[music]
 Obviously when you evolve inside an animal body, localized in space and time, you get a hellacious set of reflexes and muscles designed to deal with immediate threat in the environment.
 But at the core of the oyster is, you know, this portal into universalism, which we have denigrated to what we call the imagination.
 It is a... there is a third eye. The third eye exists, but it doesn't look out at this world. You've got two perfectly good eyes for doing that.
 The third eye looks out at the holographic matrix of informational totality, and then the problem for that form of perception is filtering.
 Would you say that another word would use the word...
 Well, "atman" means soul or being or... Yes. I mean, it's simply that consciousness is distributed and holographic, and nobody has their brand on it.
 What we have been calling human consciousness is the only consciousness there is. It's something you tap into, not something you evolve out of yourself.
 I mean, you require a local language to create a local model of this universal input.
 If your local language is insufficient, then you abide in a domain of intuition, and that's what I would call animal consciousness.
 It's a domain of intuition of being. Animals intuit being.
 But given a more advanced nervous system, a more advanced cultural toolkit, the intuition changes into a direct perception,
 and you begin to make poetry and experience loss and feel love, and you begin to feel the emotional outlines of the enterprise of being,
 and how far one can go into that, I assume it's infinite, or at least appears infinite from our limited position.
 So the local language is?
 Well, the local language is a necessary compromise. It would be... It's interesting...
 The thing that makes psychedelics so central to a discussion like this is they are the only thing which pulls the plug on the illusion,
 the illusion created by local language.
 That's why people are both in love with it and terrified of it, because it addresses a fundamental aspect of reality,
 and it addresses it incontrovertibly.
 And people who feel culture as a safety zone that is keeping at bay the black oceans of God knows what
 are not interested in taking psychedelics.
 On the other hand, people who feel confined by the cultural dream and who want to cross the black oceans of who knows what
 to see what's on the other side, they embrace that same experience as a God-sent gift.
 But it's the same phenomenon.
 So it addresses one's own fundamental relationship to the unknown.
 Local languages, like local cultures and architectural styles and everything else, are designed to create, I think, an infantile sense of security.
 One of the bees up my rear end these days is the idea that culture is not our friend,
 that we have been very naive about what culture is and how it is something designed for the convenience of the species.
 It could turn you into a janitor or a banker or a celebrity or anything else with no interest or concern for whether that's good for you.
 It plays with individuals.
 And most people think, or at least I think most people think, that when you get to be, I don't know, 30, 35, 40 or something, you have jumped all the hurdles.
 You got your college degree.
 You had some children.
 You made some money.
 You lost some money.
 Maybe you had a marriage.
 Maybe you had several.
 Anyway, people sort of get the feeling, well, I've done it.
 Actually, the major adventure still lies ahead.
 And the major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you.
 The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being.
 It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuse, actress, whatever.
 But it will not give you true being.
 And maybe this is the voice of somebody who just turned 50 talking.
 But I thought it would get simpler.
 It doesn't, because this rejection of culture thing is the last and hardest step to take.
 And there are all kinds of impediments to taking it.
 The fact that in middle age, if you've played the game right, you get a lot of money.
 That's totally stultifying in most cases in terms of going forward to the next level.
 It's almost as though culture is an enterprise self-organized to buy you off at the moment when you might be most dangerous to its values and goals.
 Well, you know, in Revelations, the ancient of days is described as there's a sword which comes out of the mouth.
 It's a very hard image to picture, but a sword, the turning sword, which comes out of the mouth.
 And of course, the whole Western myth of creation is that the world was made by an utterance.
 In Principio ad verbum, ad verbo caro factum est, in the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh.
 And in some sense, I think the what is not stated there is that then out of the flesh, the word must be redistilled.
 That's the second half of the historical process.
 In this book, which I may mention at some point, the statement is made, God created man in order to taste the bitter fruit of time.
 In the DMT flash, the entities that appear, their entire program is a program of language acquisition.
 And, you know, this is a point that's brushed over in science fiction films because it's actually such a conundrum.
 Those of you who saw and you suffered, as I did, Mars attacks, the little role for Rod Steiger in there as the German guy with the translation machine.
 Well, if you think about alien contact, real alien contact, we cannot assume that universal understanding is easily achieved.
 The very first aspect of true alien contact would probably be a language lesson of some sort,
 because the aliens don't want to communicate about our gross national product or our political system.
 If they do, they're not really aliens. They're just odd looking people from far away.
 Real aliens have something really alien to communicate, and it can only be communicated in an alien language.
 So I think it's very suggestive that these invisible entities that we contact, when we dissolve the local language boundaries,
 and they are, they're like mud walls built around our little hut of mental, you know, our collection of goats and stuff that we've pushed together.
