[music]
 Well, an ideology is a simplification of reality,
 where the vast, seething, messy, baroqueness of being
 is put through some kind of rasher of language
 and comes out grossly simplified.
 And because it's grossly simplified, it becomes like a kind of algebra-video-sy,
 where now you can set up these little equations and they solve themselves,
 and you get a feeling of satisfaction from that.
 But, in fact, the whole thing betrays the human enterprise.
 And to give you a graphic example of what I'm talking about,
 I'm thinking of a scene from a novel called "Corelli's Mandolin" by Louis de Bounieres,
 where a guy who's a communist in the Greek partisans during the war
 beats a villager to death who has given shelter and food
 to some non-communist partisans fighting in the mountains.
 And the protagonist of this particular part of the novel says to this guy,
 as he's beating this old man to death, he says, "Why are you killing this old man?
 He is harmless."
 And the guy, without even missing a stroke, turns to him and says,
 "It's a matter of historical necessity.
 This is the voice of absolute fanaticism speaking,
 and this is the voice of pure ideology."
 In other words, unconscionable acts, the Holocaust,
 up to that level of unconscionable acts,
 become intellectually defensible in the presence of a complete corruption of language.
 And so ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.
 Well, ideals and ideology are not quite the same thing.
 Ideals are simple and don't knit themselves into vast intellectual structures.
 In other words, an ideal of mine is to do as little harm as possible.
 I may not meet this ideal, but it is an ideal of mine
 to try and do as good a job as I can.
 But in the name of that ideal, it doesn't lead on—
 there isn't a "therefore."
 Therefore what?
 Therefore I should become a Mormon?
 Therefore I should no longer eat meat?
 Therefore I should no longer have sex?
 Therefore—no, there isn't that kind of implication.
 But ideology always implies implication.
 If man is, as Marxists say, an economic creature,
 then the following must follow, and the following must follow from that.
 So I think ideals are very close to our emotions.
 They're things that spring from the heart,
 and their boundaries are not well-defined,
 and the implications are not clear.
 I mean, if I say my ideal is to do good for mankind,
 the next step is not at all clear.
 But if I profess an ideology, the next step is always deceptively clear.
 So I think ideologies flatten complexity.
 You know, people don't like paradox.
 I'm not sure why this is.
 I think it's a quality of print culture.
 People want closure.
 They want every program, or every intellectual argument,
 or every examination of a phenomena to end with a conclusion.
 Q.E.D. Therefore, this is what it is.
 But you don't have to be a rocket scientist
 to notice that this betrays the complexity of the world.
 The world is never one thing, or even several things.
 The world always has dimensions which exceed the descriptive machinery
 that you're applying to it.
 And I don't know who it was, George Bernard Shaw, or Nietzsche,
 or some other 19th century bad boy,
 but it has been said that the essence of intellectual maturity
 is being able to simultaneously hold two contradictory thoughts
 in your mind at the same time.
 Now you are actually approaching the beginning of intellectual maturity.
 But if you're always saying, "Well, if it's this,
 then it can't be that, and if it's this, it can't be that,"
 then you have been hoisted on the petard of dualism.
 And it's more than a joke to say that dualism is the root of all evil.
 Of course it is. It's the root of all good.
 And what really we are given is a seamless continuum of phenomena
 that we are asked to not to understand.
 That's preposterous.
 Why should talking monkeys understand reality?
 But to feel. We can feel.
 We have an extremely complex body, and nervous system,
 and perceptual apparatus which ushers us into feeling.
 So you have not mastered a situation when you understand it.
 When you understand the situation, you are probably on the road to catastrophe.
 When you feel the situation,
 you are probably moving into a good position then to act in that situation.
 And often we, in fact, usually we do not understand our feelings.
 That's a strange thing to ask of one's feelings.
 If we understand our feelings, it's simply a footnote on our intellectual housekeeping.
 It is neither necessary nor sufficient.
 What is necessary and what is sufficient is feeling into the moment.
 I think this is where we got to at some point earlier in this,
 that the felt presence of immediate experience is the defining phenomenon of being.
 If you don't, if you can't reach it, you are in trouble.
 You need some kind of help. Psychedelics, therapy, loving kindness, something.
 And if you can reach it, then you have contacted the authentic domain of being.
 I almost said of humaneness, but it goes deeper than that.
 Because the animal world is living in that space.
 Well, I think because of the good offices of quantum physics and some other things,
 we are beginning to realize that things like chaos, like paradox,
 these are not names for intellectual black holes.
 These are names for the sources of life's richness and its advance,
 its creative advance, lies in these things.
 Reducing, as we have done over the past 200 years, the universe to a machine,
 some kind of a machine, then robs it of meaning.
 And then we stand back and look at our lives and our societies and say,
 "How come they have no meaning?"
 It's because we labored like demons to make sure that they didn't have meaning.
 And now we have no one to blame but ourselves for the gross simplification of reality
 and the betrayal of experience that we achieved in that process.
 Yeah, well, yeah.
 You know, years ago in Canada there was a political party called the Social Credit Party.
 And they had a very complex scheme that nobody could understand.
 And they ran on the platform under the motto,
 "You don't have to understand social credit in order to vote for it."
 So this is sort of what you're talking about.
