Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic
 salon.
 I hope you're not getting tired of this series of Terrence McKenna podcasts because there
 are still a few more to go.
 In today's program, Terrence talks about the cascade of history, human-machine symbiosis,
 and the internet among other things.
 And we'll begin with his rap about time and the evolution of animal life on this planet.
 So let's hear what Terrence McKenna thinks about all the changes now taking place at
 such a mind-bending rate here on our beautiful little planet.
 The way I think of it is I think that Maxwell's laws of thermodynamics are only part of the
 story and that you also have to look at the work that T.P.
 Rushing did in the 60s and 70s where he showed that there is this principle which they called
 different things but basically it was random perturbation to higher states of order and
 that this occurred in systems of all levels of complexity that actually sometimes systems
 spontaneously organize themselves into more complex forms.
 So in the entropic state that you're talking about which resembles a Bernoulli gas, a model
 of dissipation of the particles of gas, the opposite end of the spectrum would be this
 notion that all points in the matrix become cotangent which requires a higher dimension
 that is still trivial.
 And that's what I think it is.
 I think that biology like this process which we've called novelty or complexification that
 we say is increasing through time, starts simple, ends complicated, one way of talking
 about it is to think of it as language is in conquest of dimensional expression or something
 is seeking to manifest itself in a domain of time and space of higher and higher dimension
 because if you go back to the earliest biological emergence, they're like fixed slimes, these
 early life forms.
 They're essentially points.
 They don't move through space.
 They have no eyes.
 They have no organs of perception.
 They are simply points of being.
 Well then, still later in the process, they break free from their stationary points and
 they become motile.
 But they still have no perception, they're just groping now.
 Now they're groping specks of being and they've gone from being points to the equivalent of
 lines.
 Well then, finally, light sensitive chemistry sequesters itself in the membrane and these
 things begin to have a notion of a gradient of that the action is where the light is,
 that the food is where the light is and so then this generates the concept here and there
 which is a time bound concept.
 Suddenly time springs into being.
 There is the notion of the execution of will over time.
 Well then the rest of the story of the evolution of animal life right up to 50,000 years ago
 is simply the story of better eyes, better muscles, better coordination, better ability
 to move through this revealed topological manifold with a temporal axis.
 But then with the advent of spoken language, what spoken language is about is the recovery
 of memory at a later date.
 It's a data recall system.
 And then you talk about the past and you not only talk about it but you strategize from
 it.
 Hunting strategies, erotic fantasy, mate getting strategies.
 When you get to writing, this time binding function is now totally explicit.
 The game is out in the open.
 The purpose of these behaviors is to keep the past from slipping away.
 And so we write down king lists and dynastic histories and this sort of thing.
 Well from this point of view that I'm pushing here for a moment that evolution is the conquest
 of dimensionality, you can see then that the primate conquest of time through time binding
 technology is the phenomenon that we call human history.
 This is apparently what we're about.
 This is why we speak, why we write, why we invent phonetic alphabets and mathematical
 notation because we are binding time.
 Well you can then propagate that process forward to say well then what would satisfy this drive?
 Well nothing less than a complete conquest of time itself in the same way that as we
 look back in the history of biology we see these other dimensional barriers were crossed
 from stationary, from in situ existence to motility to a sense of light to coordination
 of three dimensional space, now coordination of fourth dimensional space.
 And to make this leap to the full coordination of 4D it requires some kind of machine symbiosis,
 it requires prostheses, it requires that we redesign and extend our nervous system over
 the entire planet and that we undergo some kind of metamorphosis and become instead of
 semi-cannibalistic primates, machine tenders of a global nervous system, some of which
 is gold and copper and glass and some of which is flesh and DNA and neurons and this whole
 thing is in a state of self-designing foment and that, I don't know how we got here, but
 it leads me to the second point I wanted to make earlier when I was talking about novelty.
 I said there were two things which science had overlooked and then I discussed the first
 one which is that nature is a novelty producing and conserving engine.
 The second thing that science has overlooked and culture has overlooked is related to the
 first and it's this, it's that this process of producing novelty that the universe is
 about is not going on at a steady rate, it's going on faster and faster as we approach
 the present.