 And then we dissolve the walls, and, you know, there's alien people, there's alien minds out there waiting to trade with us.
 They probably have always been trading with individual geniuses through dream, through insight, through imagination.
 I mean, many of, you know, if you've read Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
 you know that even in as constipated and self-conscious an enterprise as science,
 the real breakthroughs occur in situations of delirium, frenzy, drunkenness, inspiration.
 And then guys, usually it's guys, spend the whole rest of their professional life trying to make it all sound reasonable and rational,
 and how it proceeded from earlier work done by other people, and so forth and so on.
 This is just a fantasy, a kind of way of attaining respectability.
 Well, yeah, I mean, Hinduism and Hebrew and I think those are the two biggies, have really elaborate theories of the power and the place in the universal scheme of things of certain tones.
 And as I was sitting, I was thinking Sufi, and then I was also thinking Pythagorean.
 I mean, some people call this the Pythagorean impulse, the belief that basically the universe is harmonious and exists as a series of octaves,
 and that if you know the mechanics of this, you can converse with angels, you can ascend to higher levels.
 Yes, again, it's an issue of language. I mean, some languages fill your pockets with lead,
 and some languages give you a helium balloon for plunging into these metaphysical areas.
 One thing I wanted to talk about this morning, and maybe this is the place to get into it,
 is we've spoken of the imagination as a seemingly boundless realm, but it's not ruleless.
 And people who encounter it without rules often have very difficult experiences,
 the most difficult of which can be raving madness, I would think.
 And so if we're going to embrace the imagination as the new benchmark of being,
 then we need to talk about what the rules are that obtain in the imagination.
 You know, the 14th century nominalist William of Ockham dealt with questions like,
 "Can God do anything?" Yes, God can do anything.
 Then, "Can God make a rock so heavy that God can't pick it up?"
 And then, "If not, why not?" and "What does this mean?"
 Well, this is an effort to tame the imagination, and Ockham concluded from exercises like that,
 that even God must follow the rules of logical necessity,
 otherwise becoming trapped in self-negating paradox.
 So I am thinking about this. I listed three areas where rules might be gleaned
 that could be applied to the imagination.
 The first two are linked somehow.
 Mathematics. Mathematics is not what you think it is.
 Mathematics is basically rational thinking about defined sets of entities.
 And since the imagination is nothing but defined sets of entities,
 the rules which govern them are worth learning.
 In practical terms, what this comes down to is logic.
 And one of the problems that I think haunts the current cultural impasse
 is the fact that there is a lot of hostility to science,
 and it has spilled over. And science we should be very suspicious of.
 It's a wonder worker. It's a magician dealing its wares in the marketplace.
 So we should be suspicious of science.
 But this scientistic paranoia has spilled over into a suspicion of reason.
 This is too much. If you abandon reason, you will have nothing to guide you
 but the emotional depth of the situation.
 This is what Heidegger called the depth of the call.
 And in the 20th century, the history of following the depth of the call
 has not been a happy one.
 We cannot trust the call of the blood uncritiqued by reason.
 Reason is primary in this situation.
 So then many people say, "Well, mathematics is impossible. Logic is difficult.
 Isn't there a third possibility? Isn't there yet another way to get a handle on this?"
 And the answer is, "Yes, but I'm not sure it's easier. It may seem at first easier,
 but that is aesthetics. The imagination must serve the ideal of the beautiful."
 I talked about this a little bit last night.
 That which is tasteless is to be avoided at all cost.
 And 90% of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened
 if you had just had better taste.
 Am I not right?
 I look at this Heaven's Gate thing in amazement
 because of its tastelessness. That's all.
 I mean, it is utterly unappealing for that reason.
 I don't even have to reach for the club of logic.
 If it had been better scripted, I might need logic.
 But the aesthetics of the situation are just so overwhelmingly, ugh.
 You're speaking towards what Heaven's Gate you said?
 The suicide cult that eliminated itself in San Diego, yeah.
 I'm going to get up to somebody for a second.
 Well, usually people ask me what will happen in 2012,
 and I say it's like asking a man facing east at 2 a.m.
 what will sunrise look like. In other words, it's too early to ask.
 In terms of classical technology?
 Well, I think that, A, I don't have an answer to the problem of the bully and the slave,
 unless, as the Marxists claim, that is inimical to disparity of wealth.
 Because I think disparity of wealth is a transient phenomenon
 based on a limited technology.
 But it is entirely possible that we can make everyone a king,
 and we will still have bullies and slaves.
 So if the Marxists are wrong, and the addressing of the economic disparity
 doesn't change the structure of the human soul,
 then we will have to go deeper.
 And I don't know how this is going to look.
 There's a lot of tension in any community that discusses this kind of stuff
 over where the body lies in all of this.
 Can we solve our problems and maintain our individual existences?