 Harold, that's a great thing to tell, especially why not?
 Why not, yes.
 Feelings are primary.
 The primary datum of experience is feeling.
 And then out of that comes a logical reframing of experience.
 And then still lower on the rung,
 and I maintain low enough on the rung that one shouldn't go that low,
 is an ideological recasting of experience.
 And it's a delicate thing.
 I mean, I'm not offering a simple answer here.
 It requires constant fine-tuning and intelligence.
 And to look at—and every day I think we have to—it's almost like we need—
 what is it that the Marxists used to do? Criticism, self-criticism.
 We need to be alert to ideology.
 It's constantly seducing us.
 Yeah, dialectic, but the idea of criticism, self-criticism,
 that you constantly, you and your colleagues or comrades, constantly search your behavior for betrayal of the ideology.
 I think we need to constantly search ourselves, not for the betrayal of ideology,
 but for the embracing of it and say, "Oh, dear, I'm starting to believe something.
 Slap, slap. Ah, that feels better."
 Because these ideologies are incredibly draining and distracting.
 They get in the way between us and true feeling.
 On the other hand, if you don't apply logical razors to experience,
 then feeling is open to all kinds of interpretations that become somehow themselves springboards to ideology.
 I think it's really important to try to keep things as simple as possible
 because they will still be hellaciously complex if you are true to experience.
 The simplest explanation of what is going on here is still maddeningly Baroque.
 So throwing on flying saucers and papal plotting and the plans of great Atlantis only further exacerbate the problem.
 If you just deal with the given of the fact of your history and your destiny, things are quite complex enough.
 And of course, again, what the psychedelics do is provide a reference point in organism.
 It's like a reset button.
 It says beyond ideology, beyond cultural programming, beyond language, beyond hope, beyond fear, beyond expectation,
 there is the raw datum of experience here.
 Have a dose. Didn't work? Have a bigger dose.
 And if we keep returning to the raw datum of experience,
 then these other things, they will recrystallize around us,
 but not with the imprisoning intensity that they have for straight people.
 We know that behind all this constipated social stability lies the chaos of the psychedelic experience.
 It's important to keep it in mind in very unpsychedelic situations.
 But people who have never broken through the cultural dream take it to be reality
 and to commit crimes based on delusions about what is and isn't reality.
 Well, not to speak of whales and dolphins specifically, but nature as a dynamic field of activity
 beyond the reach of politicians, image makers, and so forth and so on.
 Nature is the constant psychedelic companion of the human experience.
 I think we know this. That's why we crowd into cities and build walls and keep nature at bay.
 If you go into nature alone and don't eat much and don't speak much,
 within 72 hours the hills speak and the winds confer with you
 and you are conveyed into an animate, caring, living, natural dynamic.
 But it's threatening to the ego.
 This is the first time in two hours I've used this word.
 But the ego is a maladaptive tumor-like growth in the personality
 that has been inculcated into you by the toxicity of culture.
 It is literally the response to toxic culture is the growth of ego.
 The more toxic the culture, the more the ego is revered as a natural value within that culture.
 So responding to dolphins and whales and anthills and termite swarms and these kinds of things
 is an opening to the natural dynamic that's all around us.
 Many people never observe nature except when psychedelics force it upon them.
 But this is a very... I think if you feel afraid of psychedelics,
 but you want the juice that you may sense there,
 take up wilderness camping and do it assiduously.
 And though it's a slower process and you may not have specifically colored hallucinations,
 the conclusions that you will emerge with are essentially the same as the psychedelic voyager emerges from.
 Nature is deep, ordered, dynamical, and caring for the project of being.
 And so should we be.
 And the order that we seek is the natural order of our bodies and our minds in interface with the world,
 not the unnatural order of ideology, commodification, propaganda, and a misuse of communication.
 No, I think it's very difficult because the process of education,
 without anybody quite knowing where the crime was committed,
 has turned from a handing on of cultural values to a handing on of this neurotic behavior around commodification.
 And people are clueless and they're being used and abused.
 People, seemingly intelligent people, behave in incredibly stupid ways.
 The phenomenon of the respectability of aimless shopping.
 Shopping is unconscionable. It's stupid. It's tasteless. It's murderous towards the earth.
 And yet people who teach at Esalen will suddenly drop their guru persona
 and whip out the charge plate and head for Robinson's.
 What kind of thinking is going on here?
 They are clearly not alienated enough.
 Alienation may be for them just a stance,
 but where they're really comfortable is down at Barney's racking up the charge card.
 Somehow the message has to be put across that there are no exceptions to the obligation to decommodify experience.
 And anybody who feels alienated from this orgy of consumerism is going to have to look elsewhere for their values.
 I don't quite, I feel blessed because I guess I'm just so alienated that it doesn't touch me.
 But recently for some reason I had to lay out my income for an attorney
 and say how much I spent every month on things like entertainment and so forth and so on.
 So he called me on the phone. He said, "You declared $15 a month for entertainment."
 He said, "Based on your income, do you know how much would be a standard deduction for entertainment?"
 And I said, "How much?" He said, "$700 a month."
 I said, "That's inconceivable to me. What kind of idiot would I be?"
 And I said, "And I put down the $15 because I knew you wanted something."