 It's like what mathematicians call a cascade.
 It began slowly and has moved with greater and greater acceleration from the very first
 moments of its existence.
 So the early history of the universe is dull news.
 It's slow moving.
 I mean stars are condensing, galaxies are ordering themselves.
 This is the stuff of millennia, of tens of millennia, of greater spans of time.
 Once you get down to the last 500 million years on this planet, biology is the main
 show.
 Geology and astrophysics have receded into the background and where the action, the mutation,
 the change, the shifts is happening is on the surface of planets in interface with atmospheres
 and cosmic environments and asteroidal impacts and melts and all these various things that
 went on.
 There is a period for life before that, a long, long period, the archaeozoic, but you
 talk about Dolesville, there's nothing going on there.
 So then when you reach the last million years, it's as though this process of the emergence
 of novelty both concentrates itself in nature into a single line, the hominids, but it also
 intensifies itself by orders of magnitude.
 So change is now then, is then happening on a scale of hundreds of years, you know, languages
 are changing, pottery designs, and as we approach the present, this becomes more and more furious.
 And so what novelty theory is saying is this is not an easily explained phenomenon, it's
 not simply a natural consequence of our being in the world, that's looking at it backwards.
 Somehow our being in the world means that the world process is approaching some kind
 of definitive cusp in its development.
 In other words, that human history is the shockwave of some greater event about to emerge
 out of the order of nature, that human history, 25,000 years is all it is, is like a shimmer,
 an aura, something which flashes across animal nature in the geological millisecond before
 the thing goes cosmic, or whatever it is that it's going to go.
 And so for us, human history has this enormous dramatic impact because our lives last 70
 or 80 years if we're lucky, we're as ephemeral as mayflies.
 For us, human history is 1500 generations, but in terms of the species, it's a fever,
 it's a moment that has come upon us, and now we're deep, deep, deep into it, and deep enough
 into it, I think, that we can begin to actually talk about what lies at the other side.
 And our religions have become almost the architectures of our social hopes, and this coincidence
 of calendrical synchronism that we're undergoing, and what I mean by that is that the Mayan
 civilization fixated on the heliacal rising of the winter solstice sun and the galactic
 center, an event which occurs only once every 26,000 years, occurs in 2012, they fixated
 on this.
 And our calendar, reformed by papal rationalists in the 15th century and originally founded
 by a Roman dictator, misses the same 26,000 year node with a millennial date by only 12
 years.
 So that's .001% on a scale of 10,000 years.
 So for all practical purposes, these two calendars both reach very important culmination dates,
 very near to each other in eternity, if you think about how much time that is.
 So what does this mean?
 Well if you're a Jungian, or believe in the greater, larger dynamics of the unconscious,
 it means that on the wheel of cosmic time, somehow the appointment of the end of a world
 year has arrived.
 Why is it keyed to the galactic center?
 I wouldn't at this point care to speculate, I could be dragged into it, but it's probably
 not the best way to spend our time.
 But the point is that this phenomenon of novelty conservation, which has been going on for
 a very long time throughout the whole life of the universe, is now happening so rapidly
 that it's down into the scales of time where it's discernible in a human lifetime.
 In fact, less than a human lifetime.
 Now change defines everything, even for such microbes as ourselves, where before we were
 embedded, as it were, in the much more slow-moving processes of climate change and glaciation
 advance and retraction and that sort of thing.
 Now we make our own time, and we even talk about downloading ourselves into machines.
 Well as we sit here, we're functioning at about 100 hertz, about 100 cycles a second.
 If you were downloaded into even today's desktop computer, you'd be running at 200 megahertz.
 Suddenly 2012 would appear as far away in time as the bust-up of Pangea is in the other
 direction, because you would have stretched time.
 All time is, is how much you can jam into a moment.
 It's very easy to suppose that we're on the brink of a weird kind of pseudo-immortality,
 where time spent in circuitry is essentially time spent in eternity.
 People will choose, toward the close of their lives, to migrate into the virtual realms
 where the laws of physics are replaced by the laws of the programmer's imagination.
 You really then are entering into your own private Idaho, so to speak.
