So I thought that the millennium had come, that forever after we would all trash.
 Yes, the end of the world is when all trash is Mazar-e-Sharif hash.
 When trash becomes hash.
 But at the crack of dawn the next morning I went tearing down to my harshest critic
 and knelt beside her hammock and woke her up and said, "You've got to smoke this."
 And of course, you know, Garbage was back.
 So I don't know why I got off into this.
 I guess it was the life is art thing and this thing about what would you do if you could
 do anything.
 You should just enhance that little story with the myth, isn't it, from New Guinea about
 the good ship?
 Do you remember that one where they generated a...
 You mean the thing about the resin, where the resin bar grew longer?
 I'm not sure how this relates to it, but I'll tell it.
 In the study of messianic movements, in fact, you can read about this in Sylvia Thrupp's
 book Millennial Dreams in Action, where she talks about a number of millennial religious
 groups.
 There was a movement around 1910 in Java called the Kalupan movement.
 And it was some guy was sitting on his porch one day in a hut off in the jungle and he
 was playing his flute.
 And they collect kopal in the forest there and sell to traders.
 And as he was playing his flute, he noticed that this bar of rolled out kopal multiplied
 to twice its size right in front of him.
 And not only did this happen, but at the same moment it happened, his mind was flooded with
 the sudden realization that the meaning of this event was that all human lives were now
 going to be twice as long as they had previously been before.
 And he started...
 He told people in his village, and he had the proof because they had this bar of kopal
 that was twice as long than anybody ever rolled them in that village.
 So it spread from village to village.
 And before long, people from all over Java were vectoring in on this place.
 And eventually the army had to be sent to put up roadblocks and turn people back.
 And it all had to do with this piece of resin which had doubled in length while this guy
 was playing his flute.
 And that is what's called a cognitive hallucination.
 A cognitive hallucination.
 Where an idea becomes so real to you that you see it, but then there's this funny border
 where maybe it becomes so real that other people see it.
 And maybe that's actually how we keep enlarging and complicating reality is by having consensual
 cognitive hallucinations of what's possible.
 That's right.
 That's right.
 The Iowa scarrow that Kat mentioned that we like so much and worked with in Peru, Don
 Fidel, he lived behind, he lived off this road when we knew him a few miles down this
 trail.
 And we would go over there often and walk with him back and forth between his house
 and where we could catch these little jitney buses into town.
 And he said one afternoon as we were walking along through the Amazon jungle, apropos of
 nothing, he said, "This is the path that Christ walked when he lived on earth."
 And it became so you saw that somehow this was not a logical statement.
 This was a statement about the transposition of time and dimensionality and that he was
 living in the light of Christ, that he was living in the presence of the master through
 being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination.
 And I think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination
 where our real wishes will be fulfilled.
 And that's why it's so important to find out what our real wishes are.
 One of the most powerful forms of yoga, one of the highest yogas is what's called the
 Anuttara Yoga Tantra.
 And it involves a series of visualizations and they say, "Imagine your home as a splendid
 palace and imagine the common utensils of your everyday life as golden vessels, vessels
 of beaten gold encrusted with jewels.
 Imagine your raiment as being made of the finest silk and imagine yourself as a god
 centered in the midst of all of this splendor."
 Well, this is like trying to induce what in Western psychotherapy is called a delusion
 of grandeur.
 A delusion of grandeur is when you're a hell of a lot happier than other people think you
 should be, you know.
 And they say, "What do you have to be so happy about?"
 And it's all about infusing the quality of life with greater purity.
 We were saying around the fire last night that the way to relate to the millennium is
 to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become a spectator to it
 as a historical phenomenon.
 Well, the way to make it happen in your life is to not transcend desire but transmute it
 so that what you really want is what you actually have, you know.
 I find on these plants, on the mushroom particularly, I found it effective to will choose to become
 an archetype that I both, of course, have to be able to identify as an archetype but
 then also one that I can relate to and wish to be and become as large, a hundred, a thousand
 times larger than we are, and as smooth and as everything is right.