 But in fact I don't think I spend $15 a month on entertainment. What is entertainment anyway?
 So, you know, I suppose it just sounds like preaching a kind of monkishness.
 But what is the charm of all this crap? Can anybody explain it to me?
 I heard a story about the Dalai Lama. I mean, let this ricochet around in your mind.
 The Dalai Lama came to Los Angeles and so the committee that was there to receive him
 and make his visit comfortable wanted to do something with him in LA that would be uniquely LA,
 but that would be amusing for Dalai.
 So they decided to take him to Rodeo Drive.
 And basically they just turned him loose with his translator and said,
 "You know, we'll meet you back here in an hour and a half and check it out.
 This is a unique place in American culture."
 So then after it was over and they were all having their double espresso or the Campari
 or whatever they were having, the Dalai Lama said,
 "I want to thank you so much for making this experience available to me.
 I feel I understand Americans so much better now. I saw so many things I wanted."
 This is the Dalai Lama talking. He saw so many things he wanted.
 Well, if the Dalai Lama is not immune, my God, what chance have you and I?
 If the Dalai Lama can't hold this stuff back, you know, you might as well buy that Hermes scarf.
 Just give up. Give them the $200 for the damn thing and enjoy it. Yeah.
 Well, as an old anarchist, I can tell you, efforts to organize anarchists are so fraught with contradiction
 that I wish you luck and I'll make a small donation.
 But I don't think it can be done that way.
 I think...
 Yes, you will definitely give me $15 worth of entertainment per month.
 Well, I hate to tell you this, but I would never do what you are doing.
 This may be the ultimate teaching.
 Do not ever again spend money to see me.
 My God, how much income is going down the drain as the ultimate oral empowerment is given?
 OK, as long as you take it as entertainment, that's fine.
 I have one more little story. I didn't tell you the story about the two rabbis, did I?
 Good. This is my ending story for the afternoon.
 I don't present it as a summation, but it amuses me.
 For those of you who don't like Jewish jokes,
 you will notice as this joke is told that it is easily translated into a Zen mode, a Sufi mode.
 I just like the Jewish flavor.
 There were two rabbis, extremely advanced Thai rabbis,
 Taomudists, great men of accomplishment, and they were at temple.
 And one of them prayed.
 And he said, "Lord," he stood up and he spoke aloud, and he said, "Lord, I am nothing."
 And then he sat down and the other guy got up and he said, "Lord, I am nothing."
 And there was a guy there sweeping the floor, a custodial person.
 And he thought, "Well, people are praying. Get a prayer in here."
 So he stood up and said, "Lord, I am nothing."
 And the first rabbi looked at the second rabbi and he said, "So look who thinks he's nothing?"
 That's it. That's a story about the imagination.
 The time wave is a variable wave scaled against time
 and can be scaled against very large amounts of time,
 even amounts of time larger than the life of the universe,
 thousands, millions of times larger than that.
 And you might ask, what's the point of scaling a temporal description
 over periods of time so vast that there is no reason to assume they ever existed?
 Well, the answer is that at these transition points, these dramatic shift points,
 the software automatically, as in the course of running the algorithm,
 keeps track of days to end, days until you get down here to a hypothetical end point,
 even if this is not billions of years, but trillions of years.
 It will keep track of this day count number.
 And what we discovered to our bewildered amazement was these day counts
 were almost always prime numbers or the product of two primes.
 [Audience member] What are you measuring again?
 Well, I'll answer your question, but it isn't relevant to what I'm talking about.
 What I'm measuring, what this is measuring is the ebb and flow of novelty and habit.
 And you've actually led me back to the main track,
 so we'll get serious and get out a pointer.
 That's always a sign that we're really serious.
 I don't want to give my ordinary time wave lecture
 because I've given it enough that the meme is actually established in the culture
 and there are dozens of tapes of it and written versions and fights on the internet,
 so why should I explain it to you all over again?
 I'll just assume that in the course of talking about specific issues that relate to it,
 you will pick up the rules of the game.
 And then if you're just too excruciated by your confusion,
 you can ask a question and I'll try and answer it.
 The basic assumption is there is a quality to reality which science has overlooked.
 Some people in the East have called it Tao.
 I want to divorce myself from the freight of that tradition and I want to call it novelty.
 Novelty is the quality in nature that seeks complexity.
 That's what it is.
 And its countervailing force is called habit.
 So what I'm proposing to you is that we live in a universe ruled by two fundamental forces
 that are larger than physics and electromagnetism and all of those good things.
 And these two forces are habit and novelty.
 And in every situation, whether it lasts a millisecond or a billion years,
 the struggle between these two tendencies of the universe can be discerned.
 Now, it's pretty self-explanatory what these terms mean, but I'll run through it.
 Habit means repetition of previously established pattern,
 continuation of an equilibrium situation,
 a tendency for a system to degrade entropically under the aegis of the second law of thermodynamics,
 a conservative tendency, a preservationist tendency, habit, right? For crying out loud.
 Okay, the other thing is novelty, the opposite of habit.
 What is novelty? It's the new, the untried levels of complexification previously unachieved,
 unusual connectivity, creativity, surprise, novelty.
 And these two things are locked in struggle over vast scales of time.
 Notice I did not say eternally locked in struggle.