 Or are we in fact furiously building a level of hierarchical control
 above the level of the individual that will make things like states and corporations
 seem like pale soup indeed?
 Are we in fact trying to create a super-organism?
 What is the relationship of an idea like that to classic fascism?
 [inaudible]
 Well, what about the Internet?
 You mean, is it the coming of the super-organism?
 It is prosthesis on an incredible scale.
 It is going to redefine what it is to be human.
 I think technologies are neither gods nor demons.
 It's what you do with it.
 The dilemma of human freedom is that we don't know where we rest
 in the universal hierarchy of good and evil.
 In other words, what would we do if we could do anything?
 Would our transcendent impulses drive us to a kind of angelhood?
 Or, as James Joyce says, would we flop on the scenic side?
 And the answer normally given is some would do one and some the other.
 Yes, but what if we erase that possibility of individual action?
 And is there then only one destiny?
 And then what shall it be and who shall decide?
 I would be fairly pessimistic if I saw this all going on on a level playing field.
 But it isn't going on on a level playing field.
 Transcendence is favored.
 Nature seems to be in the business of building systems which transcend themselves.
 We can see that as far back in time as we care to look and throughout all of nature.
 So it seems like we actually have a hell of a tailwind helping us toward the transcendent other.
 Probably that is what will make the difference.
 We couldn't have done it by ourselves, but we happen to be in a universe which is itself involved in the process of bootstrapping to higher levels.
 Traditionally, meaning since the invention of print, the artist has had this role where the eccentricity and the bohemian lifestyle and so forth of the artist was tolerated
 because the argument was the artist is a kind of antenna for this mysterious thing called the future.
 And the artist would sound the alarm and bring the news.
 In a sense, we don't hear this kind of talk anymore because this is the future.
 We have become the very thing our parents warned us against.
 And we, those cheerful dreams of endless progressivism that built up the 19th century and early 20th century, have given way to a much more cynical and sophisticated understanding that our buildings may become taller, our automobiles shinier,
 but somehow the human animal is not moving forward at the same rate as our technology.
 So what we have to do then is give people opportunities and let the devil take the hindmost.
 At least create a world where those who aspire to transcendence are not blocked in the aspiration.
 And of course it's not that some of us are these pure aspirants and others the haunters of the sleazy side of the internet.
 We each play all these roles and move in between them according to taste and mood.
 I mean, one of the great falsities of print is the making illegitimate of schizophrenia.
 I mean, we are all just swarms of personalities.
 The idea that a healthy person has a unified identity is just a silly idea.
 It's like believing that sexual preference comes in only two flavors or something.
 It's one of those incredibly weird simplifications that once made, everybody lines up and salutes no matter how much agony it causes the individual.
 Well, last night what I said was that I was a Platonist and that Plato felt that the world was approached through three paths,
 the good, the true, and the beautiful.
 But that goodness is controversial and truth difficult to discern, but that beauty has a kind of resonant self-evidence.
 And so following beauty, it's my faith, will lead to the good and the true.
 And some beauty is, I mean, I'm a fan of extreme forms of beauty.
 Hieronymus Bosch and Redon and James Ensor.
 I mean, the beautiful can be grotesque.
 Of course, this then opens up a whole aesthetic can of worms that maybe we don't want to get into.
 Well, beautiful art is never bad.
 Yes, I think grotesque, the beauty of the grotesque is the unique modern contribution to the discussion of beauty.
 And it's a higher form of perception.
 I mean, it's all very fine to find beauty in wild flowers and women dancing in diaphanous dresses and harpsichord music.
 And it's quite another to find beauty in ripped up railway tickets and found objects and smashed machinery and that sort of thing.
 The modern sensibility has been unsentimental and has, in that sense, I think, advanced the canon of beauty.
 Modernity, I'm feeling much better about now that it's over.
 It's such a huge enterprise to look back on.
 I mean, what faith, what simplicity, what naivete those people possessed.
 I can hardly get over it.
 The 20th century, for all of its brutality and its flirtation with the dark side of the human soul,
 the counterpoint to that was its incredible optimism and idealism and simplicity.
 I mean, the simplicity of fascism, the simplicity of Marxism, the simplicity of democratic political theory.
 I mean, these are ideologies that clearly never met a human being.
 Well, the idea of an attractor, you see, these huge thought structures that we live inside that we're not even aware of.
 And one of them is the idea that causes precede their effect.
 This seems like a non-statement to most people.
 Of course, causes precede effect.
 But in fact, if causes always preceded effects, then many, many processes would be unpredictable that are in fact predictable.
 And this has to do with this word we introduced last night briefly, the creode, the runnel.
 A given process, the destiny of a people or the evolution of a political system or the growth of a series of interconnected scientific ideas,
 is not in fact free to develop in any direction it wants.
