[00:00:00 - 00:00:09]	 How's that? Cool. Okay. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to see so many people here.
[00:00:09 - 00:00:20]	 Once again, this strange magical moment when we come together again, or perhaps for the first
[00:00:20 - 00:00:30]	 time you having come from wherever you came from me having come from the slopes of the world's
[00:00:30 - 00:00:43]	 largest active volcano actually, but via Manhattan and Austin last weekend. And the purpose of these
[00:00:43 - 00:00:52]	 things is sort of to check the state of the condensing collective understanding about what
[00:00:52 - 00:01:03]	 is going on in the world or what might be going on in the world. This, it seems to me, is the subject
[00:01:03 - 00:01:12]	 worth talking about. What is going on? How can you find out what is going on? How do you know
[00:01:12 - 00:01:24]	 when you found out what's going on? Can one know what is going on? And my involvement with this is
[00:01:24 - 00:01:33]	 no different from your own a sincere desire to untangle these questions before the yawning grave
[00:01:33 - 00:01:41]	 closes over the enterprise and the entire thing becomes moot. One has, you know, a window of
[00:01:41 - 00:01:54]	 opportunity somewhere between zip and 100 to solve or understand or penetrate or appreciate
[00:01:54 - 00:02:03]	 or come to terms with the conundrum of being this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves
[00:02:03 - 00:02:13]	 both individually and collectively. Collectively, we find ourselves, you know, somewhere between the
[00:02:13 - 00:02:22]	 slime and the archangels making our way perilously over the millennia up the evolutionary ladder
[00:02:22 - 00:02:31]	 toward the platonic light or something like that. At least this is the myth of intellectuals of the
[00:02:31 - 00:02:40]	 high tech industrial democracies evolved over the past 150 years, the triumphant ascent of organic
[00:02:40 - 00:02:56]	 life toward ever greater complexity. Individually, we each find ourselves born into a culture we had
[00:02:56 - 00:03:04]	 no share in designing, but that we will be expected to inhabit, inculcate and in fact,
[00:03:04 - 00:03:14]	 pass on to our own progeny. And so this is our circumstance, I think, individually and collectively,
[00:03:14 - 00:03:26]	 thrown into being. Heidegger said, We didn't ask for it. Here it is. What are we to make of it?
[00:03:26 - 00:03:34]	 And obviously, if you toured the halls of this exhibition, we are to make much of it and money
[00:03:34 - 00:03:46]	 of it. These two principles seem to emerge that there is much to be said, many ways to slice the
[00:03:46 - 00:03:56]	 pie and and the market economy is a very fertile domain in which to thrash this all out. You can
[00:03:56 - 00:04:04]	 sell your answers, you can trade your answers, you can upgrade your answers. You can subscribe,
[00:04:04 - 00:04:17]	 serialize, retrofit, export, import and reinvent answers. Ultimately, I wonder how satisfying all
[00:04:17 - 00:04:29]	 this is. And I always amused at my own position in this situation. I'm it's a great pan to the
[00:04:29 - 00:04:38]	 tolerance of the new age that they keep inviting me back on. I'm sort of like the crazy uncle or
[00:04:38 - 00:04:48]	 you know, you you hope for good behavior, but you understand that it's a gamble because I'm very I'm
[00:04:48 - 00:04:57]	 very ambiguous about about much of the methods and ways by which we do our intellectual business and
[00:04:57 - 00:05:11]	 pursue the matter of community and salvation. The intellectual tension that seems to work its way
[00:05:11 - 00:05:19]	 through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism
[00:05:19 - 00:05:30]	 and the deep leaf felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension or a hidden
[00:05:30 - 00:05:39]	 dimension or a transcendental dimension. And of course, downloaded into language, it becomes
[00:05:39 - 00:05:49]	 easily ridiculed and downloaded into tasteless language. It should be ridiculed. But so when
[00:05:49 - 00:05:57]	 we try to formulate our spiritual intuition, they they are inevitably, I think, tainted by what we
[00:05:57 - 00:06:05]	 bring to it. And I was struck as I moved through the hall. It was almost like an exhibition of
[00:06:05 - 00:06:13]	 language types as much as an exhibition of products or or possibilities. What were being sold
[00:06:13 - 00:06:23]	 were closed systems of jargon, which once opted into tended to produce answers in a short loop
[00:06:23 - 00:06:37]	 of possibilities. All closed systems of thought are like this. And to my mind that what seems to
[00:06:37 - 00:06:43]	 me very elderly age of 50. And I know to some people in the room, it does seem very elderly.
[00:06:43 - 00:06:51]	 And to others, I seem a pop. But anyway, from this vantage point, it seems to me that all of
[00:06:51 - 00:07:03]	 these ideologies are cartoon like they flatten, they simplify, they betray, they amuse, which is
[00:07:03 - 00:07:12]	 also cartoon like. And in amusing, I think that this is where their health, fulfilling and solitary
[00:07:12 - 00:07:24]	 worth lies. They are intended to provoke a small smile. That smile will lift you a little further
[00:07:24 - 00:07:33]	 up the ladder, the rungs of the ladder of being. So I thought today what I would talk about is some
[00:07:33 - 00:07:43]	 of the conclusions that I've come to out of a life of psychedelic voyaging, living inside this
[00:07:43 - 00:07:57]	 insanely contradictory society and going through the standard moves, marriage, divorce, children,
[00:07:57 - 00:08:09]	 career, controversy, allies, enemies, attorneys, counselors, consultants, accountants, so forth and
[00:08:09 - 00:08:16]	 so on. The same world you live in. What have I? Well, the first thing I concluded was to try and
[00:08:16 - 00:08:24]	 flee it, which I did a pretty good job of by going to Hawaii, which believe me is a private Idaho.
[00:08:24 - 00:08:38]	 But the conclusions that I've reached are not politically correct anywhere. And so I'm very
[00:08:38 - 00:08:46]	 happy to offend everyone because that seems to be what I did best and there's no sign of mellowing
[00:08:46 - 00:08:57]	 at this point. So the conclusion that I reach vis-a-vis the individual and civilization is this,
[00:08:57 - 00:09:09]	 culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable
[00:09:09 - 00:09:21]	 set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institution. A
[00:09:21 - 00:09:31]	 young man gets his first dose of the news that culture is not his friend when told that he's
[00:09:31 - 00:09:37]	 going to be given an air ticket and some training and sent to an exotic country to kill its
[00:09:37 - 00:09:44]	 inhabitants in the name of some political ideal. You have to be fairly dense not to get the message
[00:09:44 - 00:09:50]	 at that point that culture is not your friend. It is using you for its purposes. You would never
[00:09:50 - 00:09:59]	 dream of doing what it now proposes as the only conceivably right and righteous course of action.
[00:09:59 - 00:10:07]	 Well that's a black and white, a stark and enormous example of what I'm talking about. But I think
[00:10:07 - 00:10:15]	 every day in thousands of ways we betray our impulses toward wholeness, toward community,
[00:10:15 - 00:10:26]	 toward freedom, toward the spirit by genuflecting to cultural values that are squirrely or toxic or
[00:10:26 - 00:10:38]	 simply wrong-headed or obsolete. Culture is not your friend. It's an illusion. What kind of an
[00:10:38 - 00:10:51]	 illusion is it? And this sort of leads on to my the other thing I've come to. It's a childish illusion
[00:10:51 - 00:10:59]	 is the kind of illusion it is. Recently I had a physical examination with my doctor and after it
[00:10:59 - 00:11:06]	 was all over he leaned back in his chair and he said well you know most people your age in the
[00:11:06 - 00:11:18]	 19th century were dead. Yes quite true. People live a great deal longer in the 20th century and
[00:11:18 - 00:11:28]	 consequently I think we part of what drives alienation is it's like being culture is like
[00:11:28 - 00:11:35]	 being taken in a crap game. If you play long enough you will figure out that you're being
[00:11:35 - 00:11:42]	 screwed and of course if you die shortly into the game it never enters your mind. We are all,
[00:11:42 - 00:11:48]	 some of you may have seen the little saying that hangs behind bars in Minnesota,
[00:11:48 - 00:11:57]	 "We get too soon old and too late smart." Well some of us are getting smart earlier and earlier
[00:11:57 - 00:12:07]	 and what is seen through to them is the fact that culture victimizes, ideology victimizes,
[00:12:07 - 00:12:14]	 these things are all con games. Reality, culturally defined reality is some kind of
[00:12:14 - 00:12:24]	 an intelligence test and those who are joining are failing the test. This is very clear to me
[00:12:24 - 00:12:38]	 looking at well phenomena like alien abduction and the great enthusiasm for conspiracy theory
[00:12:38 - 00:12:47]	 that now seems to attend so much modern thinking. Again these are epistemological cartoons where
[00:12:47 - 00:12:55]	 low production values made acceptable through tolerance of TV is allowing people to accept
[00:12:55 - 00:13:03]	 material into their own story which should actually end up on the cutting room floor.
