[00:00:00 - 00:00:12] Okay, now, I will talk a little bit about what I've learned from psychedelics. I feel [00:00:12 - 00:00:16] self-conscious doing it, but on the other hand, wouldn't it be stupid for me to talk [00:00:16 - 00:00:23] about what you've learned from psychedelics? That would add presumption to the sins already [00:00:23 - 00:00:34] arrayed here. There are different models about what the psychedelic experience is. Here's [00:00:34 - 00:00:42] a couple. Building on Western psychotherapy, as elaborated by Freud and Jung, one view [00:00:42 - 00:00:48] of what psychedelics are is it's the part of your mind that you'd rather not do business [00:00:48 - 00:01:00] with. It's the memories of childhood neglect or abuse. It's repressed kinky fantasies. [00:01:00 - 00:01:07] In other words, the Freudian idea of the unconscious, that somehow these are drugs which dissolve [00:01:07 - 00:01:13] the boundary between conscious and unconscious mind, and then you can do accelerated psychotherapy [00:01:13 - 00:01:20] because resistances have been pharmacologically overcome. That's one model. It's good as far [00:01:20 - 00:01:27] as it goes. It just doesn't go far enough. Then there's another model, which I would [00:01:27 - 00:01:38] call the traditional or shamanic model. It says the cosmos is a series of levels, and [00:01:38 - 00:01:49] these levels are connected by vertical routes of access, which can be thought of as simply [00:01:49 - 00:01:57] flights through space or magical trees or magical ladders. Anyway, there's an image [00:01:57 - 00:02:06] of ascent. Ordinary people exist on only one of these levels, but a shaman is not an ordinary [00:02:06 - 00:02:15] person. A shaman is a superhuman person who has the power of animal allies behind them, [00:02:15 - 00:02:25] and they can go up and down in these elevators that move between levels. They can therefore [00:02:25 - 00:02:37] recover lost souls, see social hanky-panky, theft and adultery, see the causes behind [00:02:37 - 00:02:44] that, see the causes behind disease, so forth and so on. That would be the traditional one. [00:02:44 - 00:02:52] What I have concluded after 25 years of fiddling with this is that both of those ideas have [00:02:52 - 00:02:58] a certain something to recommend them, but that they don't go far enough, and that we [00:02:58 - 00:03:08] get more to the meat of this if we leave off psychological, the first explanation, or sociological, [00:03:08 - 00:03:15] the second explanation, and actually go for something a little more formal, to wit, a [00:03:15 - 00:03:25] mathematical model of what shamanism is. What I mean by that is, let's think about what [00:03:25 - 00:03:33] shamans do. They cure disease, and another way of putting that is they have a remarkable [00:03:33 - 00:03:42] facility for choosing patients who will recover. They predict weather, very important. They [00:03:42 - 00:03:52] tell where game has gone, the movement of game, and they seem to have a paranormal ability [00:03:52 - 00:04:02] to look into questions, as I mentioned, who's sleeping with who, who stole the chicken, who [00:04:02 - 00:04:09] social transgressions are an open book to them. Thinking about this from a mathematician's [00:04:09 - 00:04:18] point of view, an all-encompassing explanation that would explain how all these magical feats [00:04:18 - 00:04:28] are done is simply to suppose that the shaman is somehow able to project his consciousness, [00:04:28 - 00:04:37] his or her consciousness, into a higher dimension. Not metaphorically, as in Sylvester Stallone [00:04:37 - 00:04:45] has many dimensions, not metaphorically, but literally, as in one dimension, two dimensions, [00:04:45 - 00:04:53] three dimensions, and four. If you could move into the fourth dimension, the dimension orthogonal [00:04:53 - 00:05:00] to Newtonian space-time, seeing what the weather is going to be next week is as easy as seeing [00:05:00 - 00:05:07] what the weather is now. Seeing where the game went is as easy as seeing where the game [00:05:07 - 00:05:17] are. Knowing who stole the chicken is simply defined by looking to see who stole the chicken. [00:05:17 - 00:05:27] I have noticed that all of biology, not simply shamanism within the context of human society, [00:05:27 - 00:05:39] but all of biology is in a sense a conquest of dimensionality. That as we ascend the phylogeny [00:05:39 - 00:05:50] of organic life, what animals are, are a strategy for conquering space-time. Complex animals [00:05:50 - 00:05:58] do it better than simpler animals. We do it better than any complex animal. We 20th century [00:05:58 - 00:06:05] people do it better than any people in any previous century because we can bind data [00:06:05 - 00:06:13] in so many ways that they couldn't electronically, on film, on tape, so forth and so on. The [00:06:13 - 00:06:20] progress of organic life is deeper and deeper into dimensional conquest. From that point [00:06:20 - 00:06:30] of view, the shaman begins to look like the advance guard of a new kind of human being. [00:06:30 - 00:06:40] A human being that is as advanced over where we are as we are advanced over people