 It is going on in an epigenetic environment of intellectual confinement of some sort.
 And in the same way that water runs downhill, a given idea developing in a given time and place will predictably develop in a certain direction.
 One of the very large creodes that we can see at work in nature and society is what I call the conquest of dimensionality.
 Biology is a strategy for moving into and occupying ever more dimensions.
 And biology begins as a point-like chemical replicating system attached to a primordial clay in a proverbial warm pond somewhere at the dawn of time.
 And as life develops, it folds itself. It becomes a three-dimensional object.
 It replicates itself in time. By that means it claims the temporal dimension.
 After two or three billion years of that, it has evolved itself to the point where with strong muscles it can move through space.
 With superb visual organs it can coordinate its exterior environment.
 And finally, through the advent of language, it can tell its story.
 It can move information around not present.
 And as soon as you begin to code that information into stone or magnetic medium or whatever, in a sense time has stopped.
 You are moving outward now. And this very large creode seems to inform not only biology but the human enterprise as well.
 So when I talk about stuff like the evolution of photolithography and moving pictures out of photography and the evolution of surround sound and the global airline system and these kinds of things,
 these are dimension-conquering phenomena designed to shrink the earth to a point.
 And of course the internet is the mother of all dimensional conquest.
 I mean in a single 40-minute session on the internet, I may talk to computers in Helsinki, Australia, Paris, Vanuatu, you name it.
 And I don't even notice that this is happening.
 Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's meaningless to think in those terms because in fact you might as well think of it all being inside your CPU sitting on your desk.
 It has the same effect.
 And what that is, is it's the sum total of human knowledge being daily augmented and the fury with which people put their thing on the internet.
 Everything from how grandma's recovering from her stroke to...
 I visited a language site the other night that had 122 syllabuses for 122 languages that were philological engines for searching these languages.
 I got there through the Vonage manuscript site.
 Yes, that all still goes on.
 That community is at work.
 So apparently we will not rest until all space and all time is brought down into, for all practical purposes, a single point.
 And this is an idea that has been around in various forms since at least the 16th century.
 I mean it's the alchemical idea of the philosopher's stone, a universal panacea, a medicine which makes you wise, immortal, all seeing, all knowing, all good.
 But interestingly conceived as an artifact of technology, conceived as something brought into being through the effort of a technological worker in concert, in resonance with the intention of nature, which is to do the same thing.
 The human world is simply a catalyst for nature's intention.
 We are speeding up nature's program of dimensional transcendence.
 Nina?
 The internet begins to sound more and more like the Akashic record of the universe.
 It is. It is that, and it is in a sense the Jungian unconscious, but no longer unconscious.
 In a sense what we're saying is, you know, we all, before the internet, you were who you are, you knew what you knew, and you knew there was a great deal that you didn't know.
 You had once known it but forgotten it, or never learned it, but somebody somewhere knew it.
 And because we had this vast, dark companion, the unconscious, bad things keep jumping out of it.
 It was remarkable to me that throughout the Cold War period, a planet ruled by carnivorous monkeys, filled with ideological hatreds, under immense economic and social pressure, and yet nobody ever used atomic weapons except once, the two Japanese instances.
 And in a sense, they don't count because they didn't know what it was.
 They had to use it to see what it was, and once they saw what it was, remarkable restraint set in.
 I would never have guessed that we would have been capable.
 I mean, remember how deep the fear of the Soviet Union was.
 Remember that for 35 years a thermonuclear strike was a possibility within a half an hour of any undue movement on the other side, and yet somehow we got through that.
 So there is, in the human animal, an effort to awaken.
 You know, it was H.G. Wells who said, "History is a race between education and catastrophe."
 And it's a white-knuckle enterprise.
 Catastrophe edges inches ahead, education moves ahead.
 And again, if it were a level playing field, I'd be betting on catastrophe, because I believe that nature favors the good, the true, and the beautiful.
 I've got all my money on education.
 I think we'll make it, but I think we have to scare ourselves to death in order to keep focused.
 You know, we're primates, and we don't really dig in and get rolling until we're painted into a corner.
 Yeah, man.
 I guess the answer is you have to somehow make it your friend.
 You have to make it your friend.
 There are ways to do that, actually.
 I made a little list. You played right into my hands.
 The first and probably oldest friend, older even than psychedelics, is dreams.
 Dreams are hugely important.
 I was in Australia in February, and I did a lot of reading up before I went down.
 The aboriginals of Australia have been at the cultural enterprise for a long, long time along a different path than the rest of us.
 I mean, I've spent time with Amazon tribes and with people in Central Asia, and yes, they're funky, and yes, they're different,
 but these Australian aboriginals are on to something quite other.
 Many people barely open their eyes.
