more people than the people whose names I called, but nevertheless we're going to try and get a sense tonight just of
 people's interests and
 motivations and
 what brings you to this particular watering hole this evening.
 And we'll do that in the simple function of going around in a circle.
 This is a little different from most of the many many workshops I've done at Esalen
 because Mark is here. He is
 the gentle giant of virtual reality.
 The man who hacked Vermal. Take a good look, your grandchildren will laugh.
 And so it's an honor to entice him into this arena of
 discourse and as you'll quickly find he's
 very good at what we do here.
 So
 tonight will be strictly introductory and
 we'll go around, meet you, you'll meet Mark, you'll meet me,
 we'll talk a little and we'll pack you off to bed by 10 a.m. because 10 p.m.
 It's not a raid, like 10 p.m. because a lot of people have come hundreds of miles today.
 Before we go around just let me say the motivation for this became in my mind,
 Mark didn't remember ever meeting me and so now in my own mind, I'm not sure we ever met at all.
 But you can take your choice of two stories. Either I met Mark in
 1994 at the Seagraph
 Conference where we rode together from a hotel to an exhibition hall and talked about how he might come to Esalen or
 I met a friend of Mark's who seemed
 much shorter, much lighter and an entirely different person.
 But we talked about Mark so much
 that I recollected it as actually meeting him to the point where I felt no trepidation at all about
 sending him email and saying how would you like to come to Esalen as per our
 discussion and fantasy many years ago. So
 that's how all that happened.
 My interest in virtual reality and
 well in virtual reality springs from the naive faith that
 whatever else it may be, it's a technology that will allow us to show each other the inside of our own heads and
 that it's primarily a tool for art and hence
 communication and hence very important in
 synergizing whatever community the future holds and
 you know, I think these things are pretty self-explanatory and clear.
 Other aspects of virtual reality touch on
 metaphysics and media and human psychology and the mysteries of
 code and mathematics and the
 ontology of reality itself. I mean
 virtual reality permits thinking about reality in ways that you never
 could before because you had no platform
 outside of it from which to view it.
 Well, it's amazing how fast time moves in these things
 so I want to begin and just go around and get a feeling for who's here and what their priorities are.
 These things are most fruitful when pushed by the agendas of the people
 involved. I know what I think. In this case, I don't know what Mark thinks, so I have something to look forward to as well.
 But if you don't get what you want, it's probably because you didn't ask for it because we're incredibly compliant folk around here.
 What's your angle on all this?
 I'm Brian Duckey.
 I was introduced to you four months ago
 at a hiking seminar here.
 Not personally,
 but through a tape and listened to it.
 Read one of your books, visited your website, saw that you were going to be here now and let me know more.
 Good.
 Follow this man's model. Not all about me, but just who you are, why you're here and like that.
 And remember, in a social situation like this under time constraints,
 absence of brevity is proof of psychosis.
 Do recall that. We're looking.
 Bill Bang, I've been involved with psychotruths for a long time.
 I wanted to follow up on your name and just curiosity.
 Fine. Let's go along the wall.
 Lawrence Kincheloe, I'm a Monterey resident for many years. I do three workshops, one in September, if anyone's interested, about dream recovery.
 Just recently getting involved with the internet and studied and taken a lot of psychedelics and studied inner space for a few years.
 I'm a business owner in Minnesota.
 I'm Rajni and I'm interested in Terrence's work and I've read some of your books.
 Last summer I had an experience of a Ayahuasca journey and my life is not the same.
 And I know that you've written about that and that's why I'm here.
 And as far as virtual reality, that's totally like I'm not a computer person.
 So mixing the two together, what is that about? Technology is like, no, I'm not interested.
 I'm interested. I think it's good. I think it will be good.
 No, we will show that it's a seamless web.
 I'm infatuated now with moving along the back wall.
 I'm Ronan Halliwell and Mark invited me to come down here to participate in this and contribute some of my ideas as well as music.
 I'm a DJ. I've been working with Mark for about five years and I'm also a researcher in the psychedelic field.
 The world of wisdom tradition. And so I'm here to groove with everybody.
 My name is Nathan. I'm very interested in the trends in the evolution of society and consciousness.
 I used to be really into computers and virtual reality for a while.
 So it's interesting to kind of weave some of my interests together here.
 I'm Alice. I really have a good patience about working with Mark.
 I'm just really curious to see how everything kind of comes together.
 I'm Steve. I was here with my wife a few months ago.
 She wanted to come back and she said, "Can you look through the book and find something you think I might like?"
 So I think with the psychedelics and the Internet and I have no idea who you are.
 I don't either. Some of our best people are working on it.
 No. Some of the most fun people in these things are the people who say, "Well, we could only come at this time."
 So then we checked in this afternoon and looked in the catalog and it was between you and moving on and letting go.
 Anyway, we aim to please.
 Maybe I'm one of these guys.
 I'm a work scholar here and I didn't know anything about you guys.
 But some people told me they had been to the visiting teacher program and they were very enthusiastic.
 So I bought the book and was reading and I was very interested.
 I had psychedelic experience a long time before. I didn't take them for a long time because I'm afraid.
 So this is also an approach for me to come closer again.