 You can practice being in the Tao so deeply in those states and knowing that everything
 you do, no matter how minuscule it is, you're doing most gracefully and everything you say
 you're saying most eloquently.
 You know, even I've used the mending sock thing because sometimes I feel like that's
 what I'm doing, is that level of work, but then I'm doing it perfectly, you know, and
 that's a great feeling.
 If you indulge in that feeling of being the goddess or a god or goddess or one of whatever
 you identify with, you know, one of the kachinas, whatever, then you can carry it back.
 It's a really good way to carry it back into your daily life and learn to practice it,
 either in moments when you're wobbly and you suddenly need to grow into the situation,
 or in moments of ecstasy, you know.
 I mean, to be archetypes making love is pretty good.
 Well that's the technique of tantric practice, of imagining these gods in union with their
 consorts in sexual union.
 Can we have a break?
 Yeah, let's have a break.
 (music)
 (music)
 Watching the first light of dawn in the sky, Blessed Beauty way.
 Feeling my spirit soaring so high, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey, what can I say, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey, teach us to pray, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey.
 (music)
 Sitting around in a circle of friends, Blessed Beauty way.
 Can't tell where I start and where someone else ends, Blessed Beauty way.
 Singing hey, hey, what can I say, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey, teach us to pray, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey.
 (music)
 Watching the children run on the earth, Blessed Beauty way.
 We're giving our thanks to the source of our birth, Blessed Beauty way.
 Singing hey, hey, what can I say, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey, teach us to pray, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey.
 (music)
 Making a prayer for the bloodshed to cease, Blessed Beauty way.
 Sending a prayer for a future of peace, Blessed Beauty way.
 Singing hey, hey, what can I say, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey, teach us to pray, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey.
 (music)
 Singing our song straight from the heart, Blessed Beauty way.
 We're bringing the walls down that keep us apart, Blessed Beauty way.
 Singing hey, hey, what can I say, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey, teach us to pray, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey.
 Oh, Blessed Beauty way.
 Blessed Beauty way.
 Blessed Beauty way.
 Blessed Beauty way.
 Singing hey, hey, what can I say, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey, teach us to pray, Blessed Beauty way.
 Hey, hey.
 Oh, Blessed Beauty way.
 Blessed Beauty way.
 Blessed Beauty way.
 Blessed Beauty way.
 Oh, Blessed Beauty way.
 Help us on the way, teach us how to pray, Blessed Beauty way.
 (music)
 I guess the people burning to speak should speak.
 I have maybe one comment.
 In different parts I keep hearing people saying that we don't know anything,
 but I think we're all dancing around it very well.
 And I think you're dancing around it really well.
 And so I think we do know something, not a lot perhaps, but we do know something.
 If words are that important and do have that meaning,
 whether it's what we're saying that is true or just the sound of our voice that is true,
 something is true.
 We're here.
 We're beginning to say the unsayable.
 I just have that feeling.
 And what a feeling it is.
 Yes, well, we feel the dizziness of the things not said.
 We feel it.
 We're dizzy from it.
 It's here.
 And I think a lot has to do with trust.
 Lots of people are not going to say that because it's probably not true.
 You just got to say it.
 And then you move on.
 It keeps forming.
 It's like a creation, words, thought, ideas.
 It attacks themselves in this larger structure and keeps getting larger and larger.
 Pieces fall off.
 People add.
 But it's just trust.
 It's that leap of faith to the other side of what you can't see, what you can't understand.
 To trust it as you trust your lover, as you trust a friend.
 And it doesn't always work out.
 But trust is the only way.
 Because otherwise there is only fear.
 Fear of ourselves, fear of others, fear of ideas.
 I think it's community that's part of that, of building trust among people who have different ideas.
 I'd like to say something about learning and teaching with regard to the psychedelic experience.
 You can use a lot of verbiage in trying to explain to people what that search is about and what that adventure will yield.
 But in the end, probably the best communication is to just dispense with it.
 I think it's very holy work, and I just want to express my appreciation to those who are involved in that work.
