(upbeat music)
 - Well, first of all, let me say I don't know,
 but then here's what I think.
 The model that I've always carried in my head
 is of a target, like a bullseye.
 And at the center of the bullseye
 is the dimethyltryptamine high-dose experience,
 which even though I've spent my whole career
 raving about how strange it is, I always hit low.
 I mean, it is beyond description.
 Language fails, your language, my language,
 everybody's language.
 And as you move out from that,
 maybe the next circle out is high-dose ayahuasca
 followed by high-dose psilocybin,
 or maybe those two are reversed,
 and then further out, LSD,
 and then further out things like 2C-B,
 and then yet further out things like ecstasy.
 And what's leaving the picture are, first of all,
 intense three-dimensional hallucinations,
 then intense two-dimensional hallucinations,
 and the more exotic transformations of the mental state.
 But I have the feeling that we're always aiming
 for the center of this mandala.
 Somebody else might have a different model of consciousness.
 Roland Fisher had a toroidal model
 and various states of arousal.
 But to my mind, if you raise the dose of any psychedelic,
 it becomes more and more like DMT.
 You have to take over 500 micrograms of LSD
 for it to be like DMT.
 Very few people these days do that much acid
 because it brings a lot of physical stuff with it.
 Ayahuasca at moderate doses is the classical
 hallucinogen of Amazonian shamanism
 that you've all read about, but double that dose,
 and it becomes indistinguishable from DMT.
 Same with psilocybin.
 If a five-gram trip is a classic psilocybin trip,
 an eight-gram trip is like a DMT trip.
 So now some people are saying of alpha-salvinorine
 that it's much stronger than DMT.
 It's much more frightening and bizarre.
 Just to save my sanity, I choose not to believe that.
 Because I've been saying for years,
 if there's something stronger than that,
 I don't wanna know about it.
 Because that definitely pushed me as far as I wanted to go.
 My son, I think, has more experience with all of this
 than anybody else I know, and I said to him,
 "Where would you put it?"
 And he said, "It's almost as strong as DMT."
 And so it's sort of like that.
 But then over this set of values and comparisons
 I've just made, you have to overlay the fact
 that like your blue eyes, your height, your body weight,
 your intelligence, and everything else about you
 that makes you unique, your inherited
 allotment of drug synapses is unique.
 And this is why some people are sensitive to drugs,
 some people insensitive, some people extremely sensitive.
 And one of the things about exploring consciousness
 with substances is you have to sort of learn
 what works for you.
 You may have gotten the idea from hanging out
 with the wrong people that the way you explore drugs
 is by doing as many as possible
 and in as many combinations as possible.
 I couldn't do that.
 I have never done that, and I can't do that.
 My body just can't take it.
 If I want a more intense drug experience,
 I take more of one drug.
 But part of exploring this area
 is to learn what works for you.
 For example, the most dramatic and easy to understand
 example I think is cannabis.
 Most people, after a preliminary brush with cannabis
 which may last years, tend to decide
 that it somehow interferes or that they have memory problems
 or feelings of social paranoia and abandon it.
 Some small percentage of people
 experience no short-term memory loss
 and basically can't live without it.
 I speak from firsthand knowledge of this condition.
 So learning what works for you is very important
 and then pushing that, push that to its limits.
 What fascinates me, I'll just unload my personal opinion
 on you, are the tryptamine hallucinogens.
 I always found LSD too, what I call,
 abrasively psychoanalytical.
 I don't want to endlessly reflect on my childhood upbringing
 and whether I'm a good or a bad person.
 I mean, I'll do a little bit of that,
 but I think I got that under control.
 I'm not interested in myself
 in quite the way some people are interested in themselves.
 What I'm interested in,
 and what's always been the holy grail for me,
 are visual hallucinations.
 And people have said, "You're a nut on this subject."
 But the reason I'm so into visual hallucinations
 is because when I'm seeing something
 that I could not previously have even imagined,
 then I am completely convinced
 I'm in the presence of an other
 because I couldn't think that up,
 and yet I'm looking at it.
 Low doses of psychedelics or moderate doses of psychedelics
 transform the quality of thought.
 You think faster, think deeper, think odder, think broader,
 but you need more for that to burst through
 into hallucination.
 And that always has fascinated me.
 It's just, I guess, in my personality.
 I was thinking some months ago
 about the books that have really influenced me in my life.
 And we try to make a respectable list
 that makes us seem profound.
 So, you know, Moby Dick, Finnegan's Wake, Whitehead.
 Yeah, say, okay, that's the public list.
 What are the real books?
 Well, Bartholomew Cubbins and the 500 Hats.
 That was the biggie.
 But a really important book for me
 was a little book that Aldous Huxley wrote
 almost as a throwaway.
 I'm sure he barely gave it a thought.
 It's a book called The Art of Seeing.
 Seeing.
 And it basically, the message of this book
 can be given in one sentence.
 Pay attention to what your eyes are telling you.
 The eyes are it.
 And it's the visual thing that is so thrilling,
 so sexy, so infinitely deep.
