[00:00:00 - 00:00:04] Thank you all for turning out on a rainy night. [00:00:04 - 00:00:11] Before I get into the main body of tonight's entertainment, [00:00:11 - 00:00:19] I want to call your attention to the propaganda for an event in Mexico and another event in Hawaii. [00:00:19 - 00:00:28] These events, in the case of the Mexico event, you get a major slice of the psychedelic community. [00:00:29 - 00:00:42] You get Robert Montgomery, Jonathan Nott, Ann and Sasha Shulgin, Manolo Torres, Christian Resch, Terrence McKenna, [00:00:42 - 00:00:45] and others who unfortunately slipped my mind. [00:00:45 - 00:00:56] At the ceremonial center of Palenque in Chiapas, we've been doing these events somewhere in Mayan Mexico for the past 10 or 12 years. [00:00:57 - 00:01:01] Many of you are graduates, which doesn't mean you can't come again. [00:01:01 - 00:01:05] But I want to invite all of you there. [00:01:05 - 00:01:14] If you're interested in ethnobotany, shamanism, ethno-pharmacology, the altered state of consciousness, the politics of all of this, [00:01:14 - 00:01:20] this is as intense an information pact and exposure as you can have, [00:01:21 - 00:01:29] and it's straight from the mouths of the scholars and scientists and writers who have spent a great deal of time in that area. [00:01:29 - 00:01:32] So I just want to invite you to that. It's also a great party. [00:01:32 - 00:01:39] It's the height of mushroom season. There's nothing we could do about that. [00:01:39 - 00:01:43] So you just are on your own. [00:01:49 - 00:01:55] So when I start out on these tours, I usually have an agenda and prepared remarks, [00:01:55 - 00:02:10] and then as I make my way through my venues and I hear the feedback and I feel the ambiance of the people and the throb of the zeitgeist, [00:02:11 - 00:02:19] it all sort of just simply dissolves into an ongoing commentary on our moment in space and time and the various dimensions, [00:02:19 - 00:02:24] adumbrations, and opportunities of our dilemma. [00:02:24 - 00:02:33] But I want tonight to couch it for you in the context of, I guess, an extended metaphor. [00:02:33 - 00:02:40] We could talk about these things in many ways, but I find this particular extended metaphor [00:02:40 - 00:02:52] illuminating, and I start by recalling an observation from someone whose name rarely falls from my lips, [00:02:52 - 00:02:55] and that would be Gurdjieff. [00:02:55 - 00:03:03] And Gurdjieff said at one point, or was known to comment, that people are asleep, he said, [00:03:03 - 00:03:07] and he, by implication, suggested people awaken. [00:03:08 - 00:03:14] I'm not sure if he fully grasped the implication for his own product line had that occurred, [00:03:14 - 00:03:19] but in any case, you're on it, you're with me, yes. [00:03:19 - 00:03:27] It's very hard to give these lectures in such a way so that every person hears something different, [00:03:27 - 00:03:31] which is what is supposed to be going on, you know. [00:03:34 - 00:03:46] Well, so thinking about this comment that people are asleep, I see several implications. [00:03:46 - 00:03:51] I ask myself, what is awake in my own notion? [00:03:51 - 00:04:01] And I thought to myself, awake is, for me, awake is where the laws of physics are fully operable, [00:04:02 - 00:04:12] you know, hurled objects shatter, electricity shocks, I cannot fly, the laws of physics are in operation. [00:04:12 - 00:04:17] In that domain, I consider myself to be fully awake. [00:04:17 - 00:04:27] Now, in terms of occult and spiritual traditions, the admonition to awaken always seems to imply [00:04:28 - 00:04:35] that higher consciousness is approached through an expansion of clarity and awareness. [00:04:35 - 00:04:44] And that seems obvious, I don't argue with it as a rationalist, but as somebody who has run the edges, [00:04:44 - 00:04:51] I've noticed something somewhat counterintuitive to that teaching, and it's this. [00:04:52 - 00:05:03] To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of kazooistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, [00:05:03 - 00:05:11] whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will, to achieve that, [00:05:11 - 00:05:19] requires a precondition as a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, [00:05:20 - 00:05:29] a certain taking your eye off the ball, a certain assumption that things are simpler than they are, [00:05:29 - 00:05:36] almost always precedes what Mircea-Leon called the rupture of plane that indicates, you know, [00:05:36 - 00:05:48] that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power beyond, behind profane appearances. [00:05:49 - 00:05:54] And in my own life, for those of you who are conversant with my output, [00:05:54 - 00:06:02] when I went to the Amazon in 1971 and had the experiences that are described in true hallucinations, [00:06:02 - 00:06:12] I had been for many months before that in Asia, smuggling, hanging out, and I had