 They are not eternally locked in struggle because the good news is novelty is winning.
 Novelty is winning. If you get big enough chunks of time,
 though there may be vicissitudes, ups and downs, ultimately the situation ends up more novel than it started out.
 Ilya Prigozhin, who got the Nobel Prize for work in non-equilibrium thermodynamics,
 called this the principle of order through perturbation,
 a counterintuitive phenomenon in physical chemistry because for a very long time,
 one of the strongest held faiths in physics was that the universe is undergoing thermodynamic degradation.
 In other words, everything is tending to fall apart.
 Prigozhin showed that this is not true, that even in physical systems,
 there can be simple physical systems, there can be spontaneous mutation to higher states of order.
 So what's really going on in the universe is a struggle between these two tendencies.
 Biology represents the emergence of a very novel set of chemical strategies
 for the preservation and maintenance of novelty.
 The emergence of higher animals and culture and language and technology,
 these things are also novel strategies building on previous achievements in the novelty department,
 building toward our dear selves.
 And one of the interesting things about this kind of thinking is it gives a new importance to the human world.
 Science will tell you that we're lucky to be here and we're simply the awestruck witnesses
 to some kind of incomprehensible thing that has nothing to do with us anyway.
 Novelty theory would say, no, no, human complexity represents at this point
 the apex of accomplishment in the domain of novelty,
 and hence somehow the cutting edge of universal evolution in this moment in space and time
 has come to rest in ourselves.
 So what else do I want to say about this?
 Well, let's look at this screen for a minute and I'll sort of explain the rules of the game.
 This is a span of time portrayed along the horizontal axis as you're used to seeing.
 In this case, it's seven billion years simply because we set it to be so.
 And this represents the ebb and flow of novelty.
 There's one moment in the next two hours, if you pay attention, this is the moment.
 When the wave moves up, habit is increasing, not decreasing.
 It's counterintuitive if you're into the stock market.
 In the stock market, we always want it to go up unless we're selling short, but none of you would do that, I'm sure.
 So in this case, the excitement is where the wave moves down.
 And if this is seven billion years, notice that what I said is true of this screen.
 We end up in a far more novel position than we started.
 We started out up here.
 Habit won, was winning the battle for at least 700 million years along here.
 And it lost its foothold and novelty surged forward almost uninterruptedly, although this is quite a hiccup.
 It probably lasted 200 million years, this hiccup.
 And if you want to get a notion of the scale of what we're looking at, then life emerged from the primordial oceans at the top of this pimple.
 All this is what's called the archaeozoic and the prebiotic phase of the Earth's existence.
 Yes.
 Good question.
 It derails my plan for economy, but since you had the intelligence to ask it, you should probably be told.
 The basic data, and I don't want anyone to laugh.
 Oh, my God, you laugh before I tell you.
 So that it doesn't hurt so much.
 The basic data comes out of the Qing.
 And oh, thank you for being so polite.
 If somebody had told me this is the most powerful attack on this idea and it begins like this.
 So you want to make a revision in physics based on a Chinese occult divinatory system?
 Are we getting this correct?
 Well, in spite of the sneering, let me see if I can make it make a little bit more sense to you.
 I'm not going to review what the Qing is in an environment as exotic as this.
 That would insult our intelligence.
 The interesting thing about the Qing, even its skeptics agree, is that it seems to work.
 Very puzzling.
 Other forms of sort of age seem much less certain.
 Here's what I think is happening.
 First of all, let's look at the Western notion of time as we derive it from Newton.
 The Western notion of time is that time is what is called pure duration.
 All time is in Western physics is the place where you put process so that it doesn't all happen at once.
 Time has no quality.
 It's pure duration.
 Think of it as a perfectly smooth surface.
 The only modification to this doctrine in the past 500 years is Einstein came along 100 years ago and said,
 "In the presence of massive gravitational fields, this perfect smoothness is slightly distorted over very large scales."
 So we go from perfectly smooth pure duration to very slightly curved space time.
 But the main idea, which is contiguous through all of these intellectual evolution,
 is the idea that the local fine structure of time can be portrayed as a zero-dimensional space.
 If that's too technical for you, it means that locally it is okay to think of time as perfectly smooth.
 I say it isn't.
 Why should it be?
 This has to do with a form, remember we talked about sentimentality and how it can distort thinking.
 This adherence to the idea that time is perfectly smooth is a sentimental notion left over from our infatuation with perfect geometrical shapes
 when Greek science kicked off about 2,500 years ago.
 It took Kepler and Copernicus to demonstrate that the orbits of the planets were not perfect spheres
 because God loves perfect circles.
 And one by one, the perfect objects of Greek mathematical and geometric theorizing have been laid aside.
 The planets do not move in perfect circles.
 Nothing else has been found to have mathematical perfection except that this idea of pure duration has been hung on to.
 And there's a reason for this, and I apologize for the digression, but it's very hard to snip the loose ends on a thing like this.
 The reason this idea of pure duration has been hung on to is because science, modern science, does its business through a series of hat tricks called probability theory.
 And probability theory is the idea that you can learn something useful about a phenomenon.
 Let's say, for instance, you want to know how much voltage is running through a wire.
 The strange thing about this value that you come up with is this.