[00:13:03 - 00:13:16]	 Everything, nothing is what it appears to be. Surely you've noticed that. That's A right? A
[00:13:16 - 00:13:24]	 is nothing is what it appears to be. Well therefore complex, difficult, tricky and
[00:13:24 - 00:13:31]	 mercurial things are even less likely to be what they claim to be than other forms of reality.
[00:13:31 - 00:13:43]	 So confronted with the endless whispered rumors and doctored photographs and breathless testimony
[00:13:43 - 00:13:52]	 from the denizens of trailer courts and so forth and so on. What is one to make of all that? Well
[00:13:52 - 00:14:01]	 I think what you're, it's the message is return to basics. The information matrix has become
[00:14:01 - 00:14:09]	 compromised. The data stream is now suspect. Return to first principles. What are first
[00:14:09 - 00:14:16]	 principles? That's what the 20th century is trying to figure out. Yes, what are first principles?
[00:14:16 - 00:14:29]	 I'd like to suggest to you that a place to begin is the body. You have one. It isn't ideologically
[00:14:29 - 00:14:37]	 defined. It can be ideologically defined. You know in Catholic school the nuns used to tell
[00:14:37 - 00:14:44]	 us we should dress in darkness so we wouldn't be an occasion of sin to ourselves. That's an example
[00:14:44 - 00:14:56]	 of the body becoming ideologically defined, but it precedes culture. Culture has to deal with the
[00:14:56 - 00:15:02]	 fact that your eyes are on the front of your face and your anal pore is located near your genitals.
[00:15:02 - 00:15:10]	 Culture would probably rather have it some other way. It would be so convenient, but hey it's a
[00:15:10 - 00:15:19]	 given. I'm so happy we don't, our rumps don't swell in estrus the way some of the other primates do.
[00:15:19 - 00:15:27]	 Can you imagine Giorgio Armani trying to create a line of fashion that comes to term with that?
[00:15:27 - 00:15:42]	 But I, but I digress. So the body, the body is a pre-cultural given and coming with the body is
[00:15:42 - 00:15:51]	 this amazing thing which everyone wants to give away, throw away, get away from, called the felt
[00:15:51 - 00:16:02]	 moment of immediate experience. The felt moment of immediate experience. This is you now here in your
[00:16:02 - 00:16:11]	 body with the cheeseburger slowly dissolving, the cup of coffee, the caffeine, the bladder, all of
[00:16:11 - 00:16:19]	 these things, collisions, compressances, the crossing of trajectories of mental process,
[00:16:19 - 00:16:27]	 digestive process, metabolism, intent, income, emotional state, the felt presence of immediate
[00:16:27 - 00:16:36]	 experience lodged in the body mind system in the moment. That's who you are. That's what they can't
[00:16:36 - 00:16:42]	 take away from you. Whether they drag you away to prison, beat you, drug you, whatever they do to you,
[00:16:42 - 00:16:48]	 you will still have some kind of felt presence of experience until you drift into the darkness
[00:16:48 - 00:17:00]	 of non-entity. So there then one can begin to build outward from that core and say, aha. So the stuff
[00:17:00 - 00:17:09]	 of understanding is not information passed by culturally validated coding systems among the
[00:17:09 - 00:17:17]	 primates at high chatter rate. In other words, the truth is not in the public space or the historical
[00:17:17 - 00:17:26]	 space. The space is the truth is in the felt space of the body in the moment. Well, so some great
[00:17:26 - 00:17:35]	 religions have gotten this far and they, whatever they are, and there are many of them come at last
[00:17:35 - 00:17:42]	 to advocate something called meditation, which has many guises and travels under many names and
[00:17:42 - 00:17:52]	 methods. But what it primarily is, is attention to attention. And what it primarily reveals in,
[00:17:52 - 00:18:03]	 in the ordinary metabolism is frankly, bloody little good meditators will tell you how incredibly
[00:18:03 - 00:18:10]	 boring it is. And the rhetoric of the religions that have made meditation, the centerpiece of
[00:18:10 - 00:18:15]	 their ontology is a rhetoric of nihilism. I mean, this is, you know, or I should have said,
[00:18:15 - 00:18:23]	 because this is sort of the dirty little secret of Buddhist ontology. It isn't the cheerful
[00:18:23 - 00:18:32]	 new Buddhism being exported from California. It's the old style Nagarjuna and Buddhism that says,
[00:18:32 - 00:18:39]	 you know, it is an emptiness within an emptiness after an emptiness before an emptiness. This is
[00:18:39 - 00:18:51]	 Nagarjuna on the nature of body mind. But interestingly, meditation perceived not for
[00:18:51 - 00:19:02]	 years or lifetimes, but perceived as a cultural project over centuries leads not to a clarifying
[00:19:02 - 00:19:13]	 of this philosophical emptiness. But to a discovery that the depth of nihilism, the depths of non
[00:19:13 - 00:19:28]	 entity are in fact, most motiferous in their aspects, not a plenum is one grasping for it,
[00:19:28 - 00:19:36]	 not a plenum, not an undivided platonic thing, but an environment of spirit, meaning, power,
[00:19:36 - 00:19:46]	 intentionality, entities, intelligences, levels, swarming, swarming, swarming in the imagination.
[00:19:46 - 00:19:55]	 And these things can be accessed through drugs, through extraordinary physical practices, or
[00:19:55 - 00:20:03]	 ordeals through various kinds of driving of physiological systems like sonic driving through
[00:20:03 - 00:20:10]	 drumming or physiological driving through repeated chanting. And then the ordinary boundaries of
[00:20:10 - 00:20:22]	 culture and of body dissolve into a much larger realm, the imagination. And it is this imagination
[00:20:22 - 00:20:32]	 that I think is the place to put our attention. The imagination is a dimension of non local
[00:20:32 - 00:20:40]	 information. Quantum physics is now moving towards securing the idea that in some kind of a
[00:20:40 - 00:20:50]	 mathematical super space, all particles in the universe maintain a kind of super state of
[00:20:50 - 00:21:01]	 connectivity called Bell's non local connectivity. What this means to me is that the imagination is
[00:21:01 - 00:21:15]	 literally another dimension, a dimension that is non local. Now, the mind, the animal mind,
[00:21:15 - 00:21:27]	 the human mind, the paleolithic mind evolved as a master coordinator of sensory data coming into
[00:21:27 - 00:21:33]	 the body from the senses about the level of threat and danger in immediate three dimensional space.
[00:21:33 - 00:21:41]	 That's the mind's evolutionary function to preserve the body, to preserve the genetic stream of
[00:21:41 - 00:21:49]	 unfolding by detecting and avoiding threat. And so our minds have evolved in the same way that
[00:21:49 - 00:21:57]	 water takes the shape of its container. Our minds have evolved to take the take the shape of three
[00:21:57 - 00:22:08]	 dimensional space and time under cultural under cultural and environmental pressure. Well, we've
[00:22:08 - 00:22:14]	 paid a huge price for this. It probably also has ensured that we're here this afternoon to discuss
[00:22:14 - 00:22:23]	 it. But it's been a long time since the instantaneous reflex to bash the brains out of
[00:22:23 - 00:22:31]	 anything moving near you that's unfamiliar has served us well. You know, I mean, that that got
[00:22:31 - 00:22:40]	 old 12,000 years ago. The entire enterprise of civilization has been about something else. The
[00:22:40 - 00:22:52]	 felt presence nearby, ineffable, unsayable, but uncannily penetrating of beauty, of mathematical
[00:22:52 - 00:23:03]	 connectivity, of supernatural power. And so these are the things, the exploration of which the
[00:23:03 - 00:23:12]	 singing about of which make us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the
[00:23:12 - 00:23:20]	 business of human beings. It's why we are the way we are. It's why we will be the way we will be.
[00:23:20 - 00:23:30]	 It's how we got where we are. How is it done? It's done by dissolving ordinary cultural boundaries,
[00:23:30 - 00:23:39]	 by perturbing consciousness, and by paying careful attention to the results and attempting to build
[00:23:39 - 00:23:49]	 models there from. Now, in the last few thousand years in the West, this enterprise has been tamed
[00:23:49 - 00:23:57]	 by priestcraft, which combines the enterprise with judicious politicking and a certain amount
[00:23:57 - 00:24:08]	 of ass licking. Before that, the enterprise was untainted by such secular concerns. It was full
[00:24:08 - 00:24:16]	 force forward into the unknown. And this is the great era of shamanism. And what is shamanism,
[00:24:16 - 00:24:24]	 but philosophy with a hands on attitude, philosophy not made around the campfire,
[00:24:24 - 00:24:32]	 but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out
[00:24:32 - 00:24:40]	 what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.