taken my eye off the ball. [00:06:13 - 00:06:23] I had become very gentle, very relativistic in my approach to other people's opinions and behaviors. [00:06:23 - 00:06:28] I was easygoing, is what I'm trying to say. Too easygoing. [00:06:28 - 00:06:38] And in that situation of semi-unconsciousness and openness, the cosmic giggle approaches. [00:06:39 - 00:06:51] And I compare this, this is closing of a theme, I compare this to sleep or to states that lie between waking and sleeping. [00:06:51 - 00:06:57] And so, again, an odd take on this remark of Gurdjieff. [00:06:58 - 00:07:13] I remember someone many years ago said to me, they evoked the symbol of the yin and the yang, the two tears folded against each other within a circle. [00:07:13 - 00:07:22] And this person, who was no rishi, roshi, geisha or guru, but simply observant, said, [00:07:24 - 00:07:32] "It's not the black side, it's not the white side, it's the interface, it's the edge." [00:07:32 - 00:07:44] And I found, by observing sleep, and some of you may recall the motto in Athanasius Kershers An Theatrium Satientium, [00:07:44 - 00:07:52] that's chiseled over the alchemist doorway, I can't do it in Latin, but it says, "While sleeping, watch." [00:07:53 - 00:07:55] While sleeping, watch. [00:07:55 - 00:08:09] And I've noticed that while going to sleep, there is a barrier, a place in the process of going to sleep that is like a mercurial edge. [00:08:09 - 00:08:13] It's a river, it's a zone of hypnagogia. [00:08:13 - 00:08:16] You often pass through it post-orgasm. [00:08:17 - 00:08:32] It's a place of drifting, a mi-boid, colored after image, lights, and then true hallucination, images, strange, transcendental or transpersonal images. [00:08:32 - 00:08:39] Well, so then, so far in the context of pursuing this extended metaphor about sleep, [00:08:40 - 00:08:49] I've talked basically, essentially about the individual's relationship to the concept, to the fact. [00:08:49 - 00:08:56] But there's also a social or a political, a species-wide implication. [00:08:56 - 00:09:05] It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, [00:09:06 - 00:09:15] some considerable percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake. [00:09:15 - 00:09:26] And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake. [00:09:26 - 00:09:30] It is never entirely asleep. [00:09:31 - 00:09:40] It exists in, I guess you can hear me, it exists in some kind of indeterminate zone. [00:09:40 - 00:09:49] And this to me is the clue to understanding something that is personally fascinating to me. [00:09:49 - 00:09:55] And it revolves around why people believe such weird things. [00:09:56 - 00:10:04] And why, either as a consequence of the approach of the millennium or the breakdown of traditional values, [00:10:04 - 00:10:16] or the density of electromagnetic radiation, or for some reason, a balkanization of epistemology is taking place. [00:10:16 - 00:10:23] And what I mean by that is there is no longer a commonality of understanding. [00:10:24 - 00:10:27] For some people, quantum physics provides the answers. [00:10:27 - 00:10:33] Their next-door neighbor may look to the channeling of archangels with equal fervor. [00:10:33 - 00:10:40] I mean, if this is not a balkanization of epistemology, I don't know what it is. [00:10:40 - 00:10:52] It is accompanied by a related phenomenon, which is technology or the historical momentum of things [00:10:53 - 00:11:03] is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story, [00:11:03 - 00:11:13] a simple creation myth or redemption myth to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane, [00:11:13 - 00:11:20] techno, consumerist, post-McGluinist, electronic, pre-apocalyptic existence. [00:11:21 - 00:11:32] And so into that dimension of anxiety created by this inability to parse reality [00:11:32 - 00:11:45] rushes a bewildering variety of squirrely notions, epistemological cartoons, if you will, [00:11:46 - 00:11:53] and conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion, I'm somewhat immune to paranoia, [00:11:53 - 00:11:58] so those of you who aren't, you know, gaze in wonder. [00:11:58 - 00:12:06] Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. [00:12:06 - 00:12:12] I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the grays [00:12:13 - 00:12:19] and all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological problems? [00:12:19 - 00:12:25] Or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything? [00:12:25 - 00:12:31] Or the Communist Party? Or the Catholic Church? Or the Masons? [00:12:31 - 00:12:41] Well, these are epistemological cartoons. It's, you know, kindergarten stuff in the art of amateur historiography. [00:12:42 - 00:12:47] I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying, [00:12:47 - 00:12:59] that the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. [00:12:59 - 00:13:09] Absolutely no one. You know, you don't understand Monica, you