 And in that book, Huxley tells you
 how to look at a painting
 by basically clear your mind, open your eyes,
 stand still, that's very important when viewing paintings,
 stand still, and let it come in.
 And then he gave advice.
 And, you know, this is advice which I've seen acted out
 in both of my children.
 Incredibly simple advice in the world of child rearing
 and incredibly important.
 And the advice was, draw from nature.
 Literally, with a pencil.
 Draw things.
 Because drawing things forces you to look at them.
 And don't draw from pictures.
 If you want to draw a bowl of fruit, get a bowl of fruit.
 And then what you look at is you see how,
 you say, oh, I see, when an object is red,
 its shadows are not black, its shadows are deep pink.
 And when an object has this curvature,
 then it spreads light around itself like this.
 And as you learn to look, this is a very impersonal process.
 You're not thinking about your childhood traumas
 or any of that stuff.
 You're really getting into the world.
 And this is how the world can communicate back to you.
 The world is something to look at.
 And that attitude in the presence of psychedelics
 will throw open a cornucopia of riches to you.
 Did you want to say something?
 - No, I was just curious, what about--
 - Oh, well, I, whenever I,
 I mean, cannabis is in a different category.
 I mix cannabis with air, with light,
 with being awake, with being asleep.
 There was a period in my life when I used to awaken
 at 3 a.m. in order to smoke,
 because I couldn't go from 11.30 to six without it.
 I mean, granted, I was in Asia and the rules were different.
 No, I don't know what life is like without cannabis.
 I hear there is such a thing.
 (audience laughing)
 But no, what I mean is, you know,
 I know people who say,
 well, we had a really far out time Saturday night.
 We did 120 milliliters of ketamine
 and followed it with ecstasy a half hour later,
 and then we broke out the nitrous,
 and somebody had a little 5-MeO with them.
 And then I say, how was it?
 And they say, far out.
 (audience laughing)
 And I don't doubt it for a minute.
 (audience laughing)
 But, well, one, I think, I always want,
 I don't want to go any place
 that I can't find my way back to,
 'cause I might want to show somebody.
 And, you know, it's sort of like
 the multi-body problem in mathematics.
 You know, you can calculate every point in a system
 if there are only two bodies,
 but you only have to add a third
 before it becomes beyond calculation.
 And drug synergies are an absolutely unexplored area.
 You cannot go to the medical literature
 and find any papers on what happens
 when you combine LSD with 2C-B.
 There isn't such a paper on this planet.
 So if you're gonna do that,
 just know that nobody has ever been there before.
 And I don't mean intellectually, I mean physiologically.
 I don't know very much about the death of this writer
 who calls himself D.M. Turner, but he did die.
 And his book, his best-known book,
 is a book that I felt was completely irresponsible
 because it advocated these multiple synergistic drug doses,
 stuff like I just said,
 2C-B plus ketamine plus nitrous plus E plus this plus that.
 That's not how I would do it.
 I say, you know, single pure substances,
 and if you're unsatisfied with the experience,
 as Dr. Leary used to say,
 when in doubt, double the dose.
 But he didn't say, when in doubt, empty the medicine cabinet.
 (audience laughing)
 Just double the dose, thank you.
 And Tim was a pretty reckless and wild-ass kind of guy,
 so if he took that position,
 I think we don't have to be ashamed to line up behind that.
 Yeah.
 Ketamine.
 It has a lot of enthusiasts.
 First thing, the most effective way to do it
 is by injection.
 Automatically, this raises flags of alarm for me.
 I just somewhere picked up the idea
 that banging things is a bad idea.
 But let's move past that, because it can be snorted.
 And anyway, ketamine is what's called
 a disassociative anesthetic.
 It is not an alkaloid.
 It is a veterinary anesthetic.
 In other words, if you have a racehorse
 and you need to put it, wrap its tendon
 or work on it in some way, this is the drug of choice.
 I cannot deny that the experiences that I had,
 and I only had five, were very, very interesting.
 I always did it in the presence of a physician.
 And I always did quite, as I understand it,
 quite high doses.
 In other words, I did around 140 milliliters.
 Yeah, milliliters.
 One of the things about ketamine
 is it's active over a huge range.
 Some people who roll it into their lifestyle
 tend to do small doses, like 40, 50, 60.
 When used as an anesthetic in pediatric surgery
 and stuff like that, 600 milliliters IV push,
 that would be like being hit by a freight train
 moving at 10 times the speed of sound.
 You would never know what hit you.
 It's a kind, for me, I'm just speaking subjectively,
 it was a sort of empty space.
 It was a light-filled space.
 And the metaphor that came to me was,
 it's like a new skyscraper and they don't have any tenants.
 So there are these endless hallways
 lit by fluorescent lights
 and wonderful water coolers every 300 feet,
 but there's nobody there.
 And I talked to Rupert about this
 because one of the things we've kicked around over the years
 is the idea that drugs are like morphogenetic fields.
 And so, for instance, when you take psilocybin,
 it takes you.
 And in a sense, you are participating
 in every psilocybin trip anybody ever had.