 There's great respect for the sacrament and for those to whom they dispense it.
 And I'm just very happy to be associated with you folks.
 I think that's something I've missed for a long time since the days of the '60s,
 but last time I was around people who knew about that work and approached it with the kind of reverence that I see here.
 The great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves.
 So they need no priest, no interpreter.
 They can deliver their message all by themselves.
 Something that happened after that song that seemed to be so wonderful were words.
 Maybe the unspeakable, with being together in a room in silence.
 I'm still in a state where there's like nothing left to say.
 For me, who is always babbling, it's quite an event.
 Well, it's wonderful to feel so comfortable with people that you don't have to rattle on.
 Yes, yes.
 Why don't you lead us now, Kat, in a meditation?
 Hold hands.
 We've seen many eggs in the last two days and had the pleasure of holding them and swallowing them.
 And spoken of luminous eggs, and it seems just to be very eggy today, right?
 Resurrection and all that stuff.
 So I was thinking that our luminous eggs should meet each other in maybe a less verbal way.
 If we close our eyes.
 And find your center, the light.
 And let it swell out into your egg, your shape.
 And then you feel that light of your center.
 And then you feel that light of yourself moving into your head and letting everything else out of it.
 You can breathe through the top of your head.
 Through your forehead and your eyes.
 Let it become, let your head become like a cloud of light.
 And when it gets strong, that floats up above your head.
 Until you have a sphere of light that you can feel and see just above the top of your head.
 It seems to get more and more charged as you perceive it.
 And then it grows.
 The light is growing, the sphere is growing rounder and fuller and softer until it meets the lights of your neighbors.
 And we have a huge halo over us together.
 If you travel through it in your light, you'll encounter everyone.
 Very softly.
 And we can charge that halo of light to be stronger and bigger than us.
 I feel like it becomes a sphere, a dome above and beneath us which meets the light of the spirit of this place.
 The spirit that lives here.
 It's partly in the earth and partly in the air.
 And very old and wise with a sense of humor.
 And so we're all inside our collective spirit.
 [Music]
 And so we're all inside our collective luminous egg.
 Which we could take anywhere actually.
 But perhaps for now we should just greet the spirit of this place and gradually breathe and draw the white light energy back into ourselves.
 Into our circle.
 And into our individual spaces above and through and beneath us.
 And when we go out and sit on the rocks alone, we can keep doing this even though we're not in a circle.
 [Silence]
 [Silence]
 [Silence]
 It's good to connect with all of you.
 Thank you.
 [Silence]
 I'm going to think about a phrase that you were suggesting that this kind of visual language somehow, our future lies there somehow.
 And I know that Jose Aguas talks about the future of technology being light and sound in probably the same way that you're talking about it.
 I guess my interest in formulating this question has to do with things like the Mayan hieroglyphic language system or also Egyptian hieroglyphs.
 Basically that kind of visual language system.
 I also think of Northwest Coast Indian designs where there's very particular kind of design patterns.
 And another piece of this question is the interface between the past use of that and the future use of that somehow.
 It seems that, I mean, my sense of these hieroglyphic languages is that in the past they would literally see these things that are being drawn
 or these things would speak to them or provide information as you're talking about.
 And that somehow as we've evolved, we've lost that ability somehow or buried it or shunted it off to one side.
 And so my question has to do with, is there some sense of the re-emergence or the, in the Joyce sense,
 here comes everybody, the democratization of that ability in future culture?
 Yes, well, I think so.
 I think that the way these hieroglyphic languages, especially Mayan and Egyptian, differ from alphabetic languages
 is that etymology remains on the surface in a hieroglyphic language so that thousands of meanings are immediately visibly present.
 And so it's more like an ideogram rather than a word with a dictionary meaning.
 You couldn't really, I doubt that a Mayan could conceive of a dictionary of Mayan glyphs
 because they infinitely shade off one into another.
 And that kind of sensitivity to the depth of language and to the presence of the past in the present in a word
 is what Joyce is trying to do in Finnegan's Wake.