 It is not necessary that it correspond to any one of the thousand measurements that you took.
 It's entirely possible you will get a value that is not congruent with any one of your measurements.
 But we say with confidence, "Well, it's the average. It's the average."
 Lurking behind this notion, "average," is the unexamined assumption that time is completely uniform.
 That it does not matter when the measurement is made.
 And now, why do we assume that? Is there any reason to assume that?
 Well, not looking at nature. No, there is no reason to assume that.
 Looking at science, hell yes, there's a reason to assume that.
 You can't do science unless you assume that.
 Because science depends on what is called the experimental method.
 An experiment is you arrange a funny little unusual situation,
 which is designed to cause some phenomenon normally lost in the noise of being,
 to be thrown into high relief.
 And basic to the idea of experiment is what is called the restoration of initial conditions.
 In other words, we're going to roll a ball bearing down a ruler and measure its velocity.
 And we do this. And then we say, "Restore initial conditions."
 That means pick up the ball bearing and move it back to the top of the ramp.
 But now notice that time has passed since the first time the ball bearing rolled down the ramp.
 If time is not uniform, then you cannot restore initial conditions.
 If you cannot restore initial conditions, you cannot make sense of probabilistic data.
 So we have assumed and preserved this sentimental notion of Greek science
 because it makes it possible to do modern science.
 If we were intellectually honest about what's going on,
 then what we really should say is that probability theory and modern science
 is the study of those natural phenomena so coarse-grained
 that an assumption of a restoration of initial conditions does not destroy the integrity of the phenomenon.
 In other words, it's a lens that can be focused only to a certain depth.
 And beyond that, it begins to give false data.
 Of course, ball bearings always roll down ramps the same way.
 Of course, two liquids always mix together in the same way.
 But who cares about these things?
 What we're interested in are love affairs, dynastic transitions, corporate takeovers,
 political revolutions, family feuds.
 And the interesting thing about these things is they never happen the same way twice.
 Have there ever been two identical births, divorces, love affairs, corporate takeovers?
 Of course not. We would not even expect such a thing.
 We understand that the complexity of those phenomena ensures their uniqueness.
 Well, when it comes to talking about the uniqueness of something,
 I think it is safe to say that the mind of Terence McKenna was about as unique as anything this universe has produced so far.
 And we'll have more of Terence in this workshop about imagination in my next podcast,
 but first I want to do a little something different.
 As I mentioned at the beginning of today's program, I'm going to play another little conversation for you,
 but it is much more recent, just about a month ago to be exact.
 And the reason I feel compelled to play it for you right now is simply to let you know that
 whenever you get together with a few friends, maybe have a toke or two,
 and get involved in a rather heady discussion,
 then you are doing the same thing that fellow psychonauts are doing all over the planet these days.
 What I'm about to play comes from my friend Alan Lundell,
 who you probably remember from his work on Mondo 2000 and other influential publications back in the day.
 The occasion on which this recording was made was the recent Luscious Libra Live Sushi and Birthday Party,
 which also included DJs, a fire circle, hot tubbing, and the ever-popular Hookah Lounge.
 So, as you can tell, it was just your average California weekend get-together.
 Now, at one point during this little event, which included a bunch of experienced trippers,
 ranging in age from 28 to 71, and many of whom were uber-geeks, I should add,
 well, when one of them brought up the topic of neutrons,
 Alan grabbed the famous physicist Nick Herbert from the Hookah Lounge
 and brought him into the conversation that was taking place around the fire circle.
 And that's about where the following audio recording begins.
 Now, my guess is that about the only difference between this conversation
 and one that you might have with your friends in a college dorm room tonight
 is that Nick Herbert is one of the world's top physicists,
 and the other people in this conversation are also at the top of their professions.
 My point here is to show you that your ideas are probably as good as the next person's ideas.
 It really doesn't matter if you've got a dozen degrees,
 or if you've educated yourself by reading, going to lectures, and other ways.
 Because once you've picked up a few bits and pieces of ideas here in the salon,
 or over on KMO's C-Realm podcast, or on one of the Dope Fiends series of programs,
 or any of the many other great podcasts that are out there right now,
 well, you're as well equipped as anyone to add your two cents to
 what is ultimately just a lot of semi-informed speculation on most of our parts.
 However, I do have to admit that there are some people, like Nick Herbert,
 who happen to be considerably better informed about most things than I am.
 So, now let's sit in on a typical California conversation among a few fellow psychonauts.
 Maybe we'll see how many of the world's problems can be solved in just a few short minutes.
 And for sure, we're going to learn that even among the tribe,
 there are generational gaps and shocks about the ways in which our sacred medicines are sometimes used.
 Nick, I wanted you to meet a fellow mad scientist from the mountains.
 You probably know. I don't know.
 He's talking to me, he's mumbling some serious physics shit,
 and I thought, you know, you might see if this could be for real.
 Let's look at neutrons, about neutrons being exactly equal.
 Hi. Hi. My name is Nick.
 Hey, Nick. Michael, Nick, and Andy. Andy. Andy.
 Yeah. How it's for you to moderate this discussion?
 Yeah, I'm just kind of curious what you think of this.
 Yeah, I am too.
 This is something you think about all the time, sir. I think it would be...
 But, you know, he's a real specialist. My specialty is quantum physics.