 And also I'm very new and I just bought a computer like half a year ago and I'm coming to this field.
 I'm very interested. I'm kind of hoping.
 This is my last weekend here in London.
 So that's a nice ending.
 My name is Raphael Barker.
 I met someone while I was living in Italy a few weeks ago who raved about you.
 He was surprised I didn't hear about you.
 So he said he took over and delivered you to the throne and whatnot.
 So I looked you up on the website and started exploring it and got freaked out that I couldn't understand the novel theory.
 Decided to come take the workshop because you mentioned Esalen which I hadn't heard of either.
 So I decided to leave my family and everything behind and take both this workshop and the workshop I just finished a month long on Eric Sony hypnosis.
 So I'm just kind of bombarded with information, left my family behind and hoping this will be a stepping stone for me in a sense as I go back to New York and try to carve a niche.
 My interests are film and cyberpunk. I have a very strong blood-hate relationship with technology.
 And have lately been approaching it with a little more interest in more of the tools that have kind of been controlling 1984.
 It's the mentality I had before. So things are changing for me and I'm interested in your guys' perspective.
 I have a lot more things but my ears are getting red.
 No, that's good.
 My name is Owen Raleigh. I have a moderate history of working in virtual reality.
 Starting with Autodesk and a couple of other things. Working with Mark in the early days of Vermont.
 I'm a witch and practitioner of magical arts.
 And I don't know a damn thing.
 My name is Gary and I'm very interested in a lot of the ideas I've heard and read from you in the past.
 I'm definitely interested in new ways to look at the future now or experience as much as possible.
 I'm Lynn Shamshland and I've seen Terrence perform. I've read one of your books.
 I've often forgotten it but I enjoy it.
 I just thought it would be cool to see you again and see if you have any good examples of the novelty you expect to see soon.
 And how you might combine with another person while you're talking.
 I never knew a reason to come here. This time of year with all the shooting stars and everything.
 It's just fun to get away from the kids.
 To be around somebody like you who travels all around the world and has the greatest minds ever.
 That's just, maybe we'll be catching up this year.
 My God, you remind me. Is tonight the peak of the London?
 Perseids.
 Perseids? Is it tonight the peak?
 I don't know if it's tonight.
 This almost slipped by me and it's supposed to be major this year, isn't it?
 That's right.
 Well, so that's a reason to go to the tubs late tonight folks, if that's happening.
 Thank you for mentioning that.
 I made a mental note to be on it but then I'm on the road and I forget.
 It'll be most of it.
 Yeah.
 My name is Sharon and up until about this time last year I didn't have a clue that so many computer artists
 and people that were developing their tools were actually using psychedelics as an important part of their work.
 And then I read a book by Douglas Rushcock called "Tiberia" reading about designer drugs
 and how people that were taking those and the ones that were pushing themselves the furthest were actually designing consciousness.
 And then I heard about virtual reality projects like Osmos that have a very fast perception.
 So my question is if you think there is some kind of a convergence on some level of computers, virtual reality and consciousness
 and if so what is the responsibility of those that are in the role of designing it
 and what is the responsibility of those of us that are witnessing it?
 Well I'm sure this will be rolled over and dealt with.
 Yeah.
 Hi, my name is James and I have a background in psychology, psychobiology, holistic health, yoga
 and I'm a computer professional.
 I have been following both Terrence and Laura's work for some time now.
 And I am here because I seem to be, I find that certain things form as attractors
 and I get pulled where I need to be at that particular time and I'm here today.
 So I'm not exactly sure what's going on.
 The combined force of two black holes.
 I'm Alan Esagira and I saw you talk about three years ago and never let go of time wave zero.
 And I also have a computer experience, computer background, whatever you want to call it.
 I once saw an IMAC commercial.
 And you post frequently to novelty.
 Yeah, I used to.
 Yeah, how many people here are on the novelty list?
 Not that you've ever seen me post.
 Yeah, cool.
 How many people have ever posted to novelty?
 I've posted.
 That's about it.
 Yeah, well lurkers out number posters by ten to one I think.
 Which probably isn't a bad thing, given what is posted.
 All right, let's go to the back wall.
 My name is Harvey.
 It's kind of a stretch for me, but I've always been interested in ideas of creation.
 Recently I kind of stuck into that first reality thing.
 I was fascinated with the idea of the four avatars and always kind of poked my own psychoactive drugs.
 The horse description was just very intriguing to me.
 Yeah, good.
 Yeah.
 My name is Andrew Jones.
 I read half of one of your books, Quite Great Chalice and Forever.
 I'll try and get the other half from the horse's mind.
 I'm interested very much in traditional cultures and in school Greek mythology.
 I'm very interested in Henry Crawford's descriptions of creative imagination.
 I'm interested in those relationships and I wanted to see how you put it all together.
 I know nothing about computers, nothing about relationships.
 But it was so interesting to see how you developed it.
 Henri Corbin, so you're familiar with his stuff on Ismailian Mazdism.
 Yeah, I'm very interested in that.
 Yeah, very good.
 Paul, why don't you introduce yourself?
 Paul, I haven't asked a name, I know what you're talking about.