don't understand Netanyahu. [00:13:10 - 00:13:18] Nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. [00:13:18 - 00:13:25] Now there may be entities seeking control, the World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, somebody or others, [00:13:25 - 00:13:33] but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself, [00:13:34 - 00:13:43] because this process that is underway will take the control freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall. [00:13:43 - 00:13:48] It's like trying to control a dream, you see. [00:13:48 - 00:13:58] The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream. [00:13:59 - 00:14:05] Now a Jungian would say, no surprise here, history is the collective dream of humanity. [00:14:05 - 00:14:20] It is run by archetypal energies. It is downloaded by the zeitgeist into the various menus and epochs of which it is composed. [00:14:21 - 00:14:35] This seems reasonable to me. I don't want to give you the impression it's too linear to understand that what I am saying is that awake is good, asleep is bad. [00:14:35 - 00:14:46] What I would rather do is explain this whole gradient of possible positioning vis-a-vis your life and your destiny, these choices that you have, [00:14:47 - 00:14:56] and then have people understand that they choose, you choose to be asleep or partially asleep or fully awake, [00:14:56 - 00:15:06] or to be one part of the time and in some situations and one part of the time and in other situations. [00:15:07 - 00:15:19] Now if in fact we exist inside some kind of morphogenetic field that is created by the sum total of human minds on the planet, [00:15:19 - 00:15:29] and if in fact in half or more of those minds at any given moment the rules of the dream hold sway, [00:15:30 - 00:15:46] then it is no surprise that when we make our way into society or just when we live our lives, there is an eeriness to it, there is a fatedness to it, there is a plottedness to it. [00:15:46 - 00:15:52] You know we are inside some kind of engine of narrative, I believe. [00:15:53 - 00:16:04] You know some science fiction writers such as Greg Gigan and others have suggested that this could even be a form of recorded medium. [00:16:04 - 00:16:15] You can see the thumb prints of editors on our reality if you are truly paying attention. [00:16:16 - 00:16:24] If you are a devotee of the theory of stochastic and random unfolding of events, [00:16:24 - 00:16:34] then you have to look very carefully at how unrandom and how mythical and archetypal most people's lives are. [00:16:39 - 00:16:52] If you take psychedelics and hurl yourself to the edge and spend time with strange aboriginal people in remote parts of the world, the cosmic giggle becomes your friend. [00:16:52 - 00:17:04] But in fact, ordinary people's lives, everyone's lives are touched by deep magic. [00:17:05 - 00:17:22] And I've, you know, again, the primary data in this experience and then the models are built backward from the primary data without prejudice and in an attempt to transcend historical momentum. [00:17:23 - 00:17:37] And when I do that, what I see is that the carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people's lives is love. [00:17:37 - 00:17:52] Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in nature. [00:17:52 - 00:18:07] What do I mean by that? I mean, you can be the janitor at Microsoft and the chief, the vice president in chief of operations, his daughter can bring him lunch one day. [00:18:07 - 00:18:16] And you can from a distance have your eye fall upon her and fall in love with her. [00:18:17 - 00:18:29] And, you know, from that point to having the five children she bears you go off to Harvard in the sore bone, it's just a matter of running the clock forward. [00:18:29 - 00:18:40] And these things have any to you. It may seem like a miracle, but to to those of us who are students of human happenstance, it's inevitable. [00:18:41 - 00:19:02] And launch your story. And I've, you know, in the course of taking psychedelics and looking at my life and other people's lives and narrative, I think that the secret of, I don't want to say anything as pretentious as transcendence or enlightenment, [00:19:03 - 00:19:12] but the secret of taking hold of one's destiny is to understand that one is a character. [00:19:12 - 00:19:30] A character is a different thing than this model you inherit out of the idea that you're a three dimensional animal inside a democracy with a Christian heritage and, you know, a Dewey Decimal cataloging system or whatever. [00:19:31 - 00:19:44] Anyway, these are some of the notions that occur to me in the context of comparing dream on many scales. [00:19:45 - 00:20:05] It's you have to really struggle, I think, to believe that you actually live inside the model of reality that science and Newtonian physics and the mathematical analysis of nature have given us. [00:20:06 - 00:20:32] You know, not to get too philosophical