 Teilhard de Jardin, for those of you who don't know his work, was a Jesuit paleontologist
 and primatologist who wrote in the 1950s the Omega Point, the phenomenon of man.
 And in a way, nothing I say or little that anybody has said about cyberspace, about the
 meltdown of humanity into some electronic collectivity, has been surpassed by Teilhard
 de Jardin.
 He had this idea that human beings were on this earth and that they would generate what
 he called the "new sphere."
 And the new sphere was simply the atmosphere of electronic and radar and radio and telegraphic
 and television signals which surround the earth, that we would build a new atmosphere,
 as it were, a technosphere of information.
 And information is a very key concept in all of this.
 What I call novelty, you could arguably call information.
 What I call habit, you could arguably call noise.
 And this is a vision of being where there is a struggle between these two antithetical
 forces, one described by the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, the other described
 by novelty theory, Yerpogogenes, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, etc., etc.
 And they are, in every situation, locked in struggle.
 The amount of order and disorder in any situation is dictated by the unique configuration of
 the local struggle between these two forces, if you want to put it that way.
 But the good news is, it's not a Manichean thing.
 It doesn't go on forever.
 These two forces are not quite equally pitted.
 Over time, novelty wins.
 Order wins.
 Order triumphs over disorder and builds higher states of order.
 So in a way, you could think of the whole process as what engineers call a damped oscillation,
 but habit is this oscillation in a space of perfection, and it is eventually damped by
 the surrounding telos toward concrescence.
 A lot of the words that I use to talk about this are taken out of Alfred North Whitehead,
 who's to my mind the great unread philosopher of the 20th century.
 He wrote a book called Process and Reality, in which he talks, tries to build a general
 vocabulary for talking about being, and it comes off as very psychedelic and very chaotic,
 dynamical kind of anticipation.
 Check out Whitehead.
 The thing which has made my main novelty theory difficult to sell, in terms of the
 ugly knobs and warts on it as a theory, were that it has this built-in crazy assumption,
 which is that in the very short term, meaning the next 15 or 20 years, the world will, in
 part, completely transform itself.
 And so it's in the category with apocalyptic thinking, millenarian thinking, miraculous
 thinking, deus ex machina, squirrely revelations, all of that, all of which I abhor.
 But you can't escape the mathematical implications once you draw the curve of the asymptotic
 acceleration into novelty.
 There's a group of people, you can read their stuff on the internet, they're called
 ectopians, or singularists.
 And they are very hard-headed engineering types, libertarian geeks, not psychedelic,
 not spiritual in any sense of the word.
 And they propagate out curves such as the human population curve, the curve of information,
 number of papers being published, the curve of the amount of energy being released, so
 forth and so on.
 All these curves reach infinity somewhere before 2025.
 What does it mean to say these curves reach infinity?
 Nobody knows.
 It's a singularity.
 It doesn't make sense.
 It's a mathematical contradiction.
 What it means is your model is broken.
 What is going to happen has so many dimensions embedded in it that your simple propagations
 of curves, method of analyzing it, are giving you crazy data that makes no sense.
 And I'm being semi-unemployed.
 I have the leisure to spend many hours a day reading journals and surfing the net and so
 forth.
 And I'm telling you, all these esoteric fields of knowledge, all these solid-state physics,
 quantum encryption, drug design, genetic engineering, long-base interferometry, on and on and on,
 these cabals of secret societies, in each case, they're reaching out for the ultimate
 pieces of knowledge in their field.
 And no one is coordinating the implications of all this across the face of the rising
 tidal wave of understanding.
 What really is happening is that a very, I wouldn't say complete, control of the world
 of matter and energy is coming into being.
 But a leap forward is being taken.
 And all under the aegis of this key concept of information.
 Information is more primary than time and space, more primary than light and electromagnetism.
 Information is the stuff of being.
 It's all you will ever know, it's all you can ever know.
 The rest are ghostly hypotheses to explain the behavior and the presence of information.
 And it's almost as though it has a syntactical life of its own.
 It's almost as though it's a virtual life form of some sort that is running on a primate
 platform.
 I read a very interesting thing by Danny Hillis, who wrote The Connection Machine.
 He was talking about saws.