 I'm part of this one, that's why I'm here.
 Paul's the guy who gave me a career.
 He found me in a bar in New Jersey years ago.
 People will pay to listen to that.
 That isn't quite how it happened, but something like that.
 Okay, let's come forward.
 My name is Paul, also I have a last name, it's Gladwin.
 I grew up in that bar in New Jersey.
 I am chiefly a composer of music, and with that, rather computer oriented,
 both as tools and the music I compose is often for computer applications or internet.
 I think I probably first read Terrence somewhere in the range of 20 years ago, I guess,
 and I have been exploring for research purposes only.
 I've been in psychedelia for 25 years, but we figured I was only 25 anyway.
 But I just got really old and stayed with it.
 Four years ago I moved to San Francisco and I saw Mark Heschey talk at the Exploratorium
 and he was talking a lot about this thing called the World Wide Web
 and I, along with most of the world, had never heard of the World Wide Web four years ago,
 which is kind of hard to believe today.
 He also said the phrase "world song" and though I didn't know what he meant by world song,
 he didn't actually describe it very accurately during that talk,
 I knew somehow inherently what I thought world song ought to be,
 and so as a thinker about sound and the world,
 I pictured the entire internet being used as some sort of musical instrument
 or people singing together using the internet as a transmission source.
 And so then Mark and I went on to try to sort of structure or build that thing
 that would allow people to, say, tone together over the internet.
 And we did that first at SIGGRAPH in 1996.
 Six.
 Six, Mark tells me.
 [laughter]
 I thought it was five, actually, but I think it was--
 all right, he says six.
 So anyway, we did a singing experiment using the internet.
 We had people in Norway and Vancouver, Montreal, Kansas, New York, and--
 New Orleans.
 New Orleans, where we were at SIGGRAPH.
 And we all actually sang together and saw each other with avatars.
 One avatar would represent the whole group in that city at that point,
 so there's five avatars.
 And it worked.
 It was actually terribly fun.
 It was quite fun.
 And we went on to do two other major experiments of that sort.
 One at the Digital Bee in San Francisco.
 And mostly to me, those were just proof of concepts.
 They were in order to turn people that were working in the computer industry
 onto the concept that audio being used in the internet
 was a conduit for the transmission and transmutation of human consciousness.
 And that's kind of a wordy way to say that audio had a strong power
 in terms of the internet.
 And so we did that, and now I'm waiting for the next step.
 I'm really here.
 I saw Terrence once, and I love Time Waves Zero.
 It makes a lot of sense, but I can't quite believe that everything's going to end in 2012.
 However, as a researcher and as a musician,
 I'm interested kind of in the sound of what that would be.
 So then finally, Mark asked me to come down,
 and we're maybe going to do one of these vocal exercises that we do.
 We want to get over the internet.
 Real life is actually more fun.
 Thanks.
 Tomorrow.
 Tomorrow.
 Cool.
 Thank you.
 Hi, my name is Susan Mazur, and I'm a publicist,
 but I like to think of it more like a media manipulator
 because I do it really different than a lot of other people in the works.
 And because of this, I guess I know a lot of people who write,
 and Mark is one of those people.
 The last time I saw Terrence was with Richard Metzger,
 who's another person who writes.
 And so that's one reason I'm here.
 I'm also here because I'm really deeply involved in electronic music and rave culture
 where the ideas that we're going to talk about this weekend
 are almost treated as like the accepted spirituality,
 which is amazing.
 And they're all like 17-year-olds, and there's thousands of them.
 And it's amazing.
 And I'm working on some theories about bass frequencies
 and how they interact with brains on psychedelic drugs
 and people together and the messages in the bass.
 And so I just love Mark,
 and I gave myself a birthday present
 and a first-year anniversary of my business present this weekend.
 [laughter]
 My name is Steve Krastecki.
 I'm an artist, and I work primarily visually in the digital medium.
 I've done 2D and 3D design.
 I've done some virtual reality design.
 The first time I ever saw anything on the Internet,
 I knew that it was going to be the next thing in communications and in art,
 and I've been pursuing that ever since.
 And I'm very interested in Terrence's theories,
 and I see many parallels between things that you talked about
 with prehistoric man turning into civilized man
 and growing and evolving through the centuries
 as to what's happening on the Internet currently.
 So that's why I'm here.
 Good night.
 John Prince, middle-aged roomer.
 Showed up at Terrence about six years ago.
 Showed up every year.
 Resisted the computer and the room and all that,
 and now it's like, it's coming, it's got me, and here I am.
 I do what you do.
 It's here to stay, dude.
 Yeah, I know.
 It's definitely here to stay.
 Hi, I'm Gerard Hall, and I live down south in Laguna Beach.
 I'm a gardener and a sculptor.
 And I had no idea this was going to have anything to do with computers,
 and last week I got my first Mac,
 and I'm signing up for the World Wide Web,
 my little disc is supposed to come.
 And you put it in, and you're connected with AT&T,
 and you start it up.
 Doors open, yes.
 Well, the phrase "neo-paganism" just, like, electrified me,
 because I feel very comfortable with ancient religions.