here, but for positivist philosophers, everything that is important, color, feeling, taste, tone, ambition, apprehension, appetition, these things are called secondary quality. [00:20:33 - 00:20:50] In other words, they're peripheral. They arise at a lower level of understanding. They are somehow determined by the presence of the animal body and hence dismissible by a theory of pure abstraction. [00:20:51 - 00:21:07] It says, you know, what is real is spin, charge, angular momentum. None of these things are very rich concepts for a living human being who knows what any of these things are. [00:21:08 - 00:21:26] You know, so one, I mean, we don't have time in a situation like this to explore all the implications of this dream analogy that I'm pursuing. [00:21:27 - 00:21:56] But one that interests me is the plasticity of time in the dream. And I think I would argue as the devil's advocate that it is the plasticity of historical time and the acceleration, the sense of an out of control spin up or spin down into new domains of possibility. [00:21:56 - 00:22:10] That is the strongest evidence present at hand that we are in some kind of dream. I've struggled my whole life with I've always believed or I've always felt the power of the state. [00:22:10 - 00:22:18] The world is made of language. But of course, you think about this proposition for 30 seconds. [00:22:19 - 00:22:34] And the question that arises then is, if the world is made of language, then why isn't it the way I want it to be? You know, why does it have its own raison d'etre, even if it is language? [00:22:35 - 00:22:59] Well, I think it's appropriate to speak of this to an audience as digitally sophisticated as I assume you must be. I think the primary insight that has been secured here at the end of the 20th century, the primary contribution of 20th century thinking, if you will, [00:23:00 - 00:23:15] is to have understood finally that information is primary, that this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information. [00:23:16 - 00:23:30] Information is a deeper and more primary concept than space, time, matter, energy, charge, spin, angular momentum. The world is made of language. [00:23:31 - 00:23:47] The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked. If reality is made of language, then what we're saying is that it's code. [00:23:48 - 00:24:11] And if it's code, then it is far more deeply open to manipulation than we ever dared dream. I mean, we've been messing around on the desktop opening files with religions and political systems and xenophobic theories and racial superiority, [00:24:12 - 00:24:20] and this crap that haunts the human historical adventure means we have not addressed the deeper levels. [00:24:20 - 00:24:36] And in thinking about this and the relationship to dream and human culture, I have realized that cultures are like operating systems. [00:24:37 - 00:24:46] We are like hardware. The human animal is a piece of biological wetware/hardware. [00:24:47 - 00:25:13] And it has been, we know, pretty much as we confront it today for at least 140,000 years. At Klasis River Cave Mouth in South Africa, they have excavated homo sapiens sapiens skeletons 100,000 years old, and that person could have sat in the front row here tonight and nobody would have batted an eyebrow. [00:25:14 - 00:25:34] So the human hardware has been in place for a while. What has changed rapidly in comparison to the rates of biological evolution are the operating systems. [00:25:35 - 00:25:45] The people who excavated Ur, which was at that time thought to be the world's first city, and in any case is the city seven millennia old, [00:25:45 - 00:26:01] when they excavated the central plaza at Ur, they discovered that a black basaltic slab had been set up there by the earliest kings of Ur, and that was the cultural operating system. [00:26:02 - 00:26:12] And if in a deal trading goats for olives, the dispute arose, people had reference to the central operating system and these things were determined. [00:26:13 - 00:26:33] Now Ur 101 was fine for olives and goat trading, but it didn't support higher mathematics, it didn't support rational exploration of nature, it didn't support astrological knowledge about the movement of the stars. [00:26:34 - 00:26:48] As we have gone forward through culture, we have swapped out these operating systems and at each swap out there has been a lot of hair pulling and cussing and screaming. [00:26:49 - 00:27:06] And the one who has installed a new operating system is completely familiar with that sickening from the bowels kind of coldness that you realize it all hangs by a thread. [00:27:07 - 00:27:23] Now this situation, this operating system metaphor, I think is a useful one for understanding, and again a circle closes, the balkanization of epistemology that causes me such anxiety. [00:27:24 - 00:27:46] If you meet an aboriginal person from the Amazon for example, they may be running