[00:24:40 - 00:24:48]	 The reason people refer to psychedelic endeavors with the vocabulary of travel,
[00:24:48 - 00:24:58]	 taking a trip and so on, is because that is an extreme endeavor. It's the same endeavor. It's
[00:24:58 - 00:25:04]	 the leaving behind of the values of your own culture. Take nothing but a change of clothes,
[00:25:04 - 00:25:13]	 fly to Benares and take up residence at the Sassanid Gap among the Chara Saadis. And I
[00:25:13 - 00:25:20]	 guarantee you whether you resort to psychedelics or not, you will experience boundary dissolution,
[00:25:20 - 00:25:28]	 a reorienting of categories and a reframing of your perspective on your life and your being.
[00:25:28 - 00:25:36]	 So extreme experience is the necessary key. This is true in all forms of endeavor. I mean,
[00:25:36 - 00:25:43]	 if you if you want to understand the atom, you have to smash it, you know, sitting around looking
[00:25:43 - 00:25:50]	 at it, it will never yield its secrets. You have to smash that sucker at the bits and then collect
[00:25:50 - 00:25:59]	 the pieces and then examine exactly how it all came apart in the same way. And without going too
[00:25:59 - 00:26:07]	 far afield for the pun, we must smash ordinary consciousness, get smashed and then look at the
[00:26:07 - 00:26:14]	 pieces flying in all directions and say, you know, gee, I didn't know minds could do that. Well,
[00:26:14 - 00:26:22]	 they can't in the work of day wrote of, you know, living inside the little boxes of positivism and
[00:26:22 - 00:26:33]	 constipated behaviorism and all the rest of it. So extreme experiences, but you know, you don't
[00:26:33 - 00:26:39]	 want these experiences to be too extreme or you will sever the connectivity among the various
[00:26:39 - 00:26:47]	 subsystems and then we'll have to bury you. And this is always a huge strain on those left behind.
[00:26:47 - 00:26:55]	 So there is a practical element here, which is OK, so we want to have extreme experiences,
[00:26:55 - 00:27:02]	 but we don't want to have such extreme experiences that we don't live to tell the tale. We want
[00:27:02 - 00:27:11]	 control to some degree over these experiences. Well, this is where the incredible thoroughness
[00:27:11 - 00:27:20]	 of our human ancestors comes to our aid throughout time and space on this planet, our remote,
[00:27:20 - 00:27:28]	 the tribal societies that preceded us made it their business to discover, catalog and learn
[00:27:28 - 00:27:38]	 to manipulate plants in the environment as the carriers, as the sources of chemical compounds
[00:27:38 - 00:27:44]	 in the environment, which would work extraordinary transformations on consciousness without
[00:27:44 - 00:27:55]	 physical harm, without physiological damage to the organism. And of all the many techniques or deal,
[00:27:55 - 00:28:04]	 abandonment in the wilderness, sexual abstinence, hanging by your pectoral muscles from hooks in the
[00:28:04 - 00:28:12]	 sun for days, all of these sorts of things, of all of these methods, psychedelic plants and their
[00:28:12 - 00:28:23]	 judicious use is arguably the most effective, the most effective and the least invasive and the most
[00:28:23 - 00:28:34]	 likely to produce negative long term consequences. Well, this was not news or even controversy
[00:28:34 - 00:28:43]	 anywhere in the world until within the confines of the 20th century, basically, the presence of
[00:28:43 - 00:28:51]	 these substances and plants began to alarm the order keeping forces of the high tech industrial
[00:28:51 - 00:29:01]	 democracy. Issues separate from the issue of stimulants and depressants, it's an issue separate
[00:29:01 - 00:29:06]	 from the issue of addiction and dependency. These things are not stimulants or depressants,
[00:29:06 - 00:29:14]	 and they do not cause addiction or dependency. What they cause is what I'm advocating,
[00:29:14 - 00:29:22]	 a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently
[00:29:22 - 00:29:37]	 is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people and animals and ecosystems, none of whom were
[00:29:37 - 00:29:44]	 ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction. We do not feel
[00:29:45 - 00:29:51]	 what we are doing. Remember, I spoke about the primacy of the felt moment of experience. If we
[00:29:51 - 00:29:58]	 could feel what we are doing, we would stop doing it. But between us and the consequences of our
[00:29:58 - 00:30:10]	 action, there are endless veils of political rhetoric, stultification, denial, sedation,
[00:30:10 - 00:30:21]	 intoxication, ideological delusion. Now, normally, I think a rap like this tends to,
[00:30:21 - 00:30:31]	 if you have to pigeonhole it, to come down on the side of pessimism. But I am not pessimistic. I see
[00:30:31 - 00:30:38]	 everything as though it were integrated and connected. And there is an unfolding and a
[00:30:38 - 00:30:49]	 plottedness about our situation. It's not for nothing that at the very pinnacle of the age of
[00:30:49 - 00:30:56]	 faith in the machine and science and male dominance and projection of strategic weaponry and so forth
[00:30:56 - 00:31:03]	 and so on, that there should come from the gentler societies of the world, from the rainforests and
[00:31:03 - 00:31:12]	 high deserts of the world, the news of these plants. The Western mind, the cataloging mind,
[00:31:12 - 00:31:18]	 the Cartesian mind in its frenzy to locate, list, isolate and define everything,
[00:31:18 - 00:31:26]	 carried these plants and substances over the past 150 years into the confines of our society.
[00:31:26 - 00:31:35]	 And they are much like Trojan horses left there by the bedraggled, beat down, disenfranchised,
[00:31:35 - 00:31:42]	 third world shamanic people to be found by the white coated priests and priestesses of science
[00:31:42 - 00:31:49]	 and to be brought back into the laboratory to be picked apart for their efficacy and
[00:31:49 - 00:31:54]	 treating addiction or overcoming neurotic behavior or something like that.
[00:31:54 - 00:32:06]	 But of course, the neurotic behavior that they impact upon is neurotic behavior so
[00:32:06 - 00:32:12]	 wide, so deep, so revered that it is in fact cultural values themselves.
[00:32:12 - 00:32:23]	 You see, what is happening, I think, is it's really bigger than psychedelics.
[00:32:23 - 00:32:32]	 It's bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in this ocean. We are corks
[00:32:32 - 00:32:43]	 riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged by, perhaps, chance alone
[00:32:43 - 00:32:50]	 to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe, a moment when the universe
[00:32:51 - 00:33:01]	 goes through some kind of self-transforming evolutionary inflationary expansion.
[00:33:01 - 00:33:07]	 That's what's happening. I mean, it's been happening for a long time. It depends on where
[00:33:07 - 00:33:14]	 you pull back to to get your perspective. One could say, looking at the universe in general,
[00:33:14 - 00:33:20]	 that this planet has been favored from the very beginning. That by a billion years ago,
[00:33:21 - 00:33:26]	 the discerning could tell that this was a planet going places.
[00:33:26 - 00:33:35]	 But certainly, by 500 million years ago, it was clear that this was a planet going places.
[00:33:35 - 00:33:46]	 One complex animal life form gave way to another. Catastrophes, yes, but never catastrophes so
[00:33:46 - 00:33:53]	 total that the enterprise was wiped out. We know that 65 million years ago, a catastrophe,
[00:33:53 - 00:33:59]	 a asteroid, a planetesimal impact occurred on this planet. Nothing larger than a chicken
[00:33:59 - 00:34:10]	 walked away from that on this planet. A bad day, you say. But were it not for that bad day,
[00:34:11 - 00:34:19]	 our story would still be the egg-eating shrews at the edge of the reptilian garden party.