 People sit silently. People don't talk.
 This, again, relates to what we said about language.
 In Australia, among these people, you get the feeling that they don't talk because they're not sure it's here to stay.
 If an aboriginal wants to communicate something to you, they would far rather walk with you a half mile into the bush and point at it
 than to simply describe it back at camp.
 So the dream time and the Jungian unconscious and the unconscious made conscious by the Internet begin to sound like the same thing.
 I previously didn't have much interest in the Australian aboriginals because I was slightly irritated by reliance on psychedelics.
 So it was like, what am I supposed to do with these people?
 They're clearly very loaded and very far out, and how do they do that without drugs?
 It was paradigm agonizing to me.
 Well, it turns out that they just are better at keeping secrets than the people in the Amazon.
 There is a revolution breaking over ethnobotany.
 We have been saying for decades that South America was the most hallucinogen-rich ecology on the planet,
 and why was that, and wasn't it fascinating, and so forth and so on.
 In the next 18 months, some Australian ethnobotanists and trippers are going to publish data that shows that the Australian aboriginal worldview is entirely running on DMT.
 These acacias, this gum tree ecology that stretches from Queensland down to the South Coast, is replete with DMT.
 It's simply that the aboriginal culture is even more secretive than other aboriginal cultures in other parts of the world,
 and only very, very slowly is this information being let out.
 So dreams are one of the great friends of the imagination.
 [inaudible]
 Yeah, that's what I'm saying, basically.
 There'll be more. It's not for me to take the thunder.
 Very good people have hundreds and hundreds of pages about to be published, and they've got the data, and they've done the analysis.
 [inaudible]
 Well, I pretty much take the position that there may be people who can do it on the natch, but there's no technique.
 It's something you have to be born to, and there's no culture that can do it.
 I think throughout the human population, there may be one person in a hundred who has a futuristic set of synapses,
 because I occasionally, in a group like this, somebody will come up to me and say,
 "Well, I've never taken a psychedelic drug, but I know exactly what you're talking about, and I see visions," and so forth and so on.
 I used to just think that these people were nutcases.
 I've now encountered enough of it that I modify my position to say these are just incredibly fortunate people,
 and you can't tell how much of it is personality and how much of it is chemically real.
 Again, how much of what I'm saying to you right now, it's being processed differently in every head in the room.
 Some people are seeing pictures. Some people are hearing words.
 Some people are logically building on what I say, and for some people it's just music.
 And so it's very different, and again, it's something very hard to share because it's so subjective.
 But throughout the world, there are what we would call primitive or aboriginal cultures,
 and some are drug users and some are not.
 And it isn't a matter of ecology. It's a matter of something else.
 In eastern Ecuador, you have tribes that are just totally druggy, and across the river, people who never touch anything,
 living basically what appear to the unschooled observers, two cultural systems not that different from each other.
 But generally speaking, the psychedelic cultures seem more—let me put it this way—the psychedelic cultures seem less dogmatic.
 Shamanism comes in two flavors, at least two.
 There's what I call a traditional shamanism is very rigid and ritual-driven and usually non-psychedelic.
 And the other kind of shamanism, there are rituals, but they are basically for the consumer, not the producer.
 And what shamans in these psychedelic cultures are are simply alienated intellectuals.
 I've been in situations in the Amazon where you fly into some remote place, and the people come, and the women come,
 and they want to touch the airplane, and they want to look at your camera and touch your clothes and all this.
 And so while this is going on, meanwhile, standing off is the shaman.
 And he doesn't give a shit about the airplane or your camera or any of that.
 He is interested in you as a person.
 And what he is is he's alienated from the values of his culture.
 The keeper of the values is the one person who knows that the values are bullshit.
 That's what they're doing in that function.
 It's like somebody has to know.
 And so all the people are kowtowing and going through their business.
 But the shaman at the top realizes, my God, we stare out onto an abyss.
 We do not know.
 And they're like scientists.
 I mean, they are scientists, I think.
 Yeah.
 Well, this is an interesting question.
 There's a hard and soft answer.
 It depends on whether you think the need to commodify is so basic to human beings that it can't be removed.
 If that's true, then the Internet still holds out a certain amount of hope.
 A hard-core anti-capitalist position wants to eliminate capitalism because it sees it as an unreclaimable evil.
 But it's possible that the only thing wrong with capitalism is that it manufactures, distributes, and commodifies physical objects.
 What if there was a capitalism that only commodified information and light?
 That might be more tolerable.
 In the future, not that long in the future, if you want to live at Versailles, it'll cost you $149 to buy the software package and set it up and live in it.
 Well, if Versailles can be made to cost $149, how much is it worth?
 And the answer is, only what the market will pay.
 So I think for a long time, this process of raising standards of living has been underway.