 Excellent.
 And you were saying about neutrons?
 Well, I was saying that from what I've understood, and I was an undergraduate physics major, not a...
 Nothing dangerous.
 I actually scattered them myself.
 My experiment took deuterons and hit them into a carbon target.
 A deuteron is a neutron in the proton.
 And this carbon, it just... we were trying to graze the target so it would minimally separate the two.
 And then we were going to study the properties of a deuteron by looking at an almost deuteron.
 That was our hope.
 So I was looking at... we couldn't measure the neutrons.
 They just went through everything, but we could measure the protons.
 Sure.
 I was trying to measure the polarization. That was my thesis.
 Fantastic.
 And you're the first person I've ever talked to about this in 50 years.
 [laughter]
 Once I got done with that experiment, I wanted nothing to do with it.
 Well, that's...
 I was so bored.
 Is that when you took acid?
 Yeah, I took acid too, but...
 That helped.
 Well, it helped me realize what priorities were, that physics was just, you know, way down at the bottom.
 Where the mysteries were.
 The real mystery is up here.
 But I couldn't think of anything to do.
 I mean, except take more drugs.
 You get a brain doing that?
 Just imagine taking acid right after an AI final, when in AI you're trying to replicate up here in the brain.
 It just made your job 100 times harder, didn't it?
 [laughter]
 I don't know, that was just the best trip of my life, though. That's all I'll say.
 But you realize what a problem... well, not what a problem, what a gift or what a puzzle of consciousness is after you've taken acid.
 Yeah, oh yeah.
 I mean, before, you know, you're living a life... you've had some experiences down here and up here.
 You've had that experience... you think you know what life is all about.
 You take acid. Wow!
 Now you see all kinds of possibilities that could be, you know, up here.
 But before then, you fondly thought that you were actually seeing things with your eyes.
 Well, that and I thought I was pretty arrogant.
 I thought I knew, you know, not only what I knew, but what I didn't know.
 I thought I knew all the areas.
 But acid showed me that there were a zillion things that I don't know, especially about the mind.
 The mind is really big and hard to understand.
 I wasn't too disappointed on my first acid trip.
 I was kind of expecting more.
 You were expecting more?
 I did, I did about...
 Second generation!
 You were expecting more on your first acid trip?
 I did at least 350 bikes.
 It was probably like Owsley acid.
 Because I was getting all of that, you know, I was getting Owsley stuff.
 But you had heard something that was even greater that you thought you might experience?
 No, it was just that there was a lot of hype about it.
 You know, it was like the pre-experience hype.
 I thought that acid is supposed to be a hallucinogen, right?
 Therefore you should hallucinate.
 See things that aren't there.
 And when I looked, I just saw what was ordinarily there, except when you close your eyes.
 But then later I learned that everything that you see is a hallucination.
 So that showed that really, you know, my expectations were way off in the beginning.
 Well, just the fact that most of the time we don't see any auras on each other, that itself is a hallucination.
 Yeah, absolutely.
 Well, because we see things the way an ape...
 We see things that apes need to see.
 You know, and slightly advanced apes.
 But all the other shit, what I would like...
 We were talking about what we'd like, you know, technology.
 I'd like some tech that would help me smell like my dog.
 That knows that I could amplify things about a hundred times.
 Or a million times.
 Or a million times.
 Wouldn't that be something to perceive that world?
 Talk about a different world.
 Yes.
 And I've read hypotheses why we don't have a sense like that.
 We'd never get anything done.
 All these sets going around, you know, you follow...
 Isn't that where the robots come in?
 Well, maybe we didn't need it way up in the trees.
 We are wired for survival.
 Our perceptions are narrowed down to what we need.
 That's right, to what we need to survive.
 And so, ESO-ASID is, in a way, is an anti-survival thing.
 Except for the researchers.
 Except for...
 In LSD, My Problem Child, by Hoffman.
 I love that book.
 My favorite scene in there was where he's walking with some other German professor,
 and they're walking in the black forest, there's stone to the gills,
 and they say, "This is too good for the peasants."
 Only minds like ours can really enjoy LSD.
 There's some truth to that.
 There is.
 A lot of people treat it like a party drug,
 and don't look for any particular insights, and therefore don't find any.
 But the more mind you have, the more fun you have when it's fucked up.
 I mean, that's another thing.
 I was certainly glad I didn't take ASID when I was a teenager.
 Because now I had really an amazingly complex thing to screw up with.
 The thing is, I was already reading books by Alan Watts and R.D. Lang,
 and all of them, really.
 Leary and all that stuff, way before I did LSD, when I was a teenager.
 So when I finally got around to it, like at age 15...
 Fifteen?!
 My first ASID trip.
 Even though I took Hoffman's advice and waited until I was like...
 I waited until I was 20.
 Oh, late comer.
 Good boy.
 Anyway...
 Yeah, me too.
 But anyway, I was 15 years old, and it was just...
 That's statutory rape.
 No, no, we were all teenagers.
 We all had it.
 And we were New Yorkers, you know, we were all sophisticated kids.
 We were all playing electric guitars and stuff.
 And I remember listening to The Who.
 Before we went out, I was with a couple of friends in Brooklyn,
 and we went out at night.