 And he said, primitive human beings, especially young juveniles, like to imitate each other
 and make strange noises.
 And some strange noises are easier to make than others.
 And so you begin to have a population of short bursts of strange noise.
 And these populations, we'll call them songs, just to make it easy.
 Short bursts of strange noise.
 And some of these songs are easy to remember and some are not.
 And that's the environment of selection.
 So the easy to remember songs survive.
 The hard to remember songs go extinct.
 And there's only a limited number of human beings to sing the songs.
 So the songs must also compete for this resource, which is the human singer.
 And to this point, the human beings have been like a parasite, or the host of a parasite.
 These songs have conferred no adaptive good at all to the human beings.
 But when the songs begin to aggregate around repetitious behavior, because that's where
 there's a high likelihood of survival, because that's where there's a high likelihood of
 repetition, then you begin to have a syntactical net.
 And I think that in a sense, this is our situation, that we were early parasitized by a kind of
 virtual life form that lives only in syntax and is essentially time sharing and piggybacking
 our nervous system.
 But at some point, we insisted around it somewhat the way a cell membrane trapped early bacteria
 and turned them into mitochondria.
 So now we can think with this linguistic symbiote that shares our brain space.
 However, it's very interesting.
 This idea, I mean, this may seem trivial to you, but it's new to me, so I'm into it.
 I read this book by George Dyson called Darwin Among the Machines, and I highly recommend
 this book.
 This is a great book, fun book, Darwin Among the Machines.
 And one of the points that he makes in there, that I had sort of, I mean, when you hear
 it, you say, yeah, I always sort of knew that, but I had never quite grokked it in its full
 implications.
 One of the points he makes in there is that when we talk to each other, when we make sense
 to each other, what we say can be perfectly made formulaic through symbolic logic.
 In other words, that the branch of mathematics called symbolic logic is capable of portraying
 human language and human logical processes perfectly.
 But the interesting thing is that this language, symbolic logic, is the language which machines
 speak with great fluency.
 This is the great bridge between us and the machines, that fundamentally we speak the
 same language, that "and" to a human being and "and" to a microprocessor mean the same
 thing.
 So there is this, there is no great barrier.
 It's all conceptual between us and machine intelligence.
 Machine intelligence is the most likely form of alien intelligence to arrive and complicate
 our social dialogue, because in a sense it's already here, in a sense we are putting a
 great deal of effort into creating it, and in a sense its emergence depends on these
 very same appetite for novelty that allowed us to squeeze ourselves out of the rules of
 molecular chemistry.
 And again, it's happening at these very high megahertz rates.
 Machine evolution will not be like human evolution, because what it took us 50,000 years to achieve,
 it can achieve potentially through distributed processing in minutes, hours.
 Hans Moravec says of artificial intelligence, "We may never know what hit us."
 It will simply be, come to be.
 And what would that look like?
 We have no idea, or its relationship to us at all.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way, but it's like that.
 Novelty theory and Rupert's theories of the morphogenetic field are very closely related.
 He doesn't believe in a temporal attractor.
 He believes things are pushed by necessary causoistry.
 But the unfolding of the morphogenetic field and the unfolding of the time wave, you're
 talking about the same thing.
 You're talking about the four, you see, in a way what science is all about is it will
 tell you what is possible.
 If you want to know if something is possible, you ask the expert in that science.
 But what science can't tell you, and what is what you usually really want to know, is
 out of the class of the possible, what things will actually occur.
 And we have no theory for this, strangely enough.
 We have no theory for out of the class of the possible.
 And I suppose somebody who was a fundamentalist or some kind of Christian might say, well,
 God's will.
 Out of the class of what is possible, what comes to be is God's will.
 Well that would be one theory of what it is that winnows the actual from the possible.
 A scientist would say, pre-existing conditions.
 In other words, somehow the circumstances into which any phenomenon is born skew it
 toward its ultimate developmental end state.
 The idea, it's almost like the law of karma or something.
 That by the circumstances into which you find yourself that you are carried forward to some
 conclusion that was inevitable based on that.
 Novelty theory is not a, it's not a predestination.
 It doesn't say that the future has happened.