 And it is certainly true that today in the world, hundreds of millions of people live better than emperors and kings two centuries ago.
 So I think the important thing, well, before we totally dismiss capitalism, we should see if it can operate in a virtual informational environment less destructively.
 If it can't, then something else will have to come along.
 Certainly capitalism based on the extraction of resources and their fabrication by cheap labor populations into objects to be sold in a central economy, that's finished.
 That's a dinosaur. That's self-limiting.
 Because there is not an ultimately exploitable resource base, the end of that kind of capitalism is easily discerned.
 Well, that's an interesting question. Is there a kind of natural selection of means in the marketplace?
 There probably is. For example, imagine governments deal with information completely differently than corporations.
 If a government obtains a proprietary technology, its impulse is to classify it, move it out of sight, and exploit it for political advantage.
 If a corporation achieves a proprietary technology, it drops a huge amount of money on promoting it, rushes products based on it to market, and tries to spread it everywhere as fast as it can.
 This certainly has caused an evolution of certain kinds of technology.
 But the two systems, the capitalist corporate system and the governmental system, value and put emphasis on different kinds of technology.
 For example, nation states use war as an instrument of national policy.
 Corporations almost never do that.
 Corporations don't like war. It busts up environments, it makes products difficult to move around, and where you had happy, healthy customers, you now have hollow-eyed refugees standing around with their hands out.
 But those were national interests. No corporation could have launched a war like that.
 It wasn't Exxon who had a knife poised at their throat. It was the economies of France, Germany, and the United States.
 Also, that war was generations ago. A completely different set of political rules were in place.
 That was probably the last of those sorts of wars, I would bet.
 What capitalism does with war is it exports it to already burnt-out market areas like Rwanda, Bosnia, Albania.
 They don't care what people do to each other in those places because there's no market there anyway.
 Let me go on with my list here. I think I got through dreams and drugs, which were probably the biggies.
 This is friends of the imagination, in case you lost your place here.
 Fiction and the enterprise of fiction, not necessarily science fiction, although it's interesting if you look at the golden age of science fiction.
 The magazines that created that had names like "Amazing," "Astounding," and "If."
 These are the very words and themes that we've been pursuing around here.
 Fiction is, until we get virtual reality up and running in the hands of a master, the best way we have of showing each other the contents of our own heads.
 Any of you who have made your way through "The Remembrance of Things Past," Proust's enormous novel about syndiciac life in Paris,
 there are thoughts uttered there that are so fragile and delicate that when you read it, you think you were the only person who ever thought this.
 And you never bothered to mention it to anybody because it seemed so ineffable.
 And yet, Proust has gotten it down on the page. So it shows you what human beings are.
 And of course, our world—pardon?
 Can you give an example of that?
 I'm trying to think of an example. There's an example where they're going to a beach town,
 and he's riding with this dowager woman, a great society woman, and he's watching the trees go by the carriage.
 And he notices that—now, how does this work?—that the nearer trees move faster than the trees further away.
 And then over this spatial metaphor is mapped a temporal metaphor about people changing in time.
 And God knows what it is in French, but even in English, it's this exquisitely complicated thought
 that you wouldn't think anybody could actually do justice to the feeling, and yet there it is in its completion.
 The other great friend of the imagination is travel.
 Travel is another way, a more gentle way, to break down cultural conditioning.
 I mean, what we call culture shock is when you go to Afghanistan or Albania,
 and you realize that your expectations of how a table should be set, what a toilet looks like,
 how a bus ticket works, and how a telephone is supposed to operate were just so narrowly defined
 that now you're confronted with a telephone and a toilet and you don't even know which end is which.
 And it's not for nothing that the vocabulary of psychedelic experience has borrowed from the vocabulary of travel.
 So we take a trip, we have a journey, we go to an alien landscape.
 And then finally, the great friend of the imagination is the future,
 because it's in the future that we place our hopes, our fears, our suppositions.
 I mean, the future is a land of things imagined,
 things that have not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring.
 [Audience member] Is this your second year?
 As a friend of the imagination?
 Well, did I not mention last night that the two great motivators were food fantasies and sex fantasies?
 And yes, the sexual imagination is at a very early, I almost said primitive, but I don't mean that,
 but I mean early level, because if I'm understanding you correctly, it revolves around the "if" operator.
 I approach the desirable female with the proper blandishments, "if," and then of course just sexual fantasy.
 Then we will do this, then we will do that, and so forth and so on.
 It certainly is a vehicle for altered states, whether I would call them imagination or not.
 I suppose I would, but now that I'm thinking about your question, I think there are pitfalls in the imagination,
 and probably the sexual pitfall is sentimentality.
 [Audience member] That is like tastelessness.
 Well, tastelessness is in there too. Sentimentality is a virulent form of tastelessness.