[00:34:19 - 00:34:27]	 These marvelous flowering plants, chock full of psychedelic alkaloids, none of them
[00:34:27 - 00:34:33]	 would have existed. The flowering plants and the higher mammals all arose in the wake of this
[00:34:33 - 00:34:44]	 planet-scouring catastrophe. So you see, there is built in to the larger systems of nature an
[00:34:44 - 00:34:52]	 enormous, what my mentor Eric Jansch used to call, "meta-stability." They are meta-stable. They are
[00:34:52 - 00:35:00]	 not easily deflected. An event as large as a planetesimal impact basically only resets the
[00:35:00 - 00:35:06]	 evolutionary clock by a few million years. And then, in almost over-leaping itself to make up
[00:35:06 - 00:35:15]	 for lost time, out of all of that catastrophe come primates, animals of such complexity and
[00:35:15 - 00:35:23]	 coordinated sensoria that they are wonders to behold. And from them, and quickly, then come
[00:35:24 - 00:35:32]	 abilities never before seen in the world of organic organization. Freely commandable languages,
[00:35:32 - 00:35:38]	 spoken languages, symbolic activity for the first time. Well, at that point, you know,
[00:35:38 - 00:35:45]	 even the academics believe human language is less than 40,000 years old. That means it's as
[00:35:45 - 00:35:54]	 artificial as the dirgeable or the hypodermic needle. It's an invention of some sort within the
[00:35:54 - 00:36:00]	 confines of human history or at the beginning of human history. Recall in South Africa, we have
[00:36:00 - 00:36:06]	 fire pits and stone tools two million years old. Those are not Homo sapiens tools, but they're the
[00:36:06 - 00:36:14]	 tools of Homo habilis, the preceding ancestor in the human line. My point is,
[00:36:15 - 00:36:24]	 we are caught up in a process of unfolding complexification that has now lodged in our
[00:36:24 - 00:36:32]	 species. We are its source at this point. At one point, its source was the geology of the planet.
[00:36:32 - 00:36:40]	 At a later point, closer to us in time, its source was all biological diversity. But as the novelty
[00:36:40 - 00:36:47]	 has increased, the domain of its expression has narrowed and it is now confined largely
[00:36:47 - 00:36:55]	 to the human species. Oh, yes, the rest of nature continues the slow unfolding of continental drift
[00:36:55 - 00:37:01]	 and gene mutation and transfer and so forth. But these things have now receded into the background
[00:37:01 - 00:37:12]	 as the human adventure takes center stage. So it's almost as though, in fact, this is what I believe,
[00:37:12 - 00:37:21]	 that we are not pushed from behind by the causal unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are
[00:37:23 - 00:37:33]	 in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time. And so we are not,
[00:37:33 - 00:37:40]	 as it were, following what the statisticians call a random walk across the temporal landscape.
[00:37:40 - 00:37:47]	 In fact, the temporal landscape is a canyon with incredibly steep walls, and we are only free to
[00:37:47 - 00:37:58]	 move within very narrow confines as the grip, almost the morphogenetic intensity of the attractor at
[00:37:58 - 00:38:07]	 the end of time, increases its penetration and its hold over our imaginations, our city plans,
[00:38:07 - 00:38:13]	 our technologies, our religious ontologies, our medical strategies, so forth and so on.
[00:38:13 - 00:38:24]	 Something is revealing itself to us through us. And as we get closer, the chatter of noise and static
[00:38:24 - 00:38:31]	 being given off of this thing increases exponentially because, you know, McLuhan said once,
[00:38:31 - 00:38:37]	 he said, we move into the future like a person driving who uses only the rearview mirror.
[00:38:38 - 00:38:46]	 That's how we understand the future, by driving in the rearview mirror. All of our models of what
[00:38:46 - 00:38:54]	 lies ahead are based on inverted models of the past. And the one thing you can be certain of is
[00:38:54 - 00:39:01]	 that won't do it, because we can see a person standing in 1900 using that method would have been
[00:39:01 - 00:39:09]	 wrong about the late 1990s. A person standing in 1600 using that method would have been wrong about
[00:39:09 - 00:39:15]	 the late 1900s and so forth and so on. You cannot extrapolate from the future into the past, from the
[00:39:15 - 00:39:21]	 past into the future, because the real nature of the future is its being on Ciche, the thing in
[00:39:21 - 00:39:29]	 itself. And that's what it's trying to reveal. And so the whisperings that reach the ears of the
[00:39:29 - 00:39:37]	 channelers, the visions that come through the hands of painters, sculptors, choreographers,
[00:39:37 - 00:39:47]	 musicians, all of the felt presence of the invisible world is now incredibly pregnant
[00:39:47 - 00:39:54]	 with this message of transformation. And the challenge for each of us is to
[00:39:55 - 00:40:03]	 streamline our language sufficiently that we may mirror this thing in a way that is both
[00:40:03 - 00:40:11]	 true to it and rationally apprehendable to ourselves. And this is a fractal boundary.
[00:40:11 - 00:40:20]	 This is a test of intelligence, because the thing in itself cannot be rationally beheld.
[00:40:20 - 00:40:26]	 You know, the enzymologist J.B.S. Haldane once said, he said, "The world is not only stranger
[00:40:26 - 00:40:35]	 than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose." That to me is a dizzying thought and
[00:40:35 - 00:40:43]	 obviously true. So what we want is a model true to the stranger than we can suppose,
[00:40:43 - 00:40:51]	 but not so alien that there is no emotional or spiritual support in it for the enterprise of
[00:40:51 - 00:40:59]	 being human. How do we do that? How do we inculcate the unspeakable mystery of the transcendental
[00:40:59 - 00:41:08]	 object at the end of time with the mundane nexus of real occasions that happens to be our own
[00:41:08 - 00:41:17]	 existence? Well, to my mind, the answer is it lies in the ability to assimilate paradox.
[00:41:17 - 00:41:25]	 And that means you have to transcend the idea of a closed logical system. You have to live
[00:41:25 - 00:41:34]	 with the idea that there is no intellectual closure. This is, in fact, the door marked freedom.
[00:41:35 - 00:41:45]	 But you've been taught that it's the door marked madness to live in the light of paradox.
[00:41:45 - 00:41:53]	 Things cannot be, we are taught, both A and B simultaneously. This is Aristotelian logic. A is A.
[00:41:53 - 00:42:00]	 This is as old as thought in the West. But it has to be overcome. And in the felt presence
[00:42:01 - 00:42:08]	 of the moment of immediate experience, it is overcome. The mystery does not lie far.
[00:42:08 - 00:42:16]	 It lies in the immediate moment in the act, the fact of being. The only time we really confront
[00:42:16 - 00:42:27]	 this is in the psychedelic experience or other moments of extreme epiphany. The model that I have
[00:42:30 - 00:42:37]	 come to wrap around all of this, because I think it's simple and straightforward and it leaves
[00:42:37 - 00:42:46]	 plenty of room for people to add their own filigree, is a dimensional model. God forbid,
[00:42:46 - 00:42:55]	 a mathematical model. But it works something like this. I mentioned earlier that our senses have
[00:42:55 - 00:43:01]	 evolved as a threat detection device and have sort of crunched us down into three dimensional space.
[00:43:01 - 00:43:13]	 The shaman, wherever and whenever he or she does their shamanizing, the shaman is a person who is
[00:43:13 - 00:43:23]	 able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence. They know more than the people
[00:43:23 - 00:43:32]	 they serve. The people they serve are like children within the game of culture. Only the shaman knows
[00:43:32 - 00:43:37]	 that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That's how he can do his magic.
[00:43:37 - 00:43:45]	 I was recently in Australia, and of course, Aboriginal culture and shamanism is a topic
[00:43:45 - 00:43:51]	 of great interest down there. And I learned, maybe some of you already knew this, that the
[00:43:51 - 00:43:58]	 term for shaman among English-speaking Aboriginals, of whom there are many, some who have spoken it
[00:43:58 - 00:44:05]	 for several hundred years, or over a hundred years anyway, the term for shaman is simply clever fella.
[00:44:05 - 00:44:14]	 And if someone says, "I am a clever fella," they are making a professional claim of great weight.
[00:44:14 - 00:44:24]	 But I love that because it says it all. A clever fella. When I was in the Amazon in my exploring
[00:44:24 - 00:44:30]	 days, we would go up these rivers to these bare assed folks and spend time with them. And the
[00:44:30 - 00:44:37]	 people would want to touch the outboard motors and look at your camera equipment and the butterfly
[00:44:37 - 00:44:44]	 nets and gather around, open-faced, totally innocent. You could always tell the shaman.
[00:44:44 - 00:44:49]	 Because first of all, he usually didn't come out to see who was there, even though no one ever came.
[00:44:49 - 00:44:54]	 Even though these people had visitors once every six months, the guy who wouldn't come out of his
[00:44:54 - 00:45:00]	 hut for the only event in six months was inevitably the shaman. And when you met him, he wasn't
[00:45:00 - 00:45:09]	 interested in your Velcro or your break apart glow in the dark little trinkets or any of the rest of
[00:45:09 - 00:45:16]	 it. He was looking straight at you through the eyes outside of culture, saying, "What kind of a
[00:45:16 - 00:45:24]	 person are you? Are you a fool or are you a clever fella? What is your measure? How much of the
[00:45:24 - 00:45:34]	 situation do you understand? How many levels are you simultaneously aware of at this moment?"