 It was at night, and before we left, we listened to The Who.
 He actually put on...
 What, you took ASID and walked into New York City?
 I lived in New York City.
 Yeah, I know, but...
 Anyway, let me finish.
 Anyway, go on.
 Go on.
 No strangers in Amsterdam.
 This is very interesting.
 So, anyways, what happened was, you know, this friend of ours,
 he had already done ASID, and he was already, like, to the West Coast and back.
 And I had another friend that was an ASID dealer that went from the hate to here,
 you know, and so, anyway, he was programming us with music,
 and he played every song that he played.
 He just kept changing records, changing...
 Hendrix, Are You Experienced, The Who, I Can See for Miles, you know,
 Moody Blues, you know, In Search of a Lawsuit, or whatever, you know,
 all this stuff specifically designed to prep us.
 And then he said, "Okay, let's go out."
 So we went out, and we took the subway to Manhattan,
 and it was late at night, and the subway turned into a serpent.
 Wow, inside the esophagus of the serpent, you know.
 And I remember at one point, there was this group of people that walked by,
 because people pass through cars, you know, and they walked through.
 And they all looked really deformed.
 And, like, extremely deformed, like, certain limbs were out of kilter
 with the length of other limbs, and just really weird, you know.
 And they were walking through, and I remember the feeling I had
 wasn't so much shock as semi-social embarrassment,
 because I didn't want to say anything to make them feel embarrassed,
 but they really were that way.
 [laughter]
 It was really funny.
 That's good thinking.
 And for the whole train ride, one guitar solo was going through my brain
 on a loop, and it was John Cipollina's solo for a song called
 "Joseph's Many-Colored Coat" on the album Shady Grove.
 And if you ever get a chance to listen to that solo, think of me, man.
 That was a nice moment.
 But anyway, so we went to Central Park, and we spent a lot of the--
 Was this during the day?
 No, at night.
 At night.
 It was probably about 10 p.m. or something.
 Nobody was in the park.
 It was really dark.
 Nobody but the muggers, you know.
 But you were--how many--
 They were afraid of you.
 Well, how many were--
 A little too weird.
 How many were there of you? Three?
 Yeah.
 Three, huh?
 And it was great, because I remember we'd walk up these little hills,
 and it almost felt like night vision.
 Maybe the moon was full.
 And as I'm walking up the hill, the feeling of, like, pressure under my feet from gravity
 as I'm walking up the hill made my body feel smaller and smaller and smaller,
 and so I felt like I was shrinking and shrinking.
 And I got to the top of the hill, and gravity was releasing,
 and I felt like I was growing.
 Wow.
 I do remember that.
 Did you check to see if you were deformed or any--
 [laughter]
 It's not that easy.
 If you'd looked in the mirror, you might have seen--
 Well, no, this is what shocked me most of all.
 I looked in the mirror, and I looked normal.
 [laughter]
 The mind is amazing, isn't it?
 But maybe they could see you in the park, you know, the muggers and all.
 They were like, "Whoa, what's up with that guy?"
 Speaking of shrinking, that brings us back to the original topic,
 which is, you know, turtles all the way down, basically.
 You know, there is this theory in physics that there are worlds within worlds
 and that it just continues to infinity, turtles all the way down.
 But it seems to me, from what I've read of quantum mechanics,
 that there's reason to think that that's not true,
 that at a certain level, below the level of the neutron,
 maybe quarks and electrons,
 you come to a point where there isn't any inner world,
 that things like Fermi-Dirac statistics and Bell's theorem
 indicate to us that there's no inner structure beyond a certain point,
 that if there were, you wouldn't have Fermi-Dirac statistics.
 You would have statistics like we have in the macroscopic world,
 where when you throw two coins, for example,
 you have a 50/50 chance of getting heads, tails, and tails, heads,
 because the two coins are different.
 You can distinguish between them.
 And that down in the submicroscopic quantum world,
 you have like a one-third chance of that.
 One-third chance of all, heads, tails, and head, ends, tails.
 One-third for each of them.
 One-third for heads, tails, and tails, heads,
 because you can't distinguish between them.
 And the reason why you can't distinguish between them
 is that all subatomic particles of a given type are absolutely identical.
 Wouldn't that be something if all of a sudden our kind of coins did that?
 Yeah, absolutely.
 Wouldn't that be something?
 Wouldn't that be a case for a crazy wisdom school of Buddhism?
 Well, it would seem like there's a lot of resemblance
 between things like Buddhism and Hinduism and physics.
 I only use coins.
 In my view, science has been invented twice.
 Science was invented once back in ancient India.
 And they looked at an inner world.
 And again, in, let's say, Galileo, 400 years ago,
 looking at an outer world.
 What did they discover?
 I mean, what is Indian inner physics?
 I kind of wish there was such a thing that you could read about in books
 where they would talk about the structure of the mind
 and funny little things you can do.
 Like if you close your eyes and inhale two or three times, you travel to Mars.
 Real inner technology.
 Well, supposedly.
 I don't see any.
 In the Yoga Sutras, for example, you have this phenomenon of Samadhi,
 where the brain can focus in a type of total concentration
 and basically identify itself with things in the external world or the internal world.
 And it's at least claimed that that's another route to knowledge
 than external scientific experimentation.