 And sentimentality is very hard to root out. You may think you're a hard cookie,
 but I'll bet there are areas of sentimental delusion so broad and deep in every one of us,
 and some people carry that to the grave. They're the lucky ones.
 The rest of us have divorces, bankruptcies, muggings, and what have you,
 and slowly our sentimentality is pounded out of us.
 And it's a good thing to lose sentimentality because it's a false aesthetic, and I think we recognize it.
 It's also a very easily manipulated—it is truly a false aesthetic in the hands of modern media
 because it is a great ploy for buying.
 If you can induce sentimentality in people, they will buy the object of that induction.
 [Audience member] What kind of a verb would you say?
 Well, your word "idealism" is good here because it brings me to something I always eventually get to,
 which is in line with this thought culture is not your friend. Ideology is not your friend.
 And ideology—some people think what we're trying to do here is sort out good ideologies from bad.
 Should I be a Marxist? Should I be a deconstructionist?
 And the answer is no, none of the above.
 All ideologies are viral infections of some sort,
 mimetic infections that erode your functionability and your comfort with yourself.
 Ideologies set up polarities that are based on discontent,
 and ideologies are always, always, always based on false premises.
 Whatever the—I mean, name an ideology and I'll tell you the false premises that it's based on.
 So part of this process of cultural maturity that I've been talking about
 is to get beyond ideology without embracing cynicism.
 It's not a "fuck you" thing.
 It's a deeply saddening awareness that we are not yet angel enough,
 that we should take ourselves that seriously.
 Yeah.
 Yes, I would say sentimentality is the feeling of attachment we have to our ideologies.
 So for instance, someone says, "Well, you know, Marxism, maybe we didn't have the right answer,
 but we certainly had a sense of a mission and a wonderful—we knew who we were."
 Well, that's crazy talk.
 If it was wrong, it was wrong.
 I mean, it's like old Nazis sitting around saying, "The great old days!"
 What was so great about the old days? You want community? Join a bowling league, for crying out loud.
 Yeah.
 No, that's a lesser evil. That's nostalgia.
 Another impulse for marketing frenzy.
 Yeah.
 But romanticism, I think, is a legitimate impulse and well-situated in historical context and so forth and so on.
 Sentimentality can break out anywhere, anytime, and can find anything for its object.
 Sentimentality is a lazy form of thinking, I think.
 You know, people don't want to think the hard thoughts, and yet I find the hard thoughts very paradoxically liberating.
 For instance, here is the hard thought.
 I don't want anybody to burst into tears on me, so gird your loins.
 But, you know, I've spent a lifetime taking drugs, knocking around the world, having affairs, being married, being unmarried, this, that, and the other.
 If somebody asked me, "So what do you know? What have you learned?"
 I would have to say what I've learned is that nothing lasts.
 There's a hard thought.
 Is that a cause for joy or despair?
 Well, if you're thinking about everything you loved and how it's going to turn into mush as you're shuffled into the grave, it's a hard thought.
 But on the other hand, if you think of all the jerks who've oppressed you, it's a great consolation to know that they too will go down into that good night.
 Nothing lasts.
 That is not a cause for joy or despair.
 It's a cause for expanding one's feeling in the moment.
 If nothing lasts, then there's a conclusion, not a feeling, to be drawn from that observation.
 The conclusion to be drawn from it is then the felt presence of the immediate moment must be what life is for.
 And somebody who could take that perception and use it that way could immediately transcend all kinds of neurotic behavior, longings, regrets, doubts, fears.
 No, you're just saying no, the felt presence of immediate experience.
 Yeah, sentimentalism.
 Yeah.
 [Audience member asks a question]
 Well, first of all, let me comment on the Buddhist thing.
 I'm not that friendly to that formulation because it still is postponing gratification.
 It's saying death is the bouquet of life, you should live toward death.
 I would say the bouquet of life is this moment.
 But to the more important point of longevity, I certainly am not interested in living forever, whatever that might mean, because I suspect if you live forever, you miss the point.
 In other words, I think you miss the bouquet.
 On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with, well, no, that's too much to say.
 The only problem I have with living past whatever, three score and ten, is you do get into political issues of are people buying time at the expense of somebody else.
 One of the weirdest things about this culture is we've invented a sin for which there is no name so beyond most people's ability to conceive.
 And this sin that we've invented is we steal the future from our children.
 We do it with our medical health care plans where we know that all this fine surgery and stuff that you're getting is at the expense of the next generation of people.
 We overuse resources, leaving nothing for future generations.
 I don't know how that would all be sorted out.
 I am attracted by the idea of living as long as I want to live.
 I wonder how long that would be.
 And, of course, if you make people comfortable, probably they would like to live a lot longer.