 And because it was taken for thousands of years
 by Mesoamerican shamans,
 it's been decorated by them in a sense.
 It has their mark on it.
 And so the morphogenetic field is extremely stable.
 Nothing you can do in there.
 You may be able to carve your initials
 on a picnic table or something,
 but you're not gonna be able to make major changes
 in that landscape.
 But suppose you're a drug chemist
 and suppose you read one of Sasha's papers
 where he tosses out the thought
 that the O-methylation in the four position
 of the trimethoxy isomer of the this and that
 might be hallucinogenic, and you make it.
 Nobody has ever taken this drug.
 It's a synthetic drug.
 You have made it and now you're going to take it.
 And in a sense, if you come down saying
 this was an incredibly beautiful visionary experience,
 the next person is very likely
 to have a beautiful visionary experience.
 If you come down saying it was nightmarish
 and I felt bugs crawling under my skin
 and stuff like this,
 what's happening is the morphogenetic field
 is crystallizing around this drug.
 And the feeling I had with ketamine
 was it's really pretty undefined territory.
 The one thing I learned from ketamine,
 and I actually have to give it credit for this,
 is I got so loaded on that stuff
 that I lost the concept loaded.
 And that's never happened to me before.
 I couldn't understand what was happening
 because I couldn't remember what being high is.
 And so here I am, and I sort of come into awareness
 and I say, "What is this?"
 And then the answer is, "Who knows?"
 Next question, "Who's asking?"
 Answer, "Who knows?"
 And so I just look at it for a while,
 and then suddenly out of left field,
 this aha experience, I must be stoned.
 And then it's like everything crystallized.
 I said, "That's it!
 "I'm a human being.
 "I took a drug.
 "I'm lying on the floor.
 "This is a trip."
 He said, "Oh, this is a trip.
 "Got you.
 "Now I know what's happening.
 "We're having a trip.
 "Okay, let's have the trip."
 But until I got that sorted out,
 it was like the biggest, "Huh?"
 So I would not,
 I don't prefer it because part of my ethic,
 I guess you would say,
 is that you should be able to communicate your experiences.
 It's almost like an obligation.
 It's like if you go fishing on our lake,
 you should give some of the fish to the village.
 If you go fishing and catch a lot of fish
 and eat them out in the boat
 and come back with nothing but bones for the village,
 then this is kind of bad behavior.
 So I stay clear of ketamine.
 I have a bias that used to be stronger
 against synthetic substances.
 But again, in fairness, I have to say,
 these drugs, people have different kinds of experiences.
 Like I've said to people on ketamine,
 you don't really hallucinate
 in the way that I want to hallucinate.
 People say, "Oh no, I had fantastic.
 "It was beyond DMT."
 So again, the individual thing.
 And then what's the final thing?
 And then just physical things about ketamine.
 I don't like a drug so strong
 that the house could burn down around you
 and you would never bat an eye.
 And that could certainly happen on ketamine.
 At height, you have not a clue.
 They could remove your head
 and you would not bat an eye.
 And the other thing I noticed about ketamine
 is it really sticks to your ribs.
 In other words, the experience lasts an hour,
 you come down, but the next day,
 you're driving on the freeway
 and comes a wave where you say,
 "Oh my God, what is this?"
 And I think it sequesters in fatty tissue or something.
 And so that makes it a little dicey.
 Hope I didn't rain on anybody's parade here.
 The people who are into it are passionately into it.
 I accused one guy one time of being a monopharmaphile.
 I said, "My God, you won't take a drink,
 "you won't have a hit, you won't do."
 But this stuff, five times a day.
 - Well, I'm as interested as you are.
 I don't have any special information.
 I did talk earlier in the weekend
 about this model of the hyperdimensional object
 intruding into three-dimensional space, time,
 and through the miracle of metabolism,
 wrapping matter around itself for a few years.
 And then when the hyperdimensional form
 retracts out of this lower dimensional matrix,
 the matter that it's organized simply falls apart.
 I like that model.
 My DMT trips, as I think I mentioned this too,
 I've given it to some Tibetan guys,
 and they said, "You can't go further than that and return."
 What he actually said was, "It's the lesser light."
 The lesser lights appear at the beginning of the bardo.
 The thing about DMT,
 and we didn't talk about it much this weekend,
 is that it is an inhabited space.
 A huge percentage of the people who take it
 encounter entities of some sort in there,
 not entities like wombats and foxes.
 But entities with intelligence of some sort,
 with language of some sort.
 Well, remember I talked about the principle of parsimony,
 of preferring the simplest explanation first.
 Well, when you have a drug
 which conveys you into an inhabited space,
 even the simplest explanation is going to be pretty baroque.
 Some people, including myself,
 wanted to leap to the conclusion,
 well, these must be the aliens.
 We finally found their hive.
 It isn't under the Atlantic Trench.
 It isn't inside Mount Everest.
 It's they're hiding inside this organic molecule.
 But I think in service of the principle of parsimony,
 preferring the simplest explanation,
 these things must be human souls.