 And that's why if you read it carefully, you feel many historical layers of meaning in the same passage
 because he wrote it with almost a pictographic consciousness of the meaning of the words
 rather than a linear and literary sense of it.
 So, yes, in that sense it's like that.
 How this will be achieved in the future in our culture, I'm not sure.
 The control of the Macintosh through an internationally understood set of control glyphs is very weird.
 And if any of you have worked with a Macintosh, you immediately see this idea which seems very odd.
 I could learn this very quickly and anyone can do it kind of thing.
 It maybe presages a world of illiterate computer users who communicate with computers through symbols
 because literacy has been lost.
 But it's very interesting.
 So you see computers might play a role in that kind of visual component.
 Actually, I've heard you talk about...
 I noticed when you asked your question about will computers become intelligent for life,
 I've heard you talk about it more that the technology of computers will become available to us
 as almost a biological extension of who we are.
 Yes, that's what I think will happen.
 My vision of a perfect world is where the earth is restored to its prehistoric Edenic perfection,
 but technology has not been eliminated.
 It's merely been micro-miniaturized to the point where the computers which maintain the history of the race
 and the governance of the planet have all been secreted in a certain pebble
 which lies on a certain beach somewhere on the planet.
 And we walk around in perfect harmony with nature and in perfect and complete touch
 with an imaginary holographic world that is our self-expression as a city is our self-expression
 to then be simultaneously in the world of techne and in the world of nature,
 but with neither violating the other.
 And I think that's reasonable.
 In fact, I think perhaps in a sense this is what so-called preliterate cultures in the Amazon and places have achieved.
 That's how it looks to them from the inside.
 They have an extremely rich inner life.
 It isn't maintained by vast computer networks and projected into holographic space
 and taped onto magnetic tape and all of that,
 but it's still in feeling it's the notion that the richest world is within
 and that you promote a balance with the exterior world,
 but then the purpose of the leisure created when you achieved balance is not then to accumulate things,
 but to explore the interior horizon of transcendence through the recitation of myth and ecstasis and this sort of thing.
 Terence, in connection with Rob's question, in conjunction with it,
 could you further elaborate this idea of the material externalization of the soul
 and the internalization of the body as a definitive thing in evolution?
 Well, I think imagination is where we want to go.
 That this has become the arrow of our epigenetic development
 because everybody says in the future you'll have everything you want.
 Well, if we believe this, then we have to think seriously about what everything you want is.
 I mean, obviously you want plenty of food, plenty of clothes, plenty of money, plenty of friends,
 but then if you get all that and then they say, well, you still haven't even dented your credit account.
 Well, then it says, well, I want to live at Versailles,
 surrounded by brilliant robots and I want great writers and artists to have lunch with me every day
 and the Hope Diamond and Rembrandt.
 Eventually this becomes very silly and instead there is an ascent toward truly grandiose aspirations,
 truly bodhisattvic calling, and I think that the imagination is the real frontier.
 This is why the poets and the artists are so important
 and this is why I think one of the aspects of the space thing that is never mentioned by the L5 Society
 or any of these engineering types who are so into it is the interesting thing about outer space.
 We are not going to go through space to other worlds.
 That will be very incidental to going into space.
 Going into space means going into space, that space itself is a medium with unique properties for a species such as ourselves
 and one of those unique properties is that engineering,
 which on the surface of the planet has to always be cognizant of stress and bearing loads and the limitation of materials,
 engineering is just going to become like ballet and objects miles in extent can be created
 that are obedient only to the laws of the human imagination
 and of course the funding available to create these things.
 But in other words the constraints of nature are pretty much lifted.
 Outer space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room.
 It's a vast unfilled void into which anything whatsoever can be projected.
 The hallucinations of the individual are the cultural artifacts of the species 500 years from now.
 I mean all these visions and dreams that we have will be realized,
 I mean in ways that we cannot imagine but realized nevertheless.
 This has been consistently what has been going on.
 The alchemical dreams of the 16th century are fully realized in the 20th century,
 and of course it has facets that they never imagined.