 What reason is there for a person to check out of a comfortable situation?
 In a sense, what nature does is make the body a less and less comfortable place to be until finally you just say, "All right already."
 "Beam me up, Scotty."
 But then the other possibility is what if there were forms of existence that were dematerialized?
 How would we feel about going into circuitry for a few rounds of eternity?
 And what are the moral implications of that?
 I don't know. I've had this argument with Robert Anton Wilson.
 He's a big enthusiast for life extension.
 It depends on what you think death is.
 And I've managed to talk myself into the idea that death is probably not simply dissolution and chaos,
 not because I have received any guidance from on high,
 but just as I observe nature, she has a wonderful parsimoniousness about her behavior.
 And clearly this form, which is basically an unraveled DNA molecule,
 that is now making a lot of claims on resources in the environment in order to keep this body going,
 is... nature put a lot of effort into this.
 And I think that the best model for what life is, based not on religious thinking, but on biological thinking,
 is life is what you get when a hyperdimensional object protrudes into ordinary space.
 In other words, if we take this cup and cut it in two, it doesn't change.
 It just becomes a cup in two pieces.
 But it doesn't bleed, it doesn't rot, it doesn't lose its essence.
 If we take any living being, from a bacterium to a brontosaur, and cut it in two,
 the entire system falls apart very quickly and we've created a mess
 and we see that the thing that we had is no longer there.
 So I think what biology is, is the intrusion into three-dimensional space and time of hyperdimensional objects.
 And the other clue to that, that seems an argument for it, is that we do have this thing called a mind,
 but we can't find it anywhere.
 It doesn't seem to be anywhere, even when you get down to the level of electrodes in the brain
 and saying words to people and watching oscilloscopes, you still can't seem to quite nail it down.
 So I think probably these objects retract back into hyperspace, higher space,
 and that this is what the soul is.
 There is something to this idea of a morphogenetic field.
 And we clothe ourselves in matter, but we are not matter.
 And so to actually complete a human cycle of existence, you have to go into death.
 It's where you came from, in some sense.
 I mean, we put a lot of attention into death.
 We don't look very much at birth.
 We think we understand it.
 I mean, we all know the story about the sperm and the egg and all that.
 But before that, what is going on?
 Whence come these forms?
 We seem to have the matter down pretty good,
 but really what a being is, is the intrusion into space-time of a form.
 And the form is unique, and then it retreats.
 I think it would be one of the great jokes of human history
 if here at the end of the 20th century, at the end of the millennium,
 with all this techno-hypolis surging around us,
 if we were to actually gain insight into the after-death state.
 And one of the reasons I'm so keen for DMT is because when I have given it
 to people who were purported experts in the after-death state,
 Tibetan lamas and shamans and this sort of thing,
 they come back and they say, "Yep, that's the territory, all right."
 And so in my highest states, I have had the insight,
 which I will convey to you without saying it's true,
 that this is the most limited form of existence you will ever know.
 You can't be deader than this.
 This is the bottom line.
 And so the good news is it's only up from here.
 But of course, you have to bet the farm on this cheerful rap,
 and there's no whining if you're wrong.
 This is an all-or-nothing bet,
 and so naturally it brings your heart into your throat.
 But that's the kind of enterprise life is,
 the small risk and the race to the swift, I think.
 One last--
 Well, I don't know, and I wonder what I will think
 as I approach the great divide.
 It's easy in the pink of hell to speculate and play the philosoph
 and all that nonsense, but the last dance you dance,
 you dance alone, and nobody will be watching.
 But I have seen people die, and it is an inspiration.
 I hope to have that equanimity of mind.
 The other thing about death that needs to be said
 is we all imagine, I think,
 that we will have a leisurely philosophical death.
 That's what we all want, you know,
 months to get used to the idea, to say goodbye,
 to gather friends, to make our bequeathments,
 to speak our final wisdom.
 But death for most people comes messily and unexpectedly,
 and so I don't think you should live in an anticipation
 of the drama of your deathbed scene.
 Better to repair to the moment, being a realist primarily.
 What I find always waiting when I return
 from these flights of philosophical fancy and imagination
 is my body, my history, my space, my time,
 and these things are all good.
 It's a great space, a great time, a great body,
 a great being to be.
 So the real message of the psychedelic experience
 and of the anti-historical thrust of the critique
 we've been carrying out here is to take the moment,
 the felt presence of immediate experience.
 This is all you know. It's all you will ever know.
 Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor, innuendo,
 unrealized possibility, fading memory, conjecture,
 lie, hope, who knows?
 But in the moment of being, we have the completion of being.
 It is always complete, every moment,
 and to the degree that we force ourselves to look beyond it
 or cannot find ourselves within it, we betray it,
 and then we have more work to do.
 Well, that's enough, I think.


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