a million [00:06:40 - 00:06:50] years ago because we have very elaborate strategies for coding the past. It's a dimensional [00:06:50 - 00:06:57] conquest. That's part of what I've learned about psychedelics. I could have left it there, [00:06:57 - 00:07:09] but I never do. I always want to bring more under the umbrella of whatever metaphor it [00:07:09 - 00:07:22] is that's being pushed. What I have discerned is that time is actually speeding up. That [00:07:22 - 00:07:30] the universe is not what physics tells us it is. Physics tells us that the universe [00:07:30 - 00:07:39] is a physical system, an entropic system that was born in immense energy and chaos and will [00:07:39 - 00:07:50] run down with a whimper, not a bang, run down into heat, entropy and dissipation. The psychedelic [00:07:50 - 00:07:58] data on this is completely different. The psychedelic data says what that model left [00:07:58 - 00:08:09] out was biology and mind. Biology, you might imagine, is a fairly ephemeral, recent, fragile [00:08:09 - 00:08:19] phenomenon. It is not. The average star in this galaxy gutters out after about 700 million [00:08:19 - 00:08:27] years. Not our star. We happen to have the good fortune to be around a very stable, slow-burning [00:08:27 - 00:08:36] star. There has been biology on this planet at least two billion years, three times the [00:08:36 - 00:08:45] average life of a star. Biology is not some Johnny-come-lately epiphenomena. Biology is [00:08:45 - 00:08:55] a phenomenon more persistent than the life of the stars themselves. Biology is not a [00:08:55 - 00:09:03] static thing. A star evolving now is not greatly different from a star evolving a billion years [00:09:03 - 00:09:11] ago. Biology doesn't work that way. Biology constantly changes the context in which evolution [00:09:11 - 00:09:19] occurs. The way I have downloaded this into a phrase is the universe is, the biological [00:09:19 - 00:09:30] universe at least, is a novelty conserving engine. Upon simple molecules are built complex [00:09:30 - 00:09:38] molecules. Upon complex molecules are built complex polymers. Upon complex polymers comes [00:09:38 - 00:09:48] DNA. Out of DNA comes the whole machinery of the cell. Out of cells comes simple aggregate [00:09:48 - 00:09:56] colony animals like hydra and that sort of thing. Out of that, true animals. Out of that, [00:09:56 - 00:10:05] ever more complex animals, organs of locomotion, organs of sight, organs of smell, complex [00:10:05 - 00:10:11] mental machinery for the coordinating of data in time and space. This is the whole story [00:10:11 - 00:10:20] of the advancement of life. In our species, it reaches its culmination and it crosses [00:10:20 - 00:10:30] over into a new domain where change no longer occurs in the atomic and biological machinery [00:10:30 - 00:10:39] of existence. It begins to take place in this world which we call mental. It's called epigenetic [00:10:39 - 00:10:46] change. Change which cannot be traced back to mutation of the arrangements of molecules [00:10:46 - 00:10:55] inside long chain polymers, but change taking place in syntactical structures that are linguistically [00:10:55 - 00:11:02] based. People have probably been using language with considerable facility for probably 50,000 [00:11:02 - 00:11:11] years, possibly more. In our own time, we have created ever more elaborate languages, ever [00:11:11 - 00:11:17] more elaborate technologies for transforming, storing and retrieving language so that we [00:11:17 - 00:11:25] are actually on the brink of being able to give every single one of you the complete [00:11:25 - 00:11:32] cultural inventory, the complete database of human beings' experience on this planet. [00:11:32 - 00:11:39] That's what these data highways and networks are all about. The nervous system is being [00:11:39 - 00:11:47] hardwired. What I wanted to draw your attention to about this is it is not only an advance [00:11:47 - 00:11:56] deeper and deeper into novelty, but it's an advance in which each successive stage occurs [00:11:56 - 00:12:05] more quickly than the stage which preceded it. Once you get the big bang, then nothing [00:12:05 - 00:12:12] much happens for a long, long time. There's plasma streaming through the universe. The [00:12:12 - 00:12:18] universe is slowly cooling, but that's the most dramatic complex process in the universe, [00:12:18 - 00:12:26] this cooling. Then after a certain point, more complex processes come in. Complexification [00:12:26 - 00:12:34] begins to build, and as it builds, it begins to happen faster and faster and faster. The [00:12:34 - 00:12:44] great puzzle in the biological record is the suddenness of our own emergence, of our emergence, [00:12:44 - 00:12:54] human emergence out of the primate line. It happened with enormous suddenness. Lammholtz [00:12:54 - 00:13:00] calls it the most explosive reorganization of a major organ of a higher animal in the [00:13:00 - 00:13:08] entire fossil record. That's a great embarrassment to the theory of evolution because this is [00:13:08 - 00:13:15] the organ which generated the theory of evolution. We're not talking an appendix or an eyebrow [00:13:15 - 00:13:23] here. We're talking the very organ which generated it. I think that we have taken far too much [00:13:23 - 00:13:30] responsibility for what is happening and that what we took to be a staircase we were climbing [00:13:30 - 00:13:37] is actually an up escalator. If you will stop climbing, you will notice that it does not [00:13:37 - 00:13:45] impede your upward progress because the ground you're standing on is moving you toward the [00:13:45 - 00:13:59] goal. I think that this idea, which may be the proof that I'm bonkers, requires a fairly [00:13:59 - 00:14:06] radical reorganization of consciousness because what I'm saying is the universe was not born [00:14:06 - 00:14:16] in a fiery explosion from which it has been being blasted outward ever since. The universe [00:14:16 - 00:14:26] is not being pushed like that from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future [00:14:26 - 00:14:36] toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release [00:14:36 - 00:14:43] it up near the rim. If you do that, the marble will roll down the side of the bowl, down, [00:14:43 - 00:14:49] down, down, and eventually it will come to rest in the lowest energy state, which is [00:14:49 - 00:14:58] the bottom of the bowl. That's precisely my model of human history. [00:14:58 - 00:15:05] Bear in mind what the competition is peddling. The competition is peddling the idea that [00:15:05 - 00:15:14] the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment for no reason. Whatever you think about [00:15:14 - 00:15:22] that, notice that it's the limit case for credulity. Do you understand what I mean? [00:15:22 - 00:15:28] If you can believe that, it's hard for me to imagine what you would balk at. If we were [00:15:28 - 00:15:34] to sit down and say, "Let's see who can think of the most unlikely thing that could possibly [00:15:34 - 00:15:43] happen," I submit to you nobody could top the Big Bang. It is the improbability of improbabilities. [00:15:43 - 00:15:49] It is the mother of all improbabilities right there. [00:15:49 - 00:15:57] I'm suggesting something different. I'm suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex [00:15:57 - 00:16:07] attractor that exists ahead of us in time and that our ever accelerating speed through [00:16:07 - 00:16:14] the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very, [00:16:14 - 00:16:21] very close to the attractor. All Western religions have insisted that God would come tangential [00:16:21 - 00:16:28] to history, but they all lose their nerve when you ask when, which is the only interesting [00:16:28 - 00:16:34] question about that hypothesis. If it's not now, then what the hell difference does it [00:16:34 - 00:16:38] make? It's just pissing in the wind as far as I can see. [00:16:38 - 00:16:49] I think that the very real social crisis that is upon us, the crisis of population, of resource [00:16:49 - 00:16:58] depletion, of atmospheric degradation, of epidemic disease, all these crises indicate [00:16:58 - 00:17:06] that we are now down to the short epochs of this process of universal ingression into [00:17:06 - 00:17:15] novelty and that in fact it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of a human future. There [00:17:15 - 00:17:24] is no human future. It's inconceivable given where we are today that to speak of the human [00:17:24 - 00:17:33] world a thousand years from now or 500 years from now, it is literally, it either doesn't [00:17:33 - 00:17:42] exist or it's beyond our power of imagining. It isn't simply going to be non-polluting [00:17:42 - 00:17:48] cars and smaller hi-fi speakers. That's an idiot's notion. [00:17:48 - 00:17:50] Better pictures of today. [00:17:50 - 00:17:57] Clearer TV pictures. It isn't like that at all. I mentioned this this morning, how when [00:17:57 - 00:18:03] you look at only one line of technological development, automobiles or computers, it looks [00:18:03 - 00:18:08] like you can rationally anticipate what's going to happen. But when you realize that [00:18:08 - 00:18:15] there are thousands of these lines of development all transforming themselves, all moving towards [00:18:15 - 00:18:23] some kind of omega point, then you realize that we're in the grip of what I call a concrescence. [00:18:23 - 00:18:32] And I maintain that you don't have to believe me on this. You can see it from here. You [00:18:32 - 00:18:40] just have to climb a high hill. There's one, it's called psilocybin. There's one, it's [00:18:40 - 00:18:48] called ayahuasca. The view from the tops of these hills is of the concrescence. It lies [00:18:48 - 00:18:59] now closer to us than the Johnson administration for God's sake in time. And I have an elaborate [00:18:59 - 00:19:05] mathematical theory to back this up, which you should gratefully learn you are not going [00:19:05 - 00:19:12] to be flayed with this afternoon. But I think it's going to become more and more important [00:19:12 - 00:19:24] for people to delinearize their view of time, decondition yourself from the lie of history. [00:19:24 - 00:19:36] After all, if time were space, history would be a spider web. So bear that in mind.