 It's easier for me to believe in the human souls
 than to believe in a colony of extraterrestrials
 camped inside an alkaloid.
 But it's not that easy for me to believe in human souls.
 But still, the feeling you have from these things
 is one of immense affection for humanity.
 That wouldn't come from a diplomatic mission
 from Zineb El-Ghanoubi.
 This intense love, we're...
 And so I dare to hope,
 having deconditioned myself from my Catholic childhood
 and gone through existentialism and all that,
 now I dare to hope that maybe there is
 some kind of existence beyond the grave.
 One of the funny feelings,
 there are a number of, how could you call it,
 thematic layers in the DMT experience.
 But one of the thematic layers is,
 weird as this place is that you burst into,
 it's somebody very strange
 worked very hard to produce a place
 that they thought would be reassuring to a human being.
 And the analogy, it's stronger than an analogy,
 the feeling that comes through is,
 this is like a maternity ward.
 It's as though you're being born.
 And these marvelous, self-transforming,
 Fabergé, crystalline, 4D toys
 that they're handing out in this space
 may be to them nothing more than the equivalent
 of those extruded plastic geometric shapes
 that we hang on a string over a bassinet.
 And if you ask a child psychologist, why do we do this?
 They say, well, it coordinates the child's ability
 to see spatial and so forth and so on.
 It's very like that.
 You have been born into an alien world.
 And the only thing you can do is gape,
 basically gape in utter amazement.
 And everyone is surrounding you.
 And they're saying, welcome, it's okay, be happy.
 Well, then if it is like a maternity ward,
 then one can know as much about whatever universe that is
 as one could deduce about this universe
 from looking at the four walls of a maternity ward
 in a small hospital in, say, Salinas.
 In other words, if you were to actually die
 rather than smoke DMT, then if we follow this model,
 then you would be in that place,
 but there would be no going back to this world
 after five minutes.
 Instead, there would be the next five minutes in that place
 followed by the next five minutes.
 And I can tell within hours,
 you would be beyond the reach of all human,
 anything you have ever called human or thought of.
 In other words, this isn't a world where one comes back
 and whispers in the ears of people
 and bangs doors in the middle of the night.
 It appears like once out of the body,
 this incredibly enfolded and compacted field
 called the soul begins to unfold into its death rite,
 I suppose you could say,
 and quickly one would become incomprehensible to this world.
 And all that is retained is the affection
 for us in our limited situation.
 Of course, thinking along these lines,
 I've looked at the literature of near-death experience.
 What those people are describing
 is something far more mundane than a DMT trip.
 Either they are dumbing down the DMT trip
 and suppressing the oddness of it,
 or they're having a quite different experience
 because what's being said in the near-death thing,
 generally, generally, is a tunnel
 and then loving relatives,
 reassuring and familiar people.
 The DMT thing is a tunnel,
 but it isn't loving relatives waiting at the end.
 It's a welcoming committee of professional midwives.
 And they help you through.
 So I would suggest without great heat
 that if we want to study the near-death
 and after-death experience,
 that actually you come far closer to dying,
 whatever that means, on DMT
 than you do in drownings and things like that.
 Well, any situation can be looked at
 from a point of view that reveals the whole fractal.
 In other words, what it's saying
 is experience is holographic on one level,
 but linearly sequential on another level.
 In a way, this leads into,
 or this is a continuation of this discussion of death,
 because if we leave off the historical modeling
 and turn toward the modeling of an individual life
 with the time wave,
 then again, there is a message of hope.
 It says the most novel and amazing thing
 that will ever happen to you
 is the last thing that will ever happen to you.
 And I would like to believe that.
 I would like to believe that we gather our experience,
 we become wiser, we meet people,
 life becomes more novel.
 We have children, they have children,
 we have success, we have failure.
 If you're living right,
 your life should just get more and more baroque,
 beautiful, complicated, mysterious, and then you die.
 And then it really gets interesting.
 That's what this all seems to want us to believe.
 Let's put it that way.
 This is death, and then people say,
 well, then if the world is fractal,
 if then is it not true that the evolution of an individual
 could be extrapolated to be the evolution
 of the whole system?
 And then that leads to the mildly unsettling possibility
 that what this great transition we're moving toward is
 not T1 for everybody, but D1 for everybody.
 In other words, death.
 Death is the thing that really stirs us.
 We don't know what it is.
 We don't know whether we're supposed to flee from it
 or race toward it.
 And people say, well, then is it possible that,
 just to take the date 2012 as a marker,
 is it possible that everyone would die?
 It's possible.
 I've looked a lot at asteroid impactors
 because the people who study these things know
 that this is not an act of God or a miracle,
 that this happens.
 It has happened.
 It will happen.
 And it happens on different scales
 from things like Meteor Crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago.
 Everything within 800 miles of that impact
 died instantly 50,000 years ago.
 But 65 million years ago,
 an object the size of Manhattan impacted
 in the Gulf of Campeche,
 and nothing on this planet larger than a chicken
 walked away from that.
 Well, now, if you talk about ecological disaster,
 there's never been one like that
 in the history of the planet.