 And also the mushroom thing, I'd like to, well, actually,
 I'd like to be able to find a shortcut to that door,
 to that incredible beauty, that overwhelming beauty of nature.
 It's almost spiritual.
 And I don't know, maybe pass it on, or somehow share it,
 or it's so overwhelming.
 And I heard some of your tapes, and I liked what you had to,
 I like your wordage.
 It expanded my thinking.
 So I can't, I'm fluent.
 This is my summer vacation.
 You're welcome.
 My name is Cheryl, and I've been listening to Terrence for many years now,
 and I've always greatly admired and appreciated the artistry
 with which you use language,
 and also the creative way that you put ideas together.
 And I'm always interested in anything that stretches my scope of understanding
 and awareness, like you were saying.
 And Mark, I haven't met you, but I've read about you,
 and I'm very curious to be privy to the inner workings of your mind,
 and to watch the two of you interact with one another.
 It'll be different than when I did the thing with Michael Murphy, I think.
 I'm sure.
 My name's Jim.
 Spending two weeks with you just now, Terrence, has really expanded my thinking,
 and I'm looking forward to it some more.
 Great.
 Jim hears all this stuff and tapes it all,
 and so he's a well-worn pebble.
 I'm John Heriot.
 I'm a British scholar, and I'm just finishing this weekend,
 and I very much wanted to come and learn as much from you as I could.
 Great. I'm glad you're here.
 Kathleen.
 I'm Kathleen, and I just investigate consciousness, whatever's in front of me,
 you know, how it's given to me, and I hang out a lot when I'm here.
 I brought this little list of botanical seed sources that I put together,
 and I'll pass these around.
 I think these plants should be in our lives and on our porches and in our salads.
 That's pretty cool.
 There are lists of plants that have a history of healing or shamanic vision and use,
 and some of the catalogues that you've sent for, they wax very poetic about it,
 but the catalogues are almost as much fun as the plants.
 That's fantastic, Kathleen.
 You're on the ball.
 Thank you.
 Let's continue along the wall for a bit here.
 My name's Lee.
 I'm a composer and musician, and I've been up here several times.
 My main interests are novelty theory, increasingly rapid rate of change,
 seeming possibilities and sort of convergence of all sorts of things,
 some interest in psychedelics,
 but also very interested in the Internet in regards to artificial intelligence.
 Yes, we'll talk about that.
 We'll talk about artificial life as well,
 which is I think you're interested in that, I'm interested in that.
 That's a coming thing for sure.
 I'm Brian Holloway.
 I'm a sculptor.
 There are basically two reasons I'm here.
 One, I always enjoy the crowd that this always draws.
 Two, hearing Terrence speak is like the curio shop on the side of the road in your life.
 You don't know why you have to stop there, but you stop there and you get something you never expected to find.
 Kitsch.
 The snake farm.
 My name's Catherine Robinson, and I'm a costume designer.
 I work doing movies and I mostly.
 And this is my seventh workshop with Terrence, and I always come for a brain tingle, and I always get one.
 And also I've just made some really great friends these days,
 and there's not a lot of time, so you have to work quickly.
 So I'm available.
 And I would like to just invite you.
 We started a tradition of reveling around the fire on Saturday night.
 So after festivities on Saturday night, if anyone wants to mosey down to the fire after the tubs or something like that,
 we tend to stay up rather late and have a really good time.
 It goes till dawn.
 Yeah, let me just say on that point that, you know, regardless of what you're looking for, odds are someone in this room has that.
 In the nature of the game, it is not Mark or I, ultimately.
 So, you know, we look like the rest of the population, but self-select to be here.
 So it's a wonderful opportunity to hone social skills, make new friends and connections.
 Well put.
 My name is Susan, and I do have a number of times being a philosopher from a little kid all the way through my life.
 I hear the new ideas and be involved, like you said, all the people who show up at these things and all the Terry's kids.
 And I quote you frequently, so I need new material.
 So the pressure is on.
 So let's come back here and then.
 My name is Richard Milner, and I guess this is the third workshop I've done with these journalists.
 And they're always a trip.
 I've been trying to reconcile perception and reality for some time.
 And I finally concluded there is no such thing as reality.
 And I work in the financial business.
 I'm an investment advisor.
 I've been trading in the markets for years.
 And I've seen these incredible flows of money changing as technology changes and the applications of virtual reality to money management and all this stuff, which is which is part of.
 But finally, we're looking at economics as a complex adaptive system, just as it's happening in all the physical and biological sciences.
 And I'm trying to reconcile the stuff you're talking about as far as novelty and discontinuous events.
 And so much of what happens in our markets are discontinuous, right?
 And reconcile in terms of technology and computers and how the world is changing and we're changing as we're all linking together and where that goes.
 You know, and at the back of my mind, that is always that wonderful book by Arthur C. Clarke called Childhood and Great Book, which there's a major, major shift on this.
 Good time on Epiphany.
 And ask a topic. So I'm here for part of the ride.
 I don't see what's going on.
 Yeah. In in George Dyson's book, Darwin Among the Machines, he says there is nothing as much like thought as money and then gives examples of how money works like thought.
 And in a sense, then, is the precursor of the global nervous system of the Internet, which is built as an architecture of mind slash money.