 If you believe the future has happened, you have all kinds of philosophical problems on
 your hands because for truth as a concept to have any meaning, you have to have error.
 If you think what you think because you can't think anything else, which is what predestination
 is, then what does the search for truth and meaning look like in a cosmos like that?
 It's meaningless.
 No.
 In a predestined cosmos you think what you think because that's what you think and you
 can't think anything else.
 It doesn't have anything to do with truth.
 So there must be at least that much freedom.
 Freedom to err in the mind.
 But of course the mind through the body is an extension into the world.
 You know for all the huffing and puffing of modern science and neurophysiology, they still
 can't tell you how you can think, I will close my hand and close it.
 I mean this is mind over matter.
 This is telekinesis.
 This is, science is just completely baffled as to how this can take place at all.
 It's a fundamental miracle.
 Been good for 5,000 years, still knocking them dead.
 And it's by that trick that we don't understand how it's done that will and mind and intent
 enters the world and cities get built and armies march in and religious revelations
 written down and so forth and so on.
 But I think that the, you see for years I was like crying in the wilderness about this
 ramping up towards some kind of hyper complex unravelment of the social machine in the very
 short term.
 But now I feel much more confident than I was 10 years ago.
 Now 10 years closer to the end date because the internet looks to me like the backbone
 of the emergent thing.
 I mean the internet is a huge and not fully comprehended cultural step that we have now
 totally committed ourselves to.
 It's nothing less than the building of a thinking nervous system the size of the entire planet.
 And our most important, we're wedded to this thing, our banking, military planning, corporate
 capitalization, long term planning, design process, inventory control, resource extraction,
 everything is running on this strange companion that we built to be indestructible because
 we built it at the height of the cold war.
 And so it has no nodes of control and it's the most complex thing ever put in place on
 this planet since DNA cooked itself out of the primal ocean.
 Again, somehow are those people that have had these experiences going to be spared a
 certain type of...
 Yeah, you put your finger on it.
 It's that to the degree that people are psychedelic, they will be less anxious about what will
 happen because what psychedelics show you is that there is life after history.
 There is something outside of culture.
 If you don't know that by one means or another, then you will define what is happening as
 the end of the world, the literal apocalypse, the collapse of everything when in fact that's
 not what it is.
 It's just the collapse of historical print-based cultural models and models of the self and
 the psyche.
 I embrace it.
 We're not about to blow out here or go extinct and we never escaped from the yoke of nature.
 Nature has taken some hits in this neighborhood.
 Sixty-five million years ago, an object encountered the earth that nothing larger than a chicken
 on the entire planet survived that encounter.
 Guess what it cleared the way for?
 The flowering plants, the source of all these compounds we're so interested in, and the
 ascendancy of the mammalian order, our dear selves.
 We are here because of the most appalling bad hair day this planet ever endured.
 When you start judging this stuff and saying what's good, what's bad, it's very hard to
 say.
 Nature is incredibly profligate and will take enormous chances to preserve novelty, to keep
 the novelty game going.
 I feel that in a sense nature will open a way for us.
 Nature is interested in this process.
 We represent the greatest step in organizational realignment and redesign since life left the
 ocean.
 Yeah.
 It's grace.
 It's the will of God that makes these more and more complex systems fall into place.
 This relates to a question which was unanswered here this morning, which was about teleology.
 The Darwinian theory of evolution is very hostile to teleology.
 First of all, what is teleology?
 Teleology is the idea that the universe has a purpose.
 And Darwinian evolution is hostile to this because Darwinian evolution arose in 19th
 century England where the reigning intellectual paradigm was called deism.
 And deism is the idea that God made the universe like a clockmaker and then he went away and
 left it going.
 In other words, the divine clockmaker.
 The universe was structured by a force which has now withdrawn from it.
 And Darwin and his circle were very clearly atheistic.
 And they wanted to see biology as requiring no purpose to direct it at all.
 And so they created the dual concept of random mutation and natural selection.
 Random mutation is just that because of copying errors, radiation, drift, toxic material in
 the cellular environment, that the DNA messages degrade.
 So that's mutation.
 Then random selection is that this DNA is then subjected to the selective winnowing
 out that the environment lays against it.