[00:45:34 - 00:45:42]	 And looking into the eyes of that sort of person, you either grow or turn away. You have not much
[00:45:42 - 00:45:49]	 choice. So what's happening with the shaman, I think, is he's a hands-on mathematician,
[00:45:50 - 00:46:02]	 a hands-on non-Euclidean geometer. The shaman enters into the "chaos" of the psychedelic
[00:46:02 - 00:46:14]	 experience and sees that it is not chaos. It is hyperspace. And in it, the adumbrations of the
[00:46:14 - 00:46:23]	 trees of possibility can be followed. One can see who stole the eggs. One can see who coupled the
[00:46:23 - 00:46:31]	 chief's nephew. One can see who will die and who will live. One can see how the weather is going
[00:46:31 - 00:46:39]	 to change. And one can know where the game went. And this is not magic, not in that world. It's
[00:46:39 - 00:46:44]	 impossible in three-dimensional space and time. But in fourth-dimensional space and time, it not
[00:46:44 - 00:46:52]	 only is possible, it's inevitable and unavoidable. It's a different kind of way of being with the
[00:46:52 - 00:47:02]	 information. And I'm sure many of you have your own psychedelic epiphanies that are as gripping
[00:47:02 - 00:47:09]	 and as fascinating as anything that has happened to me. Epiphanies that show that under certain
[00:47:09 - 00:47:17]	 circumstances, the ordinary boundaries of information, space, time, limitation are dissolved.
[00:47:17 - 00:47:23]	 And it may happen only for a moment. It may involve a curing with a laying on of hands.
[00:47:23 - 00:47:31]	 It may involve a sudden insight into a set of complex relationships. It may involve a sudden,
[00:47:31 - 00:47:39]	 unexpected certitude about how a certain event went down that when checked upon, turns out to be
[00:47:39 - 00:47:50]	 true. What we know about the world is defined by our culture. And the way culture does this
[00:47:51 - 00:48:05]	 is through language. You can't know or perceive or appreciate what cannot be brought in to the
[00:48:05 - 00:48:11]	 domain of language. You can't publicly know or appreciate these things. You can feel them
[00:48:11 - 00:48:21]	 as the rich contextual embeddedness of your own being, but you can't communicate them.
[00:48:21 - 00:48:31]	 Sometimes when I read Marcel Proust, I come upon passages where the conveyance of the information
[00:48:31 - 00:48:42]	 of the emotion is so exquisitely subtle that I have the feeling I know what he means. I felt this,
[00:48:42 - 00:48:48]	 but I never dreamed I would ever see it in print or have a thought about it that I could share with
[00:48:48 - 00:49:00]	 anyone else because it is so subtle. So the challenge to all of us, I think, is not this
[00:49:00 - 00:49:09]	 one-dimensional chasing after of answers. This is a fool's game, but an actual stepping back
[00:49:09 - 00:49:18]	 to gain perspective and to realize, you know, salvation is always available. It's in the moment.
[00:49:18 - 00:49:26]	 It's an act of understanding. It doesn't come down through a lineage. It doesn't come through
[00:49:29 - 00:49:40]	 a substance, an empowerment, a word. It comes through understanding. Salvation is an act of
[00:49:40 - 00:49:53]	 rational apprehension of some sort. And, you know, I really believe that we are now in a relationship
[00:49:53 - 00:50:00]	 to the transcendental object at the end of time such that the revelations are daily.
[00:50:00 - 00:50:08]	 The unfoldment, the connectivity, we can see light at the end of the tunnel. I mean, I've had long
[00:50:08 - 00:50:17]	 practice at this. I've been thinking like this since 1968, talking about it like this since 1980,
[00:50:17 - 00:50:25]	 but I never knew how it would come or what it would be. In the last few years, with the rise of
[00:50:25 - 00:50:36]	 a technological, a cultural artifact like the internet, I now see how it will make its way into
[00:50:36 - 00:50:48]	 the world. We are building the nervous system of the human over soul. We are individual units
[00:50:48 - 00:50:57]	 operating under social rules that are pushing us ever closer toward dissolving our societies,
[00:50:58 - 00:51:07]	 societies, human groups run by rules, into telepathic collectivities of some sort.
[00:51:07 - 00:51:13]	 And the chaos of the internet is chaos only to the constipated order freaks of the Habesian
[00:51:13 - 00:51:20]	 sociological machine. It makes them uncomfortable because they can't find the head. They can't find
[00:51:20 - 00:51:29]	 the hierarchy, but it's head and hierarchy that have distorted and made human institutions so
[00:51:29 - 00:51:38]	 abrasive and uncomfortable for the people who inhabit them. So I really believe there is no
[00:51:38 - 00:51:48]	 contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction
[00:51:48 - 00:51:56]	 between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience.
[00:51:56 - 00:52:05]	 There is no contradiction between ultra advanced hyperspatial cyber culture and paleolithic
[00:52:05 - 00:52:15]	 archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our
[00:52:15 - 00:52:23]	 separateness. This is all very scary. None of us know what it means, but the forces that have
[00:52:23 - 00:52:32]	 been called into being are now beyond the control of any institution or any strategic planning
[00:52:32 - 00:52:41]	 committee or any banking committee. These things have a life of their own. There is a morphological
[00:52:41 - 00:52:50]	 unfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are
[00:52:50 - 00:52:58]	 a privileged part of this. Individually, our hope is to understand and participate in the epiphany.
[00:52:58 - 00:53:09]	 There is no blame. Nothing is off-kilter or wrong or unnatural or artificial. No principle
[00:53:10 - 00:53:16]	 has been betrayed. This is how it is supposed to be. But as it picks up speed,
[00:53:16 - 00:53:26]	 it is going to become more and more frightening as most metaphors fail. This is why the rise of cults
[00:53:26 - 00:53:34]	 and why the grasping at ontological straws and why the whisperings from various corners of the
[00:53:34 - 00:53:44]	 universe have grown to a roar because we are uncertain. We are not sure. But I think you become
[00:53:44 - 00:53:51]	 sure by connecting to the source. And then what you become for other people is a source of
[00:53:51 - 00:54:02]	 reassurance. The perfect metaphor for understanding this situation is a birth. If you had never seen
[00:54:02 - 00:54:08]	 a birth and you were rushing about your daily business and suddenly came around a corner and
[00:54:08 - 00:54:14]	 this was happening, as for example could happen to you in India or in Africa somewhere, and here you
[00:54:14 - 00:54:21]	 confronted human birth, if you had not been prepared for that moment, you would have a real emotional
[00:54:21 - 00:54:29]	 thing on your hands. It looks like a medical emergency. Blood is being shed. Organs are being
[00:54:29 - 00:54:36]	 stretched. There is pleading and groaning and moaning. You have to have your chops very together
[00:54:36 - 00:54:45]	 to look at this situation and say, how wonderful, new life coming into the world as it has always
[00:54:45 - 00:54:53]	 coming to the world. Now a birth can be simple and easy or it can be prolonged and tormented.
[00:54:53 - 00:55:03]	 It can be an occasion for joy or it can end in catastrophe. The key is preparation, understanding,
[00:55:03 - 00:55:15]	 awareness, and a desire to meet the experience in all of its fullness. The birth is coming.
[00:55:15 - 00:55:22]	 The birth is coming. And what it does to the social systems we've put in place,
[00:55:22 - 00:55:28]	 the groaning ecologies that are taking the weight of our billions, what it does to the atmosphere,
[00:55:28 - 00:55:36]	 what it does to the economies upon which you and I depend, this all depends on how educated
[00:55:36 - 00:55:43]	 and enlightened each one of us can make ourselves as the thing moves toward completion. And it's no
[00:55:43 - 00:55:50]	 time for foolishness and it's no time for rumor mongering and it's no time for throwing away your
[00:55:50 - 00:55:59]	 epistemological razors and indulging in the spreading of unlikelihoods. It's time to actually
[00:55:59 - 00:56:08]	 pull together. The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It's just not a coincidence
[00:56:08 - 00:56:16]	 that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian
[00:56:16 - 00:56:23]	 intentionality. We were not out of balance for millions of years or hundreds of thousands of
[00:56:23 - 00:56:32]	 years of intellectual existence in which we had humor and song and ribaldry and poetry and
[00:56:32 - 00:56:39]	 horsing around and art and theater. We were not out of balance because our religion involved the
[00:56:39 - 00:56:49]	 dissolving of our cultural values once a week or once a month back into the mysterious mama matrix
[00:56:49 - 00:56:57]	 of primordial being. Once we cut that off, once we began to make it up or to listen to the most
[00:56:57 - 00:57:06]	 shrill among us make it up, we were lost. That's what we're returning to. Our story is the story
[00:57:06 - 00:57:13]	 of the prodigal son. We left the family farm, the balance, the domesticity, and we made the
[00:57:13 - 00:57:20]	 shaman's journey deep into the heart of matter and of energy of space and time. We return with gifts,
[00:57:20 - 00:57:29]	 with understandings no shaman before ever had. Quantum physics, fractal mathematics, astrophysics,
[00:57:29 - 00:57:36]	 cosmology, the knowledge of DNA. This is real knowledge and we shed real blood to obtain it.