 Interesting. Yeah. My name is Neil.
 And I came at first because I seen you speak on your tour for True Hallucinations and that was like hearing hearing you speak for the first time was like tripping in itself.
 I've never covered and I just wanted to continue.
 And then and then when I found that you were part of it, I looked up his net page and some of the things like your article in Salon.
 And so it was like I had to come.
 You had an article in Salon recently, recently.
 That's fun. How about virtual art?
 Do you all know? Do you all read Salon online? Oh, it's had the best coverage of the president's situation.
 And it doesn't see it like the bullshit right wing, slow moving coup, crypto fascist, witch hunting.
 It sees it very, very differently and reports it very intelligently and has broken story after story about corruption in the special prosecutor's office and leaked grand jury material and paid off witnesses and off the record meetings and Salon dot com.
 It's the best political writing.
 Salon magazine dot com.
 Sorry.
 Yeah, Salon magazine, the cognoscenti now.
 Salon.
 Yeah.
 I'm Michael. I'm on a novelty kick.
 I've been a computer programmer for 15 years and I've stopped that.
 And I wondered what technology was about.
 And so now I'm hiking into wilderness areas with a digital camera and finding patterns in nature.
 I'm not sure why.
 And for me, it's reconnecting myself with my God, which I call the great outdoors.
 God is not only great outdoors as far as nature, but great outdoors as in moving through a door.
 Now, the door, the great outdoors.
 So I'm walking around the great outdoors with a digital camera going.
 Cool.
 And I'd actually.
 Why do you not videotape your session?
 Oh, I don't know. I have no idea why.
 The question.
 Yes, I can.
 No. Well, we can arrange it.
 I just never bother because I smoke too much dope, frankly.
 Worry about stuff like that.
 I mean, it sounds like a splendid idea, like so much that would happen if I stopped smoking.
 One thing I would like to add is that I have been a photographer of film and film sees the world one way.
 And I've noticed now with a digital camera and with psychoactive tools, there's a relationship formed through the digital camera to the source, the energy.
 And a digital camera sees that differently than film.
 Very good.
 Actually, I have an FYI in the S1 library, the video library that you can actually check out.
 You have the most listing by two and a half pages of video.
 We used to shoot stuff years ago, but once they caught on to the fact that I endlessly repeat myself, they sort of folded that.
 But yeah, there's plenty. Don't worry.
 I'm not about to be erased from the historical record.
 Yeah.
 My name is Frank. I've been here many times.
 I've been keenly interested in the relationship between mind and body, mind and spirit,
 since I was a young boy, experimenting with several different substances that I found to open doors
 to facilitators toward higher consciousness.
 I've been interested in tenancy work for about a year, actually, when I first found out about you through a friend, Don Watson.
 Thank you.
 And my work in finance causes me to travel all the time.
 And I'm sort of trying to rely on technology to help facilitate my work life.
 I'm trying to find smaller and smaller and brighter and brighter computers to help me all come together.
 So I thought this would be an appropriate workshop to sort of see how I can take technology
 and my quest for inner searching and sort of more than I have.
 Smaller and brighter. Yeah.
 I signed up for healing and letting go.
 You mean moving on and letting go.
 I'm happy to stay here.
 Peter, I'm a painter and I'm interested in mysticism and I'm interested in the collective unconsciousness
 and I'm interested in how the Internet is manifesting that.
 I work on it as well.
 This is my birthday present to myself.
 My name is Tom. I'm interested in the concept of boundaries and barriers, which you mentioned in your life.
 And how both psychedelics and the Internet are breaking and expanding.
 And I had an opportunity to be in a film with these journalists some time ago.
 And they had a phrase, "the wall of the mind."
 And I found that a very powerful phrase.
 The wall of thought is gone.
 The wall of the mind has persisted.
 And I think we all have.
 And we certainly have in this country also.
 It's a great metaphor for me.
 And this workshop kind of spoke to that metaphor.
 I've also had a long interest in cultural anthropology and the role that psychoactive drugs or plants play
 in traditional cultures and that kind of thing.
 And we'll be teaching a course on sociology, but I want to look at the impact of the Internet on our culture today.
 And I thought I'd give some advice.
 My name is Jessica. I'm in the middle of a big industry storm of really remarkable proportions.
 Terrence's name keeps coming up.
 AI, computer stuff, collective conscious goings-on.
 Suddenly getting invited here for a feast seems to be a part of it.
 My name is Todd, and I first was made aware of Esalen through some tapes of Joseph Campbell's.
 It sounded like a particularly interesting place, so I frequented the website.
 And recently I wanted to come here and was thinking, "Wow, gosh, you know, I'm a month away."
 And I looked and I saw computers and psychoactive plants and the two main passions of my life coming together.
 And I was like, "Surely I didn't come here."
 My name is Chris. I'm a librarian. I live in Oakland.
 I took a class from Mark a year or so ago, and I reshuffled one of Terrence's books in January,
 and I just haven't looked back.
 It was the archaic revival of the bees, history, religion, and so forth.
 I have been interested in perceptional astronomy for a while since I read Peter Tompkins' Mysteries of the Great Pyramid.