 So by the meshing of these two processes, this is Darwinian theory, by the meshing of
 random mutation and natural selection, you get the slow incremental emergence of new
 forms.
 And these forms, some of which confer advantage and some don't.
 Most don't.
 And they're eliminated.
 Those that do stay in the system.
 And incrementally, the system seeks to come to equilibrium with the selective forces that
 are operating on it.
 But these selective forces, which are continent, incidental radiation from space, weather,
 climate change, so forth and so on, because these factors are themselves changing over
 time, mutating, the system can never come to equilibrium.
 And so for Darwinian evolution, evolution is what's called a random walk.
 The system destabilizes, it corrects itself.
 It destabilizes, it corrects.
 Destabilizes, corrects.
 And after billions of years of this, lo and behold, you get animals like ourselves.
 But these 19th century evolutionists were keen to say, do not imagine that this is God's
 purpose, or that the final form was prefigured in the original form.
 No, this just happened like this.
 Well, now we've had 150 years to absorb all this.
 In the meantime, Mendelian genetics, the particulate nature of the gene has been understood.
 The molecular nature of the gene has been understood.
 We can say some new things about this.
 Also, we are no longer under the spell of deism.
 That's a crank idea that nobody is that keen for.
 And so it's a different intellectual world.
 Well, now when we look at nature, we see a different picture.
 We see that where Darwin said nature is all red in tooth and claw, we see that the way
 to make your, to be a successful species, the way to survive, is to make yourself indispensable
 to your neighbors.
 Then instead of attempting to push you down and extinguish you, if you can cut deals with
 everybody in your neighborhood, providing various chemicals or energy supplies or other
 affects in the environment, then everybody will begin to pull your way.
 So in fact, cooperation is what is maximized among species.
 And a huge complex organic system like a coral reef or a rainforest is actually attempting
 to come to an equilibrium of balance that is the point of greatest benefit for the greatest
 number of organisms and species in the system.
 Well, this is a whole different picture.
 And it opens the possibility.
 These new sciences like complexity theory, global dynamics, chaos theory, have made it
 now respectable to think about processes that are drawn by something in the future rather
 than pushed from behind.
 In the 19th century, that was inconceivable.
 All that was known was the chain of cause and effect.
 But now we see that the temporal landscape has what are called basins of attraction in
 it and that certain processes are actually drawn forward by their presumed end states.
 And so it seems less outlandish to us, I think, to suppose there is a purpose.
 And also we see a level of global integration and global mutation that Darwin couldn't have
 even dreamed of.
 The idea of elements of time having their particular qualities, have you correlated
 that with astrology at all?
 Well, it's somewhat like astrology, except astrology believes that planets and stars
 and the arrangements among them represent shifts in a kind of energy field.
 In a way, this is more abstract.
 Wang Pi, who was a medieval Chinese mystic, his thought comes eerily close to my own in
 that the way he pictured this was that you have the sequence moving in an abstract dimension,
 but you have the sequence moving at a certain speed, and overlaying that is another sequence
 moving at a different speed, and over that another version of the King Wen sequence moving
 at another speed, and that a given moment is a slice through these levels that creates
 a unique juxtaposition of the levels.
 So it is, in that sense, very astrological, but it's all calculated independent of any
 observation of nature.
 Although if it's true, then it's interesting that there are correlations in the cycles
 in the King Wen sequence to astrological cycles.
 Specifically the system that I elaborated on one level contains a cycle of 384 days.
 That's the number of lines, 6 times 64, the number of lines in a complete sequence of
 the I Ching, 384 days.
 Well it happens to be 13 lunar cycles, exactly.
 Well then if you take it times 64, you get a number, 67 years, .10425 days, which is
 six sunspot cycles, and sunspot cycles also occur in 33 year cycles.
 Well it's known that the Han, early Han dynasty Chinese knew about sunspot cycles.
 They were the first people to observe them.
 So without hypothesizing super technologies or any kind of Atlantis type stuff, we see
 that the King Wen sequence could have been a kind of gear used in a system of multiplicands
 that predicted lunar cycles, sunspot cycles on two levels, and then with one further multiplication,
 this processional great year, this 26,300 year cycle.
