors supposed it would have. And no technology in human history has ever affected so many people so quickly as this one does. Even if you don't own a computer, you don't realize the world is working better because your accountant is on the web. Your broker is on the web. Your doctor is on the web. You may not be, but your life is substantially improved by the existence of your agent. Your agent is on the web auctioning your works. Yes, well, all this may be true, but for the thing to-- and what human beings need is not just information. They need relationship, community, etc. All that will continue as usual. It won't be diminished again by the addition of a new mode. It's better to be on the web six hours a day than watching the damn television, which is what people do and call community these days. Well, I agree. Compare that television. This can't be worse. I think half an hour a day on the web or half an hour three times a week on the web would very, very significantly enhance a lot of lives. Like physical exercise. So in terms of actual community, relationship, child-rearing and stuff, somehow that's all left in its present state. Absolutely. Which isn't very satisfactory. Absolutely. There will be a subtle change, at best, in which people become more aware of other people. Far away. Yeah. It becomes not so far away. The world is shrinking. But I mean, logically, it won't actually affect the problems to do with people's marriages, families, neighborhoods, crime on the streets, that kind of thing. No. All that would be the same. This is just a terrific increase in intelligence of the species, that's all. But it's much more restricted than the transformation you talked about in the first place, because what really matters in terms of daily living? Well, if a spiritual transformation took place, then I think that some of these other problems might be ameliorated significantly, most especially crime. And anyway, Ralph talked about four levels on the Internet, three on the web. That's today. Tomorrow is level five. At Seagraph it was very clear to me that 3D imaging is what's happening, and that the Internet is real estate. You walk into it, various forms of visual and head-mounted display problems are all being solved, and very soon, literally, the computer screen will be a doorway. Yes, the World Wide Web is headed for virtual reality, there's no doubt about that. It's already in construction. That. And then, you know, the difference between Newtonian space and cultural space would be seamless. Yes. I look forward to a day when people will live in an ecologically balanced Earth, a few hundred million healthy, well-fed, intelligent people who will be essentially at a very aboriginal level of cultural expression. But if you transpose yourself into the body of one of these people, you will notice that when they close their eyes, there are menus hanging in space. And those menus are the gateway to the cultural dimension, which is not to be seen or touched anywhere. It's in the mind, not my mind, the collective mind. What it is, is it's the creation of a telepathic collectivity. I think it will be mainly dominated, at least for children, by things like Sonic Hedgehog and the banal fantasies of video game makers. Don't you think that it will simply channel people into... Well, it's not driven from the top down, the way all these other mediums are. You know, electrical power distributed from a station, radio sent from a central transmitter, TV, same deal. This is nowhere. The games for children will be made up by children. They won't be sold by anybody because creativity becomes so easy. There's already a third-grade classroom on the World Wide Web where the children are publishing their drawings. And children take to this stuff. They have no bias, they have no inertia toward print culture. They just take to this stuff. The wiring to jack into this thing has somehow been built in from the beginning. They're so facile. They're so good at it. Reading is actually a very peculiar, abstract activity that requires great training. While being on the web, any primate can do it once they're shown the ropes. Well, there. Let's turn it off. You're listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time. Back in 1994, I wouldn't have agreed with Terence when he said that any primate can use the Internet. But today I'm in complete agreement. Shortly after turning three years old, one of my grandchildren began using the mouse on her parents' computer. She's four now and knows the difference between a PC mouse and a Mac mouse. Not only that, she's been able to find her way around some very complex children's sites quite easily. And I've noticed that many of her little friends are equally skilled in accessing the Internet at four years old. It's as Ralph, I think it was, said, "We seem to actually have been pre-wired for this experience." Now one thing I feel I should point out, though, is that Terence was wrong when he said that the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. That's an old urban myth that has been shot down numerous times. And if you want to know more about the early days of the Internet, from its very beginning at BBN, then a good place to start is with the book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late, The Origins of the Internet" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. It's a really good read if you're into geek stories, and I actually worked with and know a lot of the people mentioned in that book. So I can verify a lot of those stories. And one of those stories has to do with the