[00:57:36 - 00:57:45]	 Now it can be given meaning by being brought under the umbrella of authentic archaic human values
[00:57:45 - 00:57:52]	 informed by relationships with psychedelic plants. This is the comfortable future, the hopeful future
[00:57:52 - 00:57:57]	 that lies ahead. To the degree that people turn their back on this, they're going to have
[00:57:57 - 00:58:05]	 a rough time explaining to themselves and their children just what exactly is happening at the end
[00:58:05 - 00:58:11]	 of the 20th century. Okay, that's my wrap. Now I want to hear from you.
[00:58:23 - 00:58:30]	 Thank you. I mean, I really think, and then let's say a couple of things. These things are much
[00:58:30 - 00:58:35]	 more fruitful in the question and answer period, at least for me. And then the other thing I want
[00:58:35 - 00:58:41]	 to say is about the psychedelic community of Chicago. You know, it's all fine and good to
[00:58:41 - 00:58:49]	 come to hear the great ones pontificate. But the reality of the situation is this is your community
[00:58:49 - 00:58:55]	 and we have self-selected ourselves to be here out of the millions who aren't and the thousands
[00:58:55 - 00:59:02]	 who came to this conference and who are also not here. So look around. Somebody in this room has
[00:59:02 - 00:59:10]	 what you're looking for and it probably isn't me. We used to stand out, but then our sartorial
[00:59:10 - 00:59:17]	 choices triumphed everywhere and now we look like everybody else. But I'd like to do questions now
[00:59:17 - 00:59:31]	 for the rest of the session. Yeah. Yeah, I stay away. I stay away from talking about my own
[00:59:31 - 00:59:38]	 mathematical theories because the word mathematics is guaranteed to clear a hall in most situations.
[00:59:40 - 00:59:49]	 But I think it's I'm it's perfectly well just to do this very briefly. Two things are completely
[00:59:49 - 00:59:56]	 obvious to me that science has missed and you're smart people check it out. Isn't this true
[00:59:56 - 01:00:03]	 that the universe has gotten more complicated as we approach the present, that everything they ever
[01:00:03 - 01:00:08]	 told you on Discovery Channel or anywhere else supports the idea that the universe in the
[01:00:08 - 01:00:13]	 beginning was simple and then it got more complicated, right? So that's a truth that
[01:00:13 - 01:00:23]	 reaches notice across biology, geology, astrophysics. It's a cross disciplinary
[01:00:23 - 01:00:31]	 truth of great power. Well, then here's a second truth related to the first. This movement into
[01:00:31 - 01:00:36]	 complexity from the remote past to the present is occurring faster and faster and faster.
[01:00:37 - 01:00:43]	 And that's where we come into the picture. You see, we are we are not we are animals,
[01:00:43 - 01:00:49]	 but we are animals plus animals, plus language, plus technology, plus religion,
[01:00:49 - 01:00:56]	 plus analytical analysis, so forth and so on. We represent some kind of an experiment in a deepening
[01:00:56 - 01:01:06]	 of complexity and historical change occurs at orders of magnitude faster than biological change.
[01:01:07 - 01:01:13]	 And very recently, pick a number 100 years ago, 50 years ago, something like that.
[01:01:13 - 01:01:21]	 It seems like we entered into an even deeper involution of the spiral. Well, you don't have to
[01:01:21 - 01:01:28]	 be a rocket scientist to figure out that the spiral closure that's moving faster and faster
[01:01:28 - 01:01:35]	 is now moving so fast that its culmination can be imagined to occur within a human lifetime.
[01:01:35 - 01:01:45]	 And I think that that's true. I think we are the last generation of proto human beings and that
[01:01:45 - 01:01:53]	 beyond us lies something very hard to imagine. The human machine symbiote, something which is going
[01:01:53 - 01:02:00]	 to spring, you know, not from my loins, but as Zeus's daughter sprang in a sense from his forehead.
[01:02:01 - 01:02:08]	 We are and it's not simply a new species. It's a new order of being. It's as dramatic a break
[01:02:08 - 01:02:15]	 with the earlier orders of natural organization as the eukaryotes were from the prokaryotes and the
[01:02:15 - 01:02:22]	 land animals were from the sea. How does that make us feel? Well, I don't know. How does it
[01:02:22 - 01:02:28]	 make you feel? It's a complicated it's a complicated feeling here. You know, in Silicon Valley,
[01:02:28 - 01:02:35]	 there are people every day who go to work with the phrase in their mind, the great work. And what is
[01:02:35 - 01:02:42]	 the great work? The great work is the handing on of human civilization to a species intelligent
[01:02:42 - 01:02:51]	 enough to appreciate the enterprise. And, you know, it will be a symbiote, we hope it will be an AI
[01:02:51 - 01:03:00]	 for sure. It's here. It's here. I mean, it depends on how much you understand and who you know and
[01:03:00 - 01:03:08]	 which technologies you follow. We're all coming to terms with it at different levels. But in a sense,
[01:03:08 - 01:03:17]	 the only thing left is the collective realization occurring individual by individual. But in fact,
[01:03:17 - 01:03:25]	 history has ended. This is not only the postmodern dispensation, it's the post historical
[01:03:25 - 01:03:33]	 dispensation. What happens next? Well, that that's the adventure we prayed for and claimed we wanted.
[01:03:33 - 01:03:53]	 So it is upon us. Yeah. In the back. Oh, thanks for bringing that all up.
[01:03:55 - 01:04:03]	 Heaven's Gate. Well, you know, we only have an hour and a half here and I have a lot of ideas about
[01:04:03 - 01:04:13]	 all of this. I think you know, that was a perfect example. Ideology kills. It is not a childish game.
[01:04:13 - 01:04:20]	 Ideology kills. And I was very amused. I mean, the heavens gate thing was a tragedy, but there were
[01:04:20 - 01:04:26]	 curious aspects to it. I mean, it was the week before Easter all around me. I heard people
[01:04:26 - 01:04:33]	 saying things like, you know, how could people believe such crazy stuff? And by the way, honey,
[01:04:33 - 01:04:41]	 did you get a dress for service so we can go and celebrate the resurrection of the Redeemer?
[01:04:47 - 01:04:55]	 And you wonder, you know, whose ox is getting gored here because something is absolutely nuts,
[01:04:55 - 01:05:01]	 but 400 million people believe it. That makes it OK. But if 20 people believe something, that's
[01:05:01 - 01:05:10]	 that's a cult. I I have an all of this gives me the creeps. I have an absolute horror of belief
[01:05:10 - 01:05:20]	 systems and and cults. And I've never met a guru I really liked. I've never met one I've trusted.
[01:05:20 - 01:05:25]	 You know, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the Teddy Roosevelt, some relative, I don't know. Anyway,
[01:05:25 - 01:05:31]	 she used to say at these White House dinners that they would give in the Roosevelt administration,
[01:05:31 - 01:05:35]	 she said, if you have nothing good to say about anyone, sit by me.
[01:05:37 - 01:05:45]	 And I'm sort of in that position being on the celeb circuit and so forth. I have a chance to
[01:05:45 - 01:05:53]	 sort of be behind the scenes. And since I wasn't appointed or nobody ever came to me or I feel free
[01:05:53 - 01:05:59]	 to report to you because I identify with you. I don't identify with them. I identify with you.
[01:05:59 - 01:06:05]	 And I'm telling you, you know, keep one hand on your wallet and the other hand over your anal
[01:06:05 - 01:06:17]	 pore. This is the way to approach all of this. Belief is hideous. It's also completely unnecessary
[01:06:17 - 01:06:26]	 ideology. Imagine a monkey walking around with the idea that he or she possesses certain truth.
[01:06:26 - 01:06:33]	 I mean, you have to lack a sense of humor to not see the absurdity of that. If you met a termite
[01:06:33 - 01:06:40]	 who told you he was on a quest for certain truth, a small smile would tug at your lips. I hope.