 And then Hamlet's Milk blew my mind.
 And let's see now.
 Philip K. Dick, I thought that--
 He was going to be here.
 He is here. He is here.
 No, I thought that archaic revival was the first of Terrence's writings that I have.
 He actually wrote the afterword and the foreword to--what was it?
 Selection from the Exegesis?
 I wrote that, yeah.
 It was supposed to be a foreword, and after they read it, they announced it would be an afterword.
 So I'm looking to make friends and connections here.
 Ever since I read about the DMT flash, I said, "I have to experience that."
 So computers, the psychedelics, the Internet, and me, all right, I'm here.
 You mentioned your interest in processional astronomy.
 Any of you who are into all of that and Hamlet's Milk and so forth and so on,
 there's a new book by John Major Jenkins called Maya Cosmogenesis 2012, and it's very well written.
 It's very scholarly.
 There it is.
 It may be in the bookstore here, I don't know, but if you care about all that, it's the latest, greatest thing to read.
 Yeah.
 I'm Eric Newdord. I'm a grad student in transpersonal psychology.
 My students have done a lot for my life and maybe looked at how to change others' lives.
 That's how I got into Terrence's writings.
 I'm interested in mythicism, too, and particularly I'd like to mention in the Archaic Revival,
 there is a big difference between the mushroom experience and following a path, Vedanta or yoga or something.
 I've always sensed that, but I've never been able to figure out exactly what the difference is.
 The free lunch way with a mushroom where you don't have to work for it.
 In our Western culture, at least, we have the Protestant work ethic and we frown at that sort of thing.
 I've always been curious kind of why.
 It's not exactly a free lunch.
 It's simply that instead of searching for the spiritual gas pedal, you suddenly become very interested in finding the brakes.
 Go for it, Mark.
 Mark's book is Cosmic Trigger, probably on the influence of some psychedelic drugs, but we'll come to that.
 In it, he summarizes yours and your brother's work on the time wave.
 He, in fact, charts out history into three major sections,
 the 67-year section, which will comprise the bulk of my life,
 an interesting 13-month section, which will happen in 2011,
 and then an interesting six-day section, which will happen immediately preceding the winter solstice in 2012,
 in which I believe during the last six-day session there will be more novelty than has existed on the planet since ever.
 I looked at this and I had been reading.
 I'd started off easy, so I'd read Alvin Toffler, and then I could take a little bit more,
 so I worked myself up into Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and then I came across that,
 and I said, "Well, this appears to be the case."
 It was confirmed to me internally in a way that I could not particularly argue with.
 I could not argue out of.
 It was simply a foundational fact, and all of my work thereafter was based on a premise
 that the universe is seeking a type of closure, that in fact things are converging.
 And so my own life study had been perhaps an exploration of what those avenues of convergence were,
 and it ended up over a period of years that my own life story became a search to create the forms of that convergence.
 So we'll now flash forward to my first experience of virtual reality, which happened in 1990,
 and required absolutely no technology except about 500 micrograms of LSD-25.
 I'd been thinking, I'd been reading, and all of a sudden I drop acid after several years,
 and of course if you've taken several years break and all of a sudden thrust yourself back into that realm,
 you can find that things really pop up.
 And I found myself in a virtual world, and what I found in this virtual world,
 the thing that I must have suspected that I would find in this virtual world,
 wasn't an artificial Tron-like environment.
 It wasn't something that was entirely artificial.
 What I beheld in that environment was an image of the planet, as if I was cruising above it in a spaceship.
 And I knew that part of my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn't to escape into another dimension,
 but to find a way to make real to us the things that we can't always see,
 because we exist at a level of scale, of experience, that hides them from us.
 And at that point in my life, I decided I needed to leave New England and come to California,
 where everything was really going on.
 This was 1990, and VR was the hot new thing.
 And we forget now that VR was the hot new thing before the Internet became the hot new thing,
 but for a while it was the cheese.
 And I moved to San Francisco, which made it much easier to get good drugs.
 And I started to explore, by working, by building systems, what virtual reality was.
 And this started to have a profound change on my own understanding of how reality was constructed,
 because my psychedelic description of reality, which is that mind forms reality,
 began to conflate or become identical with my physical or scientific description of reality,
 which is that mind forms reality.
 And all of a sudden I understood that everything I used to understand about the way the universe works
 wasn't as true as I had thought.
 And so this began to inspire in me a search, a search to get to some basic level of being
 that would allow me to work in a world that was manifest because of my own will,
 and just as much as manifest because of your own will.
 Because where we're going, the simulated and the real, are going to get really blurry.
 And we don't have any tools. We don't have any tools of mind.
 Western culture, which is based on this idea of this objective external reality,
 it's not hard. It's all become very soft and it's all flowing together.
 So we need to now start to find ways of describing what's going on.
 And so what we need to do, I found in my own investigations,
 is to take a look at cultures that describe the world magically,
 that understand that perception shapes what you are and you shape what you see,
 and that they're not separate areas, they're not separate domains,
 but you have to consider them as a whole.