urban myth that Terence so blithely passed along. I'm also sure that you noticed how all three of them had the impression that the Web was going to basically remain a guy thing. But from what I know, it didn't work out that way. And today there are about the same number of women on the Net as men. I could be wrong about that, but that's what my impression is. Of course, Terence's idea that it wouldn't destroy the environment has kind of gone by the wayside, now that we understand how much of the world's electrical power is dedicated to keeping the Internet humming along day and night. But back in '94, I doubt if anyone was even close in their forecasts for where the Net was going. Recently, John P. posted the following comment on onemansblog.com that points out how fast this technology has evolved in the past 15 years. He said, "At that time, people were using 14.4 baud modems to dial into an Internet service provider and read pages on the Web. And the number of sites was only in the hundreds or possibly thousands. Compare that to today. There are 160 million sites and I visit them on my 10,000 baud modem cable connection, a 700 times increase. My house has more bandwidth than the backbone in 1994." I was also happy to hear that Ralph was talking about Teilhard de Chardin in relation to the Internet, and back in 1994 on top of it. I didn't get it quite so early on. In fact, I didn't publish my book, "The Spirit of the Internet, Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness" until 2000. And in it, my main premise was the correlation between the way in which the Internet was evolving and how this was reflected in Teilhard's work. So it was thrilling for me to hear this confirmation of my ideas coming from Ralph, and coming so long before I picked it up myself. Which again leads me to think that I have yet to have my first original thought. I'm just really good at picking up on other people's thoughts that are out in the noosphere, as Teilhard would have us believe. Now if you would like to hear how Terence's and Ralph's thoughts about the Net evolved over the next five years after this conversation we just heard, you can hear their two-hour talk titled "The World Wide Web and the Millennium," which I podcasted three years ago as podcast numbers 19 and 20. And of course this was recorded in 1999, five years after the talk we just heard. And you can download both of those for free of course through iTunes or some other aggregator, or directly from our website which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org. Now I'd planned to read a couple of emails today, but a few days ago I learned that my friend Fraser Clark died last week, and so I'm not feeling very talkative right now. When I first learned of his death, via Facebook actually, I thought it was a prank. And I still can't believe it, but that's the sad truth I'm afraid. And Fraser's death hit me on several levels, including the sobering thought that I was older than him. Now by the time you hear this podcast, Fraser's online wake and funeral will most likely be over, but you'll be hearing more about him from me in the months ahead. I guess the main headline right now that I would write for Fraser is to say that he was Tim Leary, Terrence McKenna, and a dozen other of his peers all rolled into one. Fraser Clark, in my humble opinion, was a man of mythical proportions, and I'll miss him greatly. So right now I'm going to take a little break and go back and re-listen to my podcast, Number 45, which featured Fraser giving a lecture at Stanford University here in California. It's titled "Rave Culture and the End of the World as We Know It," and it still remains one of my all-time favorite podcasts, even over most of Terrence's talks. I'll have more to say about Fraser Clark in future podcasts, where I'll collect some more of his material for you to listen to. But right now I've still got to absorb the fact that he's moved on to his next big adventure. For many of us, Fraser was either a mentor, role model, teacher, wizard, sorcerer, or all of the above. There simply was no other like him, and we will all miss him dearly. I'm going to close now with a piece of music I played once before. It's called "Miss About You" and was written and performed by my friend Queer Ninja. Some of you know him from the Sounds of Worldwide Weed podcast. And if I'm not mistaken, the vocals are by his friend Sharon. When I asked Ninja for permission to use it again, he said, "Of course," and he added, "Fraser Clark was a fascinating person who tried his hardest to get the light and love to us all." And I might add, he succeeded magnificently. Without a doubt, there are literally millions of members of the psychedelic community who have benefited either directly or indirectly from the inspired genius of Fraser Clark. For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Sail on, dear Fraser. We'll catch up with you when we can. Into the light, into the light, into the light of bare naked truth. [Music] Sunlight in your hair, the diamond smile you wave, the secrets that you whisper to me. Oh, the love that's in your eyes, the peace that you enshrine, the hope you weave in every word. [Music] The dreams you let me see, the things you'll never need, the open doors you held for me. Oh, the empty veins that broke, the bitterness that chokes, the rain that fell on the day you died. [Music] The things I miss about you, the things I miss about you. (music ends) {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.67 sec Decoding : 3.47 sec Transcribe: 4330.60 sec Total Time: 4334.74 sec