 Thousands, tens of thousands of species died.
 Entire orders of animals were wiped out.
 The continents were rearranged.
 But guess what?
 The flowering plants of which we are so fond,
 and our own dear selves of which we are even more fond,
 would never have had the chance to insinuate themselves
 into the evolutionary life of this planet
 had there not been that clearing out
 of the reptilian climax.
 So then you look at this and say,
 well, was this the greatest mass extinction in history
 or the greatest leap forward for biology
 in the history of the planet?
 And the answer is, it was both.
 Out of enormous death
 comes an enormous surge
 in the domain of organic novelty.
 I prefer to think
 that it is not a planetary catastrophe
 or a mass dying.
 And I'll tell you why.
 And this is a place, this is,
 now we're working from the notebooks.
 In other words, this is not prepared for public consumption.
 This is something I meditate on in the baths.
 I can't help but notice
 that as novelty increases
 in time according to this model,
 that the spatial domain of its focus narrows.
 So for instance,
 in the early phase of the time wave,
 the stars are condensing and the galaxies are forming.
 We could say that the entire universe
 is moving toward novelty.
 But once carbon chemistry appears,
 the cycles of fusion in stars
 and production of heavy elements and things like this
 are stabilized.
 And the domain of novelty
 becomes biology.
 And for a billion and a half years,
 biology evolves and adumbrates its forms
 and moves from the prokaryotes to the eukaryotes
 to the multicellular.
 The conquest of the land begins.
 But then,
 with the emergence of language using
 and tool using higher primates,
 in a sense, novelty leaves the domain
 of organic life.
 And organic life becomes metastable
 and evolution and mutation happens.
 But where the action has moved to
 is into the epigenetic domain
 entirely defined on this planet
 by human activities.
 And so the human beings are the carriers of novelty.
 And that has gone on until about,
 oh, pick a number, but basically
 3,000 to 2,500 years ago.
 And then the novelty
 seems to concentrate itself
 in Southern Europe.
 The Greeks take some kind of step
 that no other people have ever taken.
 You know, even today, if you go around the world
 and visit tribal people
 and ask to see their art,
 they show you, if you ask to see
 depictions of human beings,
 they show you symbolic depictions
 of human beings.
 That's what an African mask is.
 That's what a Sipic River carving is.
 These are symbols of human beings.
 The Greek mind crossed an invisible boundary
 and somebody said,
 "Let's take a block of marble or some clay
 and let's not symbolize a human being.
 Let us make a perfect topological simulacrum
 of a human being,
 a face that looks like a face,
 flesh that looks like flesh."
 It was as though the Greek consciousness
 rose to the surface
 and left the unconscious behind
 and the eyes were opened
 and no longer saw through symbolic filters,
 but instead said, "Nature in and of itself."
 This is the foundation for science and art as we know it.
 So the novelty then was largely in the hands
 and largely, I'm rushing here,
 exceptions are obvious,
 in the hands of what we call the Greco-Roman mind.
 And so it has been for a couple of thousand years.
 We'll then pick a number,
 a hundred years or so ago.
 It further contracted the novelty.
 It further contracted itself
 into the high-tech industrial democracies.
 And now it has further retracted.
 One of the problems we're having in our society
 is there's a bifurcation going on in society.
 Part of us are going with the new novel technologies
 that knit us together
 and make us dimensionless telepathic creatures
 through the internet.
 And some people are digging in their heels
 and saying, "Oh, no, no.
 Beyond newspapers, I can't go."
 And so those people are being left behind.
 They are practicing old-style culture
 in an equilibrium state.
 So now it isn't even all of the high-tech populations
 of the industrial democracies.
 As we get closer to 2012,
 if this process proceeds,
 then the source of novelty will constrict even further.
 And I guess it may eventually come down
 to one or two people or a group of people,
 and maybe those people will make a machine.
 And then the machine will be the source of the novelty,
 and all of us will be put out to the pasture of equilibrium
 and maintain the rest of the world as it was.
 But the novelty will have focused
 to some kind of incredibly intense point.
 And so looking at it from that model,
 it's hard to see how it could be an asteroid impact
 or something like that,
 because that would affect all biology, all geology.
 It would completely violate this long-standing tendency
 of the novelty to concentrate itself.
 Well, now the Buddhists have an interesting perspective
 that maybe has something to do with this.
 There are many schools of Buddhism,
 and I don't want to get into that,
 but there are schools which hold the following doctrine,
 that if a single person could attain enlightenment,
 then all sentient beings in the cosmos
 would attain enlightenment instantly.
 In other words, that only one person or one being
 has to break through the boundary
 for the entire state system to collapse and rearrange itself.
 It's December 21st, 2012,
 and through the worldwide VRML hookup of the internet,
 everybody with an IQ above 10
 has gathered in the great collective space
 to witness the first attempt to send a human being
 through time.
 And at the World Temporal Studies Institute
 at La Charrera in the Amazon,
 the president of so-and-so makes a speech,
 the lady time traveler makes a speech,
 she straps on her helmet, she steps into the machine,
 the fanfare for the common man is played,
 a button is pushed, and off she goes
 into the future.