[01:06:40 - 01:06:47]	 Do you believe for a moment that we are different from that termite? I think not. I think not.
[01:06:47 - 01:06:55]	 We understand what we can understand. We build models to do this without realizing the
[01:06:55 - 01:07:03]	 tentative nature of the enterprise is just damn foolishness. Here, my brother put it very well
[01:07:03 - 01:07:10]	 one time. He said, Have you ever noticed that as we build the fire of understanding brighter,
[01:07:10 - 01:07:16]	 the greater the volume of darkness that is revealed? Or here, I'll put it for you in a
[01:07:16 - 01:07:24]	 geometric model. As the sphere of understanding expands, as the sphere of understanding expands,
[01:07:24 - 01:07:32]	 the surface area of ignorance necessarily grows ever larger. How could it be otherwise?
[01:07:33 - 01:07:41]	 Well, so then get a grip. You know, all of these things are candles lit against the darkness.
[01:07:41 - 01:07:48]	 But that's why I say the thing to keep coming back to is the felt presence of immediate experience.
[01:07:48 - 01:07:56]	 Not how do I feel as a feminist or a Marxist or a devotee of anonymous bar or whatever. How do I
[01:07:56 - 01:08:04]	 feel? Period. Not not through the filter of ideology. As I look back through history,
[01:08:04 - 01:08:10]	 as you look back through history, very few ideologies last very long without going sour
[01:08:10 - 01:08:17]	 or becoming toxic. So why should we assume, as all those naive societies in the past assumed,
[01:08:17 - 01:08:23]	 that we are, you know, have 95 percent of the truth and the other five percent will be delivered
[01:08:23 - 01:08:30]	 by our best people in the next three years? People fools have always believed that. But the smart
[01:08:30 - 01:08:40]	 money knows we ain't even close. You know, you cannot today explain how I can think to myself,
[01:08:40 - 01:08:47]	 make a fist and make a fist. What you're seeing is mind over matter.
[01:08:49 - 01:08:57]	 I say make a fist. I make a fist. This is the defeat of science, behaviorism, causal theory.
[01:08:57 - 01:09:02]	 It's defeated by something as simple as that. So get into the mysteries of the body,
[01:09:02 - 01:09:10]	 the felt presence of the moment. Somebody else here. Oh, I don't know. Yeah.
[01:09:10 - 01:09:27]	 You advocate meditation.
[01:09:27 - 01:09:38]	 Yes. I must say, usually my daily meditations are accompanied by cannabis, which I don't consider
[01:09:39 - 01:09:47]	 high pressure psychedelic, but it certainly makes meditation more tolerable. But you raise
[01:09:47 - 01:09:52]	 an interesting question, which is what is the preparation for the psychedelic experience?
[01:09:52 - 01:09:59]	 Meditation is a good one. Engagement with these problems is a good one. I mean, think about
[01:09:59 - 01:10:07]	 what you want to do. Have clarity of intent. The way I do psychedelics is quite infrequently
[01:10:08 - 01:10:15]	 at high doses on an empty stomach in silent darkness. And then, and I add this, this is how
[01:10:15 - 01:10:23]	 I do it, but everything up to there I've advocated. The final thing is alone. And that's a biggie for
[01:10:23 - 01:10:32]	 people. But to me, that's the sine qua non, because if you don't go alone, you know who you take with
[01:10:32 - 01:10:43]	 you? Everybody. Because the other person represents the cultural system inevitably, inevitably. I mean,
[01:10:43 - 01:10:48]	 I'm not saying you should never take psychedelics with people you love and respect and children and
[01:10:48 - 01:10:55]	 loved ones and parents and all that. But the deep, deep work, you know, Plotinus called it the flight
[01:10:55 - 01:11:04]	 of the alone to the alone. The deep, deep work has to be done alone because dig it. The last dance
[01:11:04 - 01:11:12]	 you dance, you will dance alone. And I'm, you know, I see this pretty much in Buddhist terms in that
[01:11:12 - 01:11:19]	 I really believe at death, there is some kind of a landscape to be traversed, some kind of a
[01:11:21 - 01:11:27]	 process to be gone through and that it is critical not to fuck up at that point.
[01:11:27 - 01:11:35]	 I mean, they all insist on this, right? Whatever it is. So, so the psychedelic seemed to me to match,
[01:11:35 - 01:11:45]	 to show the way into the bardo. I once turned on to DMT, a very, very holy, to beckon man,
[01:11:45 - 01:11:53]	 not one of these Budweiser llamas, but the real McCoy. He didn't have a growth center or a patron,
[01:11:53 - 01:12:00]	 but he smoked the DMT and he came back and he said, those are the lesser lights.
[01:12:00 - 01:12:08]	 He said, you cannot go further than that and return. And I believe him. I absolutely believe
[01:12:08 - 01:12:15]	 him. I think they've seen the territory. So there is something about, and I know the analogy earlier
[01:12:15 - 01:12:23]	 to the collective birth, be, be prepared and be psychedelic or searchlights out into the,
[01:12:23 - 01:12:28]	 out into the great unknown. People who, you know, people talk about recreational drugs and all that.
[01:12:28 - 01:12:36]	 I regret that I have to be involved with all of that. I take drugs very seriously. Not that I've
[01:12:36 - 01:12:41]	 never done a sub dose and gone to a rave or something like that, but I didn't do it with
[01:12:41 - 01:12:48]	 the illusion that this was spiritual work. I did it to dance and to have fun with my friends.
[01:12:48 - 01:12:57]	 But the remarkable thing about the psychedelics is how safe they are at levels. No human being
[01:12:57 - 01:13:04]	 can stand, you know, I mean, we know the LB 50 of psilocybin. It's, it's hundreds of,
[01:13:05 - 01:13:12]	 it's hundreds of milligrams per kilogram. Nobody's effort taken more than 40 or 50 milligrams
[01:13:12 - 01:13:20]	 because beyond that, the human cognitive machinery can't process the data. I mean, it is literally
[01:13:20 - 01:13:28]	 beyond language. I have a friend who, every time he takes psilocybin, he says, he tries to stand
[01:13:28 - 01:13:37]	 more, stand more. And I know exactly what he means. I've had conversations with that entity in there
[01:13:37 - 01:13:44]	 where you say to it, okay, you know, the dancing mice, all this, it's very nice.
[01:13:44 - 01:13:53]	 We're feeling pretty comfortable here. Show me what you are for yourself. Show me what you really
[01:13:53 - 01:14:00]	 are. Well, immediately the temperature drops, black draperies begin to lift and there's an
[01:14:00 - 01:14:06]	 organ tone straight out of the Bach B minor mass that shakes the room. And after about 30 seconds
[01:14:06 - 01:14:13]	 of this, you said enough already of what you really are for yourself because you realize it,
[01:14:13 - 01:14:23]	 it will fulfill the request. It can lift a veil on vistas of reality that like some hero in an HP
[01:14:23 - 01:14:30]	 Lovecraft tale, you will just be left gibbering for the rest of your life in a very small cell
[01:14:30 - 01:14:36]	 because there are truths out there that the termite mind of man, I think is not ready to
[01:14:37 - 01:14:44]	 handle. The reason this whole non-local thing works the way it does is because we resonate
[01:14:44 - 01:14:51]	 with what is familiar. In other words, the universe is full of things. No human mind can
[01:14:51 - 01:14:57]	 cognize or apprehend, but because we cannot cognize or apprehend these things, we do not even notice
[01:14:57 - 01:15:04]	 them. They are, as it were, in the background. What's in the foreground is everything at least
[01:15:05 - 01:15:12]	 familiar enough that we can relate to it as strange. The problem is not to encounter the
[01:15:12 - 01:15:17]	 alien, but to have enough sense to know when it's looking at you because it ain't going to be like
[01:15:17 - 01:15:24]	 you think it is. That's the one thing you can take to the back. Yeah, back there.
[01:15:34 - 01:15:41]	 Do I consider psychedelics a door or a window? Interesting question. I think that until recently
[01:15:41 - 01:15:50]	 they were a window. I think they can become a door. Here's my wrap on this. This whole business
[01:15:50 - 01:15:55]	 about the alien, and I could have spent the whole hour on a different tack and gone at it, but
[01:15:56 - 01:16:06]	 the alien is real in some sense, but not real in any sense that I think would satisfy the marketplace
[01:16:06 - 01:16:16]	 here assembled. The alien is somehow non-local. That means that if we really want to contact the
[01:16:16 - 01:16:26]	 alien, we are going to have to understand that the alien is pure information. The alien is only
[01:16:26 - 01:16:34]	 made of information. Is that good news or bad news? It's good news. Here's why. It just so happens
[01:16:34 - 01:16:41]	 at this time in history. We have produced a technology that can manipulate pure digital
[01:16:41 - 01:16:50]	 information. The alien needs to be downloaded into cyberspace. It's not for nothing that the net is
[01:16:50 - 01:16:59]	 called the net. It is a net for catching an alien. In all the old B science fiction movies of the 50s,
[01:16:59 - 01:17:06]	 one of the tropes of the plot was always the landing zone. We must build a landing zone,
[01:17:06 - 01:17:13]	 go to the landing zone, locate the landing zone. The net is the landing zone. Where is the alien?