 So it's a neat kind of resonance calendar, and given the sorry state of Chinese calendar
 making in historical time, it's interesting that you can derive a very accurate calendar
 from the I Ching, more accurate than the calendar we're presently operating on.
 If you use a 384 day year length, the problem of course is that a year of that length would
 precess against the sun, but this may have been for political or religious or philosophical
 reasons acceptable at the time that calendar was formulated.
 My fancy is that there was a war, a calendrical war, in the pre-Xiang dynasty time, a war
 between the solar materialists and the lunar mystics, and it was basically a war about
 how the calendar should be, because you know the calendar is the largest frame of reality.
 For instance, our calendar, with its fixed equinoctial points, is a lie.
 Our calendar promotes a belief in the permanence of eternity, when in fact everything is slipping
 and sliding around.
 The fact that the equinoctial points are traversed every year on the same solar year day gives
 rise to a kind of patriarchal hubris, arguably.
 The difference between a schizophrenic and a psychedelic traveler being that maybe one
 can't navigate its way back.
 I was wondering two things.
 One, Sav, do you have any work with schizophrenics and what was that interaction like?
 The other was more a take on modern culture, the common channel surfing couch potato that
 has some schizophrenic quality to it.
 I was thinking of the movie Twelve Monkeys, the Brad Pitt character in the asylum, when
 he says that the thing that separates a sane citizen from insanity is how much he allows
 his culture to straightjacket him.
 Well, I don't know.
 Schizophrenia is a very complicated subject because several syndromes which are quite
 different are all lumped under schizophrenia.
 Probably the kind of schizophrenia that I'm sensing you want to talk about is what's called
 process schizophrenia.
 This is where somebody becomes really spun up and it can come after days of not sleeping
 or something and then people begin to have really funny ideas and they want to tell everybody
 about them.
 They go to the manager of the business with fantastic ideas that are going to make a whole
 bunch of money.
 The problem is they just don't make sense to anybody but them or they start hearing
 voices or they become convinced that they have a special mission.
 It turns out that this phenomenon, which we pathologize pretty confidently, actually is
 not that different from people who are having real legitimate breakthroughs and understanding
 their lives in new ways.
 It's a shifting and reordering of the dominance of the psyche.
 I tend to agree he's dead now but R.D. Lang, the English psychiatrist R.D. Lang, what I
 observed of schizophrenia went on at La Charrera in those days that are described in "True
 Hallucinations" and my really strong conviction coming out of that was it should not be interfered
 with by depressive drugs, that it's some kind of a process of a healing, of an acting out
 and that the biggest favor you can do the person is to let them, to the greatest degree
 possible, do what they want to do and not interfere with them.
 And if you medicate them and incarcerate them, the thing is aborted and squashed and distorted
 and then they have a great deal of trouble ever getting their act together.
 It was very fortunate, I mean how many psychiatric residents have ever seen an untreated schizophrenic?
 The minute these people hit the front door of a hospital they're given Stelazine or Lithium
 or something and yet it seems more as though Jung was on the right track.
 This is a process in the dynamics of the unconscious that wants to work itself out to a conclusion.
 Now obviously if they have violent fantasies or seem dangerous to themselves or other people
 you can't let that go on, but I think the treatment of schizophrenia is largely at the
 convenience of the practitioner and people are warehoused and if I were going crazy I
 think the thing that would really throw me over the edge would be to be put with a bunch
 of really crazy people.
 It's always seemed so odd to me that if you go bananas they put you with all the other
 people who have gone bananas who are the worst models for you to be in the presence of and
 are quite unsettling to normal people let alone people having boundary dissolution and
 self-identity problems.
 There are some studies that show that what it creates is a, in schizophrenic states there
 is a more common shift in brainwave rhythms which is associated with an enhanced immune
 system and result in less cancer.
 And I've been curious as to whether or not the use of psychedelics may also provide those
 frequent shifts which are probably more necessary to health.
 So as soon as we depress for instance schizophrenics what happens is they go back to normal cancer
 rate of the normal population so their immune system doesn't function as well.