 Now, what has always been put against time travel schemes
 is what's called the grandfather paradox,
 and this is easy to understand.
 It goes like this.
 If time travel were possible,
 I could travel back in time and kill my grandfather.
 If I did that, I wouldn't exist, so I couldn't do it,
 therefore there is a closed loop of paradox,
 therefore time travel is impossible.
 I put this to the mushroom, and it said,
 well, time travel is possible,
 but you can only travel backward in time
 as far as the moment of the invention
 of the first time machine.
 You can't travel further back in time than that
 because there were no time machines before that,
 so it's a kind of barrier.
 Well, so then I thought, so then here was my model
 of what would happen when the lady tempo knot
 sails off into the future.
 Let's forget about her and ask the question,
 what happens next in our world?
 And my first guess was what happens next
 is thousands and thousands of time machines
 arrive from all points in the future.
 They have come back through time
 to witness the first time machine take off.
 It's as though you had a Piper Cub
 that you could fly to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
 to that windy morning in late December
 when the brothers Wright rolled it out
 of their bicycle shop and fired her up.
 And then I said, well, but wait a minute,
 we haven't dealt with the grandfather paradox.
 One of these time machines from the distant future
 on its way to the first time flight
 could stop off and kill the grandfather
 of the driver of that time machine,
 and we haven't gotten anywhere at all.
 So then I produced a slightly more complicated model,
 but it works, and so here's what it is.
 It's that because the future is not what we think it is,
 well, here's a metaphor which makes it more clear.
 In this world that we're living in right now,
 we have people such as Bill Gates
 and his research and development teams,
 and we have people such as the Upriver people
 in the one that I spent time with,
 bare-assed people living at a very minimal cultural level.
 Gates and his people and this Amazon tribe
 occupy the same planet and the same moment in history,
 but who is influencing who?
 Very few people in the world are taking up
 the Amazonian lifestyle or point of view.
 Millions and millions of people are going Gates' direction
 and more and more will.
 So what I concluded from that is that advanced states
 of culture tend to squeeze out or mitigate
 less advanced states of culture.
 Now let's return to the time flight.
 What happens when the lady at Temponaut goes into the future
 is not that time machines arrive from all over the future.
 What happens is that the entire rest
 of the history of the universe happens instantly.
 In other words, a future, evolutionary developments,
 conquest of the galaxy, vast technologies
 that allow star flight and wormhole travel and all that,
 the fruits of all that are delivered instantly
 to our doorstep in 2012.
 I call it the God Whistle model.
 In other words, we end the whole thing.
 We collapse the state vector
 and everything goes into a state of novelty.
 And what happens then I think is
 the universe becomes entirely made of light.
 This is a sort of the cherry on the cake.
 You know that there is something in physics
 called the principle of parity.
 This is that particles can appear out of nothingness
 as long as they appear in pairs,
 such that after a certain period of time,
 the two pairs, the members of the pair
 encounter and annihilate each other.
 And when this happens, physicists say parity is conserved.
 Now, it's known in quantum physics
 that there is a phenomenon called vacuum fluctuation.
 Vacuum fluctuation is a situation
 where in absolutely empty space,
 suddenly out of the quantum subspace,
 particles jump into existence.
 They follow trajectories, they encounter each other,
 they annihilate each other, parity is conserved,
 and so it's okay, it's okay.
 Well, so then you talk to these quantum physicists
 and you say, "Well, how large
 "can one of these vacuum fluctuations be?"
 And they say, "Well, most of them,
 "they last milliseconds, nanoseconds."
 You say, "Well, is there a theoretical upper limit
 "on the size of a vacuum fluctuation dictated by theory?"
 And they say, "No, no, no.
 "It's simply that the longer the fluctuation lasts,
 "the rarer it is."
 So in other words, the longer a fluctuation lasts,
 the less likely you are to encounter one.
 Well, then you say, "Well, is it possible
 "that this entire universe is such a vacuum fluctuation?"
 Say, "Well, yes, but that would be very rare
 "to have such a long one."
 You say, "Well, hell, you only need one
 "for calculating the probability of a Unicode event
 "is a fool's game."
 I mean, it's either 100% sure or zero sure.
 So here is a model, and I took this
 from the Swedish physicist, Hans Olsven,
 who hasn't gotten enough credit,
 but who's really a very interesting thinker.
 Imagine that the universe is this kind of vacuum fluctuation
 of 17 billion year long vacuum fluctuation.
 Well, what it means then is that at the Big Bang,
 not one universe was born, but two,
 and they sailed off into super spaces
 and have no connectivity with each other,
 or they have Bell non-local connectivity or something.
 But anyway, they are distinctly separate.
 But they are unbeknown to each other
 on a collision course with each other.
 Parity must be conserved eventually.
 And a model like this holds open the possibility
 of the instantaneous transformation of the entire cosmos,
 because the collision of these two universes
 would not occur in three-dimensional space.
 It would occur in a higher dimensional space.