 So the four sort of prongs that got talked about in the blurb that was written for this piece
 are techno-paganism. And techno-paganism is maybe, you could describe it a bunch of different ways,
 and I certainly didn't make the word up and I certainly didn't apply the word to myself,
 but it stuck because Wired Magazine published an article two years ago
 with my face blazoned on it, Photoshop reversed in color, and said, "This is a techno-pagan."
 And really what it was trying to do was trying to articulate my own experience
 of being thrust into this world where everything was melting and nothing was solid,
 and trying to come to grips with it philosophically, trying to come to grips with it ontologically.
 And my own explorations had led me to understand that in fact,
 in a world where anything you want is true, the only way you can deal with this
 is by learning how to deal with your will.
 Dealing with your will is what magic has always, in all cultures, always been about.
 This is why the shaman doesn't go insane when the world disappears. He's ready for it.
 They're ready because they understand that where they are, he isn't bound up in their view of the world.
 The Internet is a connective layer.
 And you were talking about this last night, it's beautiful.
 If you took a picture of this room in 1990 and you took a picture of it today,
 everything would look exactly the same, and yet everything is completely different.
 Because in 1990, we didn't have this layer of bits that's flowing seamlessly among all of us.
 And it's changed us. It's radically sped up the way we deal with information in society.
 And every bit of information that passes through you changes you.
 You cannot be unaffected in any way by any bit of information.
 So the Internet is acting as this enormous accelerator.
 It's acting as something that's passing through all of us and radically transforming us.
 And part of what it's doing is ripping us apart. And that's dangerous.
 If we don't approach that carefully, and if we don't approach that with a lot of heart,
 we're going to find ourselves and what we think of as ourselves ripped away in that process.
 One of the reasons why I think it's very important that this is happening at Esalen
 is because if Esalen were running a political campaign, their slogan would be, "It's the body, stupid."
 Because it begins here and it ends here.
 And if we can stay in our bodies, even while we're projected into cyberspace,
 we have some zone for sanity. We have some zone for being.
 And psychedelics can produce these boundary dissolutions where you flow into another thing.
 What we're going to see, and it's actually quite true, that certain types of VR can produce precisely the same affect.
 There are zones where virtual reality can be very dangerous for that reason
 or incredibly powerful and meaningful for that reason.
 So where I would like to work from this weekend is I really want to work from the heart.
 I personally think in my own philosophy that to work in technology, you have to work from the heart center.
 Because otherwise you'll create golems, you'll create frankensteins, your creations will run away from you.
 And that's the essence of the story of the golem, is that this is a creature that was created with the breath of life
 but without the light of knowledge or the heart, the heart of God.
 So we really have to work from that. And one of the things that we'll be doing this weekend for that,
 and we're inviting you, I don't think we're requiring you because that would just not be in the tenor of this place,
 but we're inviting you at 7.30 in the morning, both tomorrow and Sunday, to come practice Kundalini Yoga.
 And Kundalini Yoga works very much on the heart center. It's not strenuous. I guarantee it will be fun.
 We have a very good teacher, James, who will be teaching this.
 And the idea is that with these exercises we can help to open up our heart center so that when we talk tomorrow,
 when we meet tomorrow, we can really be working from that.
 Even when we're talking about these ideas that may be very technologically relevant, they won't be isolated in our minds.
 That all said, I also want to explore the joyous nature of what we can do.
 And a lot of my work has been around exploring the joyous nature of what we can do.
 If we're working from our hearts in these environments, then a part of what we want to do is be joyous in these environments.
 One of the biggest gripes about the Internet is that it can't, as yet, contain the tenor of human emotion, which is so important.
 If we're building this edifice to be the global mind and it can't laugh, we've got a big problem.
 If it can't sing, we have a big problem.
 And so one of the things we'll be doing probably in the evening on Saturday is doing something we call "voce,"
 which Paul and I have been working on. We call it "world song" or "voce," which is a singing or toning technique.
 And it can produce a quality of connection in a group of people, which is the closest I've heard it described as almost instant ecstasy,
 in the sense of the drug.
 And it's a temporary sort of lowering of interpersonal barriers in a really, really wonderful way.
 And hopefully at the end of all of this, I will have been inspired, and Terrence will have been inspired by what you had to say,
 and we'll be able to bring that heart-centeredness, which has to, I believe, remain at the heart of how we work when we're working in the world
 and with technology in the world.
 Isn't he a great guy?
 If I had the Timothy Leary laurels with me, I'd hand them all out.
 The bad penny could pass.
 Well, I love listening to Mark rap this stuff, and he really knows where he's coming from.
 And it's exciting stuff.
 I've been into this psychedelic thing since the late '60s, and it's transformed in different ways.
 And there's been a strange sort of literary parallelism or cloud over my own life,
 so that as my obsessions evolved, society obligingly evolved in the same directions.
 And when I got started with psychedelics, it was because I was interested in the mystical experience,
 a la Jakob Berman, Thomas Trehearne, and all that sort of thing.
 And I had read Aldous Huxley's book, "The Doors of Perception."
 So it was a spiritual intentionality.
 And as time passed, I was completely satisfied in that.
 But I also became interested then in what were psychedelics in terms of their impact on large numbers of people
 and on human social and cultural evolution.