 Now, whether it's true or not, I don't know.
 It could be checked.
 I think it's a perceptual validation of science.
 I've heard that some Hindu texts were very helpful when...
 Who was the guy who was inventing the bomb?
 I've heard it, but it's not confirmed.
 The atomic bomb?
 Yeah, the atomic bomb.
 That they consulted Hindus to design?
 No, no, the text.
 Oh, that's interesting.
 Oppenheimer, when the bomb went off, he was standing in the desert,
 and he says, "I have become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds."
 That's what he quoted.
 And then when you look at Vishnu, for example, the other over-god of Hinduism,
 in Vishnu, Vishnu is asleep, dreaming, and the dream is the world,
 which is basically a simulation of reality, as far as I can tell.
 He is simulating our world by dreaming it.
 People that do DMT claim that they see that.
 It's an inner hydrogen bomb, you know?
 That they claim to see the mechanisms of the world,
 and they are kind of dream-like.
 Definitely an inner detonator.
 What's that?
 At least an inner detonator.
 DMT, I've never had it.
 Oh, I do.
 You know Will, right?
 Sure, yeah.
 Is Will going to be here tonight?
 I invited him. I haven't seen him for a long time.
 Well, he presented me to my first full-on DMT experience.
 Now, did that meet your standards?
 Yeah.
 That's what I've heard. I've heard that.
 He put me in a room, and the room had posters of Tron and all these things.
 It was kind of high-tech.
 And there was something about the things in the images that kind of affected my hallucination.
 So I felt like I was in a--it was a real comfortable leather chair,
 and he gave me a pipe load of it.
 A pipe?
 Yeah, you smoke it.
 And I felt like I was an astronaut.
 I was in there, I was feeling this G-force, and all of a sudden I closed my eyes for a minute,
 and I saw hallucinating--I was going through this long tunnel,
 and it was like a Fellini movie.
 There were these little alcoves on either side with these strange people,
 and there were faces, but as soon as I tried to look, it was going so fast,
 and it was really weird.
 Wow!
 And the thing is, I started seeing that with my eyes closed,
 but then I opened my eyes and I kept seeing it.
 Oh, my.
 Yeah, that's an interesting thing.
 There's no reason why not.
 You know, reflecting the other and vice versa.
 It kind of mixed in a little and blended in.
 When you see with your eyes, you're really seeing with your brain,
 and your brain can project anything on the inner projection screen.
 If it wants to line the two up, it can easily do that.
 Whatever is occupying your attention more.
 I did 5MEO DMT, but I didn't get a strong experience.
 I just kind of tripped for a minute or two.
 Ah, well, you'll know when you do.
 That's kind of like the--
 Well, I think it was just a combination of things.
 I did a pretty large bowlful.
 What do you have to take before you see big, luminous things connecting all of us?
 And these things shimmer and make noise.
 Like my heart and you and my lower chakra.
 On Mescaline.
 On Mescaline, that happened?
 You take Mescaline and you begin to see the things that connect people together?
 Yeah, yeah.
 When I was like, what was I, 16 years old,
 and I had a Mescaline trip with Moondog's daughter,
 upstate New York.
 We were on a camping trip with my sister and her fiancé
 and some people having fun.
 The four of you took it?
 A few of us did, my sister and him.
 We were up all night, and I remember it was warm,
 and there was all this grass all around us,
 and we were sitting like in lotus positions or whatever.
 And I remember I was looking at her, and she was really trippy,
 because I don't know who you remember Moondog was,
 but he was a pretty fantastic character at Googling.
 Anyway, we looked at--
 and she said she saw something around me.
 Like, you know, she saw colors around me.
 And when she said that, I looked at her,
 and her saying that, all of a sudden, it opened it up,
 and I saw it all around her, too.
 Were you connected with colors, too?
 Yeah.
 It was kind of like a ripple.
 Ripples, you know, coming out of each of us.
 That's pretty good.
 I mean, Mike's perhaps was more of a--
 Reboot.
 Reboot?
 Yes, sir. Mr. Tech Head.
 You totally got it.
 I mean, it dissolves your ego or any identity of being alive,
 like dirt, clods, and water, you know?
 [laughter]
 The hydrogen bomb is not a bad analogy.
 Are you still there?
 You would come back.
 You'd come back, right?
 You'd re-coalesce.
 Yeah, you'd re-coalesce.
 This is like you must trust in your wetware.
 Whoa, whoa, whoa.
 It's a surrender.
 Right.
 But you always come back, you know?
 Isn't that something?
 I mean, that's one of the most--
 It's like a reboot, I tell you.
 It's a reboot of our bodies.
 But that's one of the most amazing things about psychedelics.
 Almost all of us have reached a point and say,
 "I'm never coming back.
 I've destroyed my mind completely.
 I'm never coming back."
 You always do.
 Yeah, right.
 And it is so amazing.
 At least you think you do.
 [laughter]
 That's what's significant.
 It all depends on how wise you are.
 You think you do, you do.
 It all depends on how wise you are.
 You think you come back to hydrogen.
 You sit and say--
 But if you're lucky, you remember some of those.
 Some of those, yeah.
 So anyway, you actually came back from the reboot.
 Yeah, it took a while.
 We took like at least 5...


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