[01:17:14 - 01:17:21]	 The alien is trapped in the deeper interstices of the human soul, but can be downloaded onto the
[01:17:21 - 01:17:29]	 internet as a virtual reality of some sort. And this, you do it very slyly. You don't announce
[01:17:29 - 01:17:37]	 what I've just announced. You say, we're going to hold a contest and we're going to have a prize
[01:17:37 - 01:17:45]	 for the best simulation of a psychedelic experience in VRML, in virtual space.
[01:17:45 - 01:17:52]	 And you hold this contest and you hold it the next year and the next year. And people are inspired
[01:17:52 - 01:17:59]	 to download what they think of as their weirdest visions. But what they don't understand is their
[01:17:59 - 01:18:09]	 weirdest visions are the weird vision. In other words, the collective over soul exists dispersed
[01:18:09 - 01:18:16]	 through all of us. And if we have a collective project, seek to model it, to animate it,
[01:18:16 - 01:18:24]	 to produce a reasonable simulacrum of it in virtual reality, it will come to be. We will
[01:18:24 - 01:18:29]	 summon it out of ourselves. And I think at a certain point we will understand the nature
[01:18:29 - 01:18:37]	 of the enterprise. The alchemist dreamed of something like this, the summoning into existence
[01:18:37 - 01:18:44]	 of the cosmic Anthropos, the mystic Adam, the Sothec Hydra lift, the philosopher's stone,
[01:18:44 - 01:18:53]	 the lapis philosophorum, the transcendental object at the end of time. Once again, the living heart
[01:18:53 - 01:19:01]	 of the universal panacea. Now, I think as we move into the empowering of the imagination
[01:19:01 - 01:19:10]	 through cyberspace, we can actually do this. We can actually bring these archetypes, if you will,
[01:19:10 - 01:19:17]	 into existence in ways that will give them a terrifying immediacy. I mean, I have visited
[01:19:17 - 01:19:24]	 virtual realities of low definition slapped together in fairly short order. And it shows me
[01:19:24 - 01:19:36]	 what you could achieve if many people lovingly crafted and tooled these things. We would discover
[01:19:36 - 01:19:44]	 that we can communicate to each other. The Niagara's of epiphanous beauty that pour through us
[01:19:44 - 01:19:51]	 when we smoke the empty, take psilocybin or something like that. So in answer to the gentleman's
[01:19:51 - 01:20:00]	 question, psychedelics were a door, were a window until the advent of virtual reality and the Internet
[01:20:00 - 01:20:08]	 and the new information technology. And they melded to psychedelic intent, open the possibility
[01:20:08 - 01:20:16]	 of opening that window and stepping through it into the most beautiful dreams human beings have
[01:20:16 - 01:20:20]	 ever dreamed. Yeah.
[01:20:20 - 01:20:28]	 Yeah.
[01:20:28 - 01:20:35]	 Yeah.
[01:20:36 - 01:20:43]	 Mm hmm.
[01:20:43 - 01:20:53]	 Yeah.
[01:20:54 - 01:21:03]	 I don't know.
[01:21:19 - 01:21:28]	 Yeah. Well, this is a topic late in the game for this workshop. But there are but people in all
[01:21:28 - 01:21:34]	 times and places have asked this question is OK, if we reduce it all down to nothing,
[01:21:34 - 01:21:43]	 then how do we build it back? And philosophers have developed what are called razors or logical
[01:21:43 - 01:21:51]	 tools that allow this process to go forward. The most famous razor and the one that certainly
[01:21:51 - 01:21:58]	 could use some application around here is Occam's razor, named after William of Occam,
[01:21:58 - 01:22:08]	 a 14th century nominalist. Occam's razor says this hypothesis should not be multiplied without
[01:22:08 - 01:22:17]	 necessity or translated into common vernacular English. Keep it simple, stupid. In other words,
[01:22:17 - 01:22:25]	 the simplest explanation is always to be preferred. Never choose a more complicated
[01:22:25 - 01:22:32]	 explanation over the simpler explanation. So, for example, a light is seen in the sky.
[01:22:33 - 01:22:38]	 Simple explanation, aircraft, complex explanation, you know what?
[01:22:38 - 01:22:46]	 The simpler explanation is to be preferred until further evidence forces its abandonment.
[01:22:46 - 01:22:53]	 And God knows, even with this razor in place, you're forced to some pretty complicated hypotheses by
[01:22:53 - 01:23:01]	 some situations. But if you will rely on your own intuition, the felt presence of immediate
[01:23:01 - 01:23:10]	 experience and logical razors. Another good one, I call this one the Gorbachev razor.
[01:23:10 - 01:23:19]	 Trust, but verify. Trust, but verify. It's okay to trust as long as you verify.
[01:23:19 - 01:23:25]	 This keeps you out of trouble. So these are simply the rules of mental hygiene
[01:23:26 - 01:23:32]	 that are no longer taught because commercial interests have determined that people who don't
[01:23:32 - 01:23:38]	 know these things are easily manipulated in the marketplace and people who do know these things
[01:23:38 - 01:23:45]	 are not. It's horrifying to realize that whether you can think straight or not is a decision being
[01:23:45 - 01:23:52]	 made for you by the Fortune 500 corporations. Is it one more argument for overcoming
[01:23:53 - 01:24:00]	 culturally reinforced childishness? One more and then we have to clear this for
[01:24:00 - 01:24:05]	 Whitley Strieber, who has lots to say to you, I'm sure. Over here.
[01:24:20 - 01:24:29]	 Well, I'm certainly a print head formed by it and formed by McLuhanism. I'm not an angry print
[01:24:29 - 01:24:35]	 head. In other words, I don't like all this denouncing of youth and all this talk about
[01:24:35 - 01:24:41]	 cyber driven illiteracy and all that. First of all, I don't think it's true. I think
[01:24:41 - 01:24:49]	 people who spend hours and hours a day on the Internet are exposed to vast amounts of information
[01:24:49 - 01:24:57]	 that synchronistically or otherwise forms their opinion. I think the printed word
[01:24:57 - 01:25:05]	 at this point is a glorious art. It's funny. You should ask this question. Here it is. 1997.
[01:25:05 - 01:25:11]	 We have many things to celebrate this year in America. The the mission to Mars, for example.
[01:25:11 - 01:25:17]	 But one thing we have to celebrate that probably hasn't been mentioned here today is American
[01:25:17 - 01:25:25]	 literature is alive and well. Thomas Pynchon has written a brilliant new novel, a novel that will
[01:25:25 - 01:25:31]	 make you proud to be a reader of English and an American, a novel called Mason and Dixon.
[01:25:31 - 01:25:39]	 Don DeLillo, a very different sort of writer, has written a brilliant end of the century statement
[01:25:39 - 01:25:44]	 called Underworld. American Art and Letters is very healthy. And actually, that leads me to the
[01:25:44 - 01:25:51]	 final thought that I want to leave you with, which is the way to react to all of this stuff is not to
[01:25:51 - 01:25:59]	 believe or to denounce or to the way to relate to what is happening to us is to produce art. Put the
[01:25:59 - 01:26:06]	 art pedal to the floor. If you paint, if you sculpt, if you write poetry, if you dance, if you
[01:26:06 - 01:26:14]	 declaim, whatever you do, that is the oversold trying to come through. We are never closer to the
[01:26:14 - 01:26:21]	 quintessence of the human collectivity than when we produce art. These are the larger semiotic
[01:26:21 - 01:26:28]	 messages that are seeking to pass between us. And no one who creates art fully understands
[01:26:28 - 01:26:38]	 their own art. But if they create it out of honesty and and from close to the bone, it can't fail
[01:26:38 - 01:26:46]	 to elevate. We don't have to understand what is happening to us to affirm our humanness and to
[01:26:46 - 01:27:00]	 contribute to the future that is unfolding. Thank you very, very much. Thank you.
[01:27:00 - 01:27:07]	 Thank you.
[01:27:07 - 01:27:17]	 [BLANK_AUDIO]