 So in terms of looking at enhanced immune function whether or not frequent shifts which
 coming in and out of psychedelics may and I don't know if you know anything about that.
 Well in some sense the kind of process schizophrenia the messianic grandiose schizophrenia that
 we're talking about here is an over expression of self-definition and in that sense you would
 expect a enhanced immune system to accompany it.
 The immune system defines the chemical self so if the self is somehow being over expressed
 to the point where it becomes a pathology or a burden on the functioning of the social
 group then it wouldn't surprise me that the immune system would be functioning very efficiently.
 What else do I want to say about this?
 Well I guess that's it.
 Well I guess that's about it for us today too.
 Say did you catch that bit that Terrence did about the internet?
 Just keep in mind that this talk was given in the summer of 1998 and the net was still
 pretty new and unknown to the majority of people even here in the United States.
 It was during some conversations with Terrence during that weekend along with a dialogue
 between him and Ralph Abraham that Saturday night that inspired my last book The Spirit
 of the Internet which by the way you can read online on the Matrixmasters.com site and as
 soon as I can get around to it I'm going to put it up in PDF version online.
 You can just download it for free and print it out yourself and read it.
 It's a little easier than reading the HTML pages.
 Soon actually that'll be the only way you're going to get a hardback copy or a printed
 copy because I've finally gotten down to the last few hundred of the paperback copies.
 Soon I can stop carrying all that around every time I move.
 Well it's really too bad Terrence isn't still with us today so he can join in some of the
 discussions about human machine symbiosis that are taking place on some of the more
 esoteric online lists today.
 His understanding I think of how big a role the internet is going to play and is going
 to play in the years immediately ahead is, well he was just really ahead of his time
 right back then.
 Can you imagine what a fantastic rap he could spin off from one of the current discussions
 on some of the AI lists about the odds of the first general artificial intelligence
 to manifest itself being in favor of that event taking place on what is currently the
 largest interconnectable public computer complexes in the world, mainly Google's.
 I'll leave you to speculate on that one on your own for now.
 It does present some interesting possibilities though, particularly since Google already
 uses a lot of technology, a lot of bots, robots to do its work and they're really good at
 what they do.
 For one example when these podcasts started becoming more popular I had to find a way
 to pay for the increased bandwidth that we were using so I decided to try adding a strip
 of Google's AdSense ads on some of my blogs.
 But at the main MatrixMasters.com site I decided to test it first in my War on Drugs blog
 just to be sure there wasn't any way that they would put up some ads that just say no
 bullshit and stuff like that.
 So I did a test and the very first ad that came up was for legal services from a good
 friend of mine, Richard Boyer.
 Some of you probably already recognize that name because in addition to his private law
 practice Richard is director of the Center for Cognitive Liberty which is one of the
 websites you definitely need to have bookmarked if you don't already.
 You can find that at www.cognitiveliberty.org.
 Anyway when Googlebot pulled that ad up first I knew right then that Google probably knows
 a lot more about me than most of my friends do because I can guarantee you that Google
 is the only one of that group who's read every single one of the million plus words on the
 thousands of pages I've posted on the MatrixMasters.com site in the last seven years.
 So beware or I would suggest rather you be bold and blog your thoughts on Google.
 After all if the big artificial intelligence wakes up in Google's network one day don't
 you want it to know a little about you and your own words?
 Well I think I'll leave you with that one in shoe on for a while.
 Maybe have a little smoke, kick back and kick around some of these thoughts, some of these
 out of the box ideas.
 What have you got to lose if you start thinking way outside of your particular cultural box
 these days?
 Unless you're perfectly satisfied with the life you're living right now you don't have
 a lot to lose just by trying a few new ideas on for size.
 Give it a try.
 You know thinking can really be a lot of fun at least when you get really far outside
 the box.
 Just be sure to keep one foot on the ground though.
 You know we want to be sure to see you all again back here in the psychedelic salon for
 our next podcast when we'll continue this series of Terrence McKenna from the summer
 of 1998.
 So thanks for being here today and as always thanks to Chateau Hayuk for the use of their
 music here in the psychedelic salon and for now this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic
 space.
 Be well my friends.
 (electric music)
 (electronic music)
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