Wittoto 3.0 as their operating system, nicely supports animistic magic, huge capacity when it comes to making fish traps and bird traps. [00:27:46 - 00:27:51] Wittoto is a powerful operating system for a rainforest aboriginal. [00:27:52 - 00:28:01] In our culture, you know, there are, I have no idea, at least 10 or 20 operating systems all going at the same time. [00:28:02 - 00:28:25] Some will run Mormonism, some will support Catholicism, others Kabbalah goes at the speed of light, others support quantum physics, some support econometrics, others support political correctness, and these things are mutually exclusive. [00:28:26 - 00:28:43] And so looking at this, and looking at this clash of operating systems, I've come to the conclusion, and some of you may have heard me say this before, that culture is not your friend. [00:28:43 - 00:28:46] That's the final conclusion. [00:28:47 - 00:29:04] You see, well this came to me a few months ago when I had my yearly physical, and as I was buttoning up, my doctor said to me, he said, "You know, in the 19th century, most people your age were dead." [00:29:04 - 00:29:06] [laughter] [00:29:07 - 00:29:28] And I realized that this was true, and that one of the, among all the revolutions that we are enduring, one of them is that we live nearly twice as long as people lived very recently in the past. [00:29:29 - 00:29:47] Well, culture is a kind of neotony, and I don't want to belabor that at great length, but for those of you who are not biologists, neotony is the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. [00:29:47 - 00:29:51] It's used to describe animal behavior. [00:29:51 - 00:29:56] For instance, I'll give the most spectacular example of neotony. [00:29:57 - 00:30:04] There is a kind of animal which lives in ponds in Africa, and it reproduces like a fish. [00:30:04 - 00:30:11] It lays eggs on the bottom of these ponds. More fish-like animals come from these eggs and so forth. [00:30:12 - 00:30:28] If the pond dries up, the creature undergoes metamorphosis and becomes an animal somewhat like a gecko and lays eggs, and from these eggs come creatures that are like geckos. [00:30:28 - 00:30:38] In other words, this is an animal which actually achieves sexual maturity in two forms, depending on environmental stress. [00:30:39 - 00:30:51] This is a spectacular example of neotony. Turning to human beings, the less spectacular example, but relevant to us, is our hairless, our general body hairlessness compared to other primates. [00:30:51 - 00:30:58] We look like fetal apes. Human beings look like fetal apes. [00:30:58 - 00:31:07] Why? What is neotony? Well, this is hotly debated among evolutionary biologists. [00:31:08 - 00:31:19] But the point I want to make is a socio-political comment, which is culture itself is some kind of neotenizing force. [00:31:19 - 00:31:30] Because what culture provides is a bunch of rules, so you don't have to think, and a bunch of myths, so you don't have to think again. [00:31:31 - 00:31:48] Culture has all the answers, you know. You want to know where people came from? Well, when the sky god got out of his canoe at first waterfall and took the leak, then we, the true people, appeared like ants, and we've been living here ever since. [00:31:48 - 00:31:54] Oh, gee, thanks. I'm glad I asked. [00:31:55 - 00:32:02] This is what culture does for you. [00:32:02 - 00:32:14] But now technology throws a curve, and the curve is that we live so long that we figure out what a scam this is. [00:32:15 - 00:32:29] We figure out that what you're supposed to work for isn't worth having. We figure out that our politicians are buffoons. We figure out that professional scientists are reputation-building, grab-tailing weasels. [00:32:29 - 00:32:42] We discover that all organizations are corrupted by ambition. You know, you get the picture. We figure it out. [00:32:43 - 00:32:53] Well, then, as intellectuals, and anybody who figures it out is an intellectual, believe me, because they're slinging the programming to push you the other way. [00:32:53 - 00:33:04] So then intellectuals, defined as people who figure it out, discover that you are alienated. That's what figuring it out means. [00:33:05 - 00:33:19] People understand that the BMW, the Harvard degree, this is all baloney and manipulated and hyped, and that mostly you have a bunch of clueless people who are figuring out which fork they should use. [00:33:19 - 00:33:33] But this position is presented as alienation and therefore somehow tinged with the potential for pathology. It's a bad thing to be alienating. [00:33:34 - 00:33:46] Now let's speak for a moment, in order to fulfill the promise read in the introduction, about psychedelics and what are they doing in this fine situation. [00:33:46 - 00:33:56] Well, what they're doing is forcing this maturation process by dissolving boundaries, which is what they do. [00:33:56 - 00:33:59] They are exposing them to the power of the mind.