 So this cosmological model holds out the possibility
 that all matter in the universe
 could be instantaneously canceled in this encounter
 with the anti-matter twin that was born
 at the beginning of the cosmos.
 Okay, if you're still following, we're almost to paydirt.
 Every particle known to physics possesses an antiparticle,
 which is locked into this parity-conserving thing
 I've laid out for you, with one exception,
 one astonishing and amazing exception.
 The photon has no antiparticle.
 There is no antiphoton.
 So this universe that is on a collision course with itself
 in hyperspace, at the moment of the conservation of parity,
 all matter vanishes.
 And what is left is a universe made entirely of light.
 And we have no model, or I have no model,
 for a universe made of light.
 There would be no gravity, because gravity
 is a property of matter.
 Such a universe could be modeled.
 And then the question is, well,
 then what would happen to forms?
 What would happen to your body, my body, this planet?
 The answer is no one can know.
 But it is very interesting that the esoteric traditions
 of nearly every religion talk about light a great deal,
 talk about ascent to the light, cultivation of the light,
 the after-death vehicle as a thing made of light.
 So I just put this out here because it occurred to me,
 my imagination, in an effort to make the assumptions
 of novelty theory congruent with the known laws of physics,
 I discovered, you know, this sounds like wild hair stuff.
 But no violation of the known laws of physics
 is involved in this scenario.
 So perhaps what enlightenment is,
 is it happens to an entire universe
 when it drops its matter and antimatter
 out of its structure, and it becomes entirely made of light.
 That would certainly fulfill the novelty theory.
 Anyway, that's enough of that malarkey.
 - Sir, on the supernatural level.
 - Well, you see, the way the novelty theory is structured
 is you have this wave, and it is iterated on different scales
 and iteration, if you have a given level, let's call it A,
 above A is a larger level that is A times 64.
 Below A is a smaller level that is 1/64 of A.
 And wherever you are in the hierarchy, this is true.
 Levels above, 64 times larger.
 Levels below, 64 times smaller.
 Well, modern astrophysics says
 they're arguing about it right now,
 but the universe is under 20 billion years old.
 Everybody agrees on that.
 And the question is, is it nine, 12, 13, 14,
 but it's under 20.
 The time wave has a cycle,
 the largest cycle I have found necessary,
 except for the prime number research,
 is a 72 billion year cycle.
 So let's call that the top cycle, the A level.
 72 billion year cycle, plenty of time
 for the universe to evolve to its present state.
 Below that level is a cycle 1/64 that size.
 What would that be?
 Roughly 1.2 billion years.
 At the initiation of that cycle,
 I don't know, some dramatic thing happens in biology.
 Below it is another cycle.
 If the B level is 1.2 billion years,
 then the next level is 1/64 of that.
 I think it's roughly 275 million years.
 Next cycle, divided by 64, whatever it is,
 750,000 years.
 Next cycle, and you see where I'm going.
 Well, eventually you get to a cycle
 that's 4,306 years in duration.
 That is basically the cycle of late history.
 And certainly there was history before 4,000 years,
 but the continuous march of global civilization
 over the last 4,000 years.
 Well, then the next cycle down is only 67 years long.
 And I mentioned it last night, from 1945 to 2012.
 Each cycle begins with a bang, literally.
 Below the 67-year cycle, there is a 384-day cycle.
 And that will run from late 2011,
 somewhere in November 2011, to the end of 2012.
 And I call that the year of the jackpot.
 It's a 13-month year, but the entire history of the universe
 will be reprised in that 384-day period.
 Well, then comes a six-day cycle.
 By this time, either I will have gently bowed out,
 or the entire world will be aware of what is happening,
 because the novelty will be so intense.
 Imagine a six-day cycle in which the entire previous 67-year,
 4,306-year, na-na-na-na-na-na, up to the top level,
 are all being compressed and replayed in six days.
 Well, then comes the hour and 35-minute cycle.
 Then comes the minute and a half cycle.
 Then comes the 1.3-second cycle.
 Now, at that point, 1.3 seconds,
 if we assume that the cycles cannot be iterated
 beyond the level of Planck's constant,
 which is 6.55 times 10 to the minus 23rd erg seconds,
 the way for you to think of that is as a jiffy.
 It's the grain of the universe.
 We don't feel the need to go
 to discuss lengths of time shorter than that,
 because there aren't lengths of time shorter than that.
 Time comes in those packets of that size.
 Well, if you're at 1.3-second cycle,
 you still have 13 cycles to go through
 before you reach the realm of Planck's constant,
 and you have come through 13 cycles.
 So the universe is only half done
 1.3 seconds before its end.
 That's why asking what will happen in 2012 is preposterous.
 The mind fails.
 Half of the universe's evolutionary unfolding
 will occur in the last few milliseconds of its existence
 because of the asymptotic acceleration
 of the expression of novelty.
 So it's this thing which began very gently, very stately,
 the march of the atoms,
 the condensation of the stars and the galaxies,
 the emergence of biology,
 the emergence of higher animals,
 the emergence of, and just into then a screeching
 photo finish where all this stuff is bundled together,
 squeezed together, connected, transformed,
 lifted into higher dimensions.