 But going into space and going into the imagination is the same thing
 and in the same way that the new world presented a tremendously tight genetic filter to immigrants
 so that only the soldiers of fortune, the religious fanatics and exiles came to this place
 and that created a unique gene mix, space is going to be a much tighter genetic filter.
 I mean most people who go are going to be very smart and very healthy
 and very quickly I think a space type will arise.
 But I don't think you can create a space based civilization
 without recourse to psychedelic plants and the psychedelic experience
 because it's too much the same thing.
 If you don't integrate psychedelics into the leap to space
 and realize that what is happening is that more and more we perfect the aspiration to vertical ascent.
 In the myth of Icarus and Daedalus you get this.
 Then in the brothers Montgolfier and their gas-filled balloon
 and then the Wright brothers and then the Apollo project.
 All of these things are this aspiration to ascension
 and it is apparently a biological drive.
 I mean some people have suggested it's a nostalgia for the canopies of the rainforest that no longer exist.
 But whatever it is, it's going to take us eventually out to the stars and inward to the stars
 because the real question mark which hangs over all this is the nature of mind.
 And we do not know what mind is and yet everything goes on upon the stage
 that is conditioned by and assumes mind as a given.
 And every society has assumed that it had the answers
 that just 15 years more of fine-tuning of the current ideology would do it.
 And no society has ever been right about that.
 So why should we be right?
 We are hurtling toward an unimaginable future
 in the same way that our present would have been unimaginable to people 200 or 500 years ago.
 But it is the imagination because it is consciousness
 that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself.
 And if we take the notion that these psychedelic plants are consciousness-expanding agents,
 this is what they were originally called, consciousness-expanding drugs,
 if you take that seriously for a moment, how can you not center it in your life?
 I mean, obviously, consciousness is what must be expanded as fast as possible
 at all costs, in all times and places,
 because it is a lack of consciousness that will be toxic to our species and the planet.
 Consciousness is the saving grace, and so it has to be cultivated by any means available.
 You're saying that this urge to go into space is something like a biological urge
 and also maybe something relating to the rain forest.
 Well, I think we're like the trigger species.
 The point I want to make is that when we think of going to space, we're so human-centered,
 and it's like, yes, us as humans can exist in space and exist there,
 but I think what's really important about going away from this planet's surface
 is that it's not just a human-centered thing, it's a totally biological thing,
 and that we are just the implements of it.
 We are the thinking, conscious, creative tool-makers that will be able to implement
 this getting off of this gravity trap, this gravity well,
 but it's not just for humans, it's for all life, and it'll be a complete synthesis.
 Oh, yes.
 All biological life that will exist away from the planet.
 If we go to space, we will take everybody with us.
 Just like in a rain forest, it's not just--it's everything.
 That's right.
 We are the species that is deputized to use energy to do the thing for all life on the planet.
 That's why I'm not pessimistic about history,
 and I don't see history as unnatural or somehow opposed to nature.
 What history is is a 10,000-year process by which the monkeys attain enough understanding
 of physical processes to build the habitats into which all life on the planet can then migrate.
 That's what I was talking about this morning when I said I think the planet senses
 the finiteness of its existence, and that biology is a wild scheme for getting out to the stars,
 for dispersal of life, and you're right.
 No, though we have great hubris and believe we are doing this and man will go to the stars,
 it's more that man is the pecking beak of the cosmic chick in the egg of life on Earth,
 and the entire bird will emerge and fly, but it was man with his atomic weapons and his radar
 and all this who can break the shell, and then the whole of the biosphere will flow outward into space
 and escape the cycle of energy degradation that will eventually turn this solar system
 into a group of coal cinders rotating around a red giant or something.
 What?
 Yes, well, we're trying to compare our maps.
 Everybody has seen different pieces of a geography whose total size we don't know,
 so we don't know maybe none of our maps overlap, or maybe some do and some don't,
 and maps which don't overlap are not invalidated.
 It just means nobody has been there but you.
 I mean, I often have the feeling that I'm seeing things that no one has ever seen before.
 Often.
 [Laughter]
 [ Silence ]


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