 And see, this is not a process we can take responsibility for
 or discuss our guilt or innocence.
 This is the cosmos itself tearing loose
 from its previous constraints
 and moving ever faster toward ever greater freedom
 with ever more appetite and momentum
 until it achieves its goal,
 which is infinite novelty throughout all space and time,
 holographic connectedness, God-mindedness,
 whatever your vocabulary is.
 Yeah.
 (indistinct)
 Oh yeah, this is a completely legitimate move.
 I mean, it's mind boggling to think of this
 in human scales of time,
 that half of the universe is becoming,
 occurred in a few milliseconds,
 but dig the fact that is the position
 of orthodox physics as we sit here.
 It's simply that they say it happened at the beginning.
 I say it'll happen at the end.
 What they're saying in physics now
 is that the universe came in, the Big Bang occurred,
 and then a few nanoseconds after the Big Bang,
 there was this thing called the inflationary expansion phase.
 It lasted a few nanoseconds,
 and in those few nanoseconds,
 the universe became several order,
 tens of orders of magnitude larger than it was.
 So it's a legitimate move in physics,
 however counterintuitive it may seem on the human scale.
 Yeah.
 - Have you looked at the many worlds?
 - Well, the problem with the many worlds theory
 is it just, it violates the principle of parsimony.
 In other words, that is not the simplest explanation.
 That's an, do you all know what this is?
 It's the idea that whenever a process in the universe
 encounters a bifurcation point, that it goes both ways.
 In other words, and so the multiplication of possibilities
 in a situation like that is staggering,
 and I just don't see, I just don't feel the need for it.
 If I understood Wheeler's mathematics better, I might,
 but that theory has been around since the middle '70s,
 and he has a very respected position at Princeton,
 but he doesn't seem to be able to sway his colleagues,
 which doesn't mean he's wrong.
 I'm just saying it's a bit baroque for my taste.
 Well, once beyond the zero point,
 by definition, novelty must mean
 the simultaneous realization of bifurcations of all sorts.
 In other words, what ultimate novelty must mean
 is anything we say it means.
 There are no limitations when novelty soars to infinity.
 The universe is a series of impediments
 to the expression of novelty,
 and when it has overcome all those impediments,
 there is a flawless higher dimensional matrix
 throughout all being, I guess is how you'd put it, yeah.
 - Is that many worlds?
 - No, that's another can of strings,
 and that's a different thing, and more exotic.
 There's a lot of this stuff going around.
 I am by no means the strangest cat on the block.
 Is Sky Allen Goof, have any of you looked at his website?
 This is a guy who's being paid a salary by MIT,
 for God's sake, and his thing is all about
 making universes, and he says we can make universes
 and put them on the shelf.
 Made this one in February, botched that one in March,
 and talks about how the ultimate proof
 of the direction in which modern physics is moving
 is to make a universe.
 After all, if they begin from an area smaller
 than the diameter of the hydrogen atom,
 a major laboratory could just stamp them out like hotcakes.
 Of course, the question is what are they good for?
 What do you do with a universe once you've made one?
 But as an exercise in the imagination,
 I take a look at what this guy is into.
 Let me just try to sum this up,
 not certainly to sum up the ideas,
 because the ideas are not really that important.
 They may be true, they may be untrue,
 they may reside in a domain where those rules don't apply.
 The feeling that I hope you take away from all of this,
 when you are most self-reliant,
 maybe you don't understand 10-dimensional vector calculus,
 then don't use that tool to understand.
 Hone the tools that you have and try to create models
 and understand that all models are provisional.
 This is the antidote to the idea of ideology.
 Ideology is when you believe something passionately.
 Models are when you dispassionately attempt
 to define the operation of a system.
 And the word model implies that you are perfectly willing
 to discard the model when a better model comes along.
 I mean, get a grip, people.
 Where is it written in Adamantine
 that talking monkeys should be able
 to understand the universe?
 If you met a termite who told you that he was on a quest
 to understand the universe,
 a certain lip-curling cynicism would ensue.
 Well, do you think you're better positioned
 than that termite to undertake that?
 So the thing is to understand what one understands
 and then to build outward from that.
 And the tools are mathematics, drugs,
 attention to phenomena,
 intuition, community, and inspiration.
 And these things may not solve your marital problems
 or increase your earning power,
 but they will put you in touch
 with the larger dynamic of being.
 I think being is most appreciated when it is understood.
 That's why worship raises my hackles.
 Worship is what animals do to the mystery
 because they can't assimilate or understand it
 if they even deal with it at all.
 But true religiosity is signified
 by honest intellectual efforts to model and understand.
 And it's by that process that we increase
 our connectivity to the universe
 and the depth and richness of our connectivity
 to our community.
 That's what it really is all about.
 That's our glory, to understand, to model,
 to describe, to explore, to appreciate.
 So meet me at the waterfall at the top of the river.
 Thank you very much.
 (audience applauding)
 (indistinct)
 (indistinct)
 (audience applauding)
 [applause]


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