 Because to me, it was just this incredible power, this dimension, which my own culture completely denied and overlooked.
 But that obviously, from the first time I had a major trip on, it was clear to me that this had to have evolutionary implications.
 And it seemed to me, as I read my Darwin and Freud, that there had to be some kind of quickening influence in human emergence
 that, if not outright transcendental, was certainly unique and out of the ordinary order of nature.
 And so then I spent years thinking about psychedelics' implications for human evolution.
 And most of you, if you're interested, know my theories about all this.
 Well, then the engagement with it extended further, and I began to see it as a lens for coordinating large amounts of data
 in order to essentially prophesize the future.
 That the future, somehow I had the notion that history and the individual life built around the psychedelic experience
 were fractal reflections of each other.
 And that led to the conclusion that history is a trip.
 And that led to the conclusion that the best was yet to come, or the yes-ed was bet to come. I'm not sure.
 So it had this sociopolitical and historical implication.
 And it wasn't as simple as just imagining what would happen if societies would permit these things.
 But I could also see that it was a catalyst on imagination.
 That whatever it was that psychedelics were doing, it was taking anybody's notion of reality, anybody's mindset, and radically extending it.
 And if they found that comfortable, they were ecstatic.
 And if they found it horrifying, they were traumatized.
 But the common thread was, takes ordinary minds, makes them bigger, stranger, more grotesque, less predictable, more bizarre.
 So then that was not yet the outer parameter of the issues that this phenomenon, the psychedelic experience, seemed to engage.
 It seemed to me that at the personal and experiential level, the thing that was so astonishing about it was not that it led, at least for me, directly to God.
 What it led to was more art than I conceived of existing.
 How was it that in a five-hour psilocybin trip, an ordinary person lying in darkness sees more art than is stored and cataloged in all the museums of Europe?
 I mean, this was confounding to me.
 And I had a Jungian bias, too.
 So I was full of the notion of the commonality of the unconscious and all that.
 And so I was puzzled, why don't I see these motifs in Tibetan paintings, Shapibo carving?
 How can something which is so near, over a very slight energy threshold involved in taking these substances, be so distant from our cultural values and our store of images?
 And it was around this time, roughly 1990, that I began to hear the first buzz about virtual reality.
 And I knew, the minute I understood the concept, I knew, in the same way that I knew when I heard about the first Mac and LSD and potassium sugar per chlorate rocket fuels, that this was going to be the next great thing.
 And as a tool of art, as a tool for leading us beyond the notion that we are a hive society of advanced primates, because that's how we visually appear to the empirical point of view.
 That's an out-of-context description of what we are.
 It's like a schematic or an aerial map.
 What we really are is a community of mind knitted together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes.
 The invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little more than a kind of screen or stage upon which we move.
 So this thing Mark said, I heard it for the first time and got it, that the purpose of VR is to show us aspects of reality that are not artificial, but that are fields of data not ordinarily coordinated by ordinary perception.
 You know, Ralph Abraham, who's a favorite around here, has talked about how mathematics, which has been a high priesthood of arcane formulae and special signifying languages, is giving way to visual understanding.
 If you talk to someone about a seven or eight dimensional process, most people completely blur out.
 If you show them an animation of an ongoing eight dimensional process, everybody understands without a word being said exactly what is happening.
 So I see virtual reality as a way not of escaping any notion of empirical reality, but as a way of re-portraying invisible levels of the given world that are very vital and important to us.
 How we see flows of energy, how we understand complex economies, how we understand the fractal hierarchies of nature.
 Everything is about to get very much more complicated, much larger.
 The number of choices are about to exponentially explode.
 In a sense, these technologies point us toward, if not literal godhood, then a kind of fictional godhood.
 We are all going to become the masters of the narrative in which we are embedded.
 Our separate stories are going to take on dimensions so multifarious that for all practical purposes we will each move into a cosmos of our own creation and control.
 In a way, all that is happening is that what is already co-present with three dimensional reality is being literalized.
 But literalized in time scales that make the nature of the game apparent to all but the dullest among us.
 I mean, after all, we have always lived in virtual realities, ever since we abandoned nomadism and defined a polis and a wilderness.
 And when Hammurabi set up the first codes in Babylon, these were operating codes.
 These were constraints on the human system that did not fully implement its capabilities, but rather defined and limited it for purposes of implementing certain design goals.
 Well, now we have been in the birth canal of the design process for about 8,000 years now, and we can see light at the end of the tunnel.
 The French have a notion of forward escape.
 That means when the situation gets so crazy, then you just hit the accelerator and drive straight up the middle, and that's the forward escape.
 And technology represents this for us.
 Our ideologies are probably lethal, obviously lethal, I would say.
 But they are fortunately a kind of chrysalis of ideological constraint that technology is in the process of dissolving.
 And William Butler saw this in the 19th century.
 Teilhard de Chardin reached it in the '40s and the '50s.
 McLuhan expressly articulated this vision in the '50s and the '60s.
 This is really, as Ahab tells the crew in Moby Dick, this is what you've shipped for, mate.
 This was the plan.
 Plato said, "If God does not exist, man will create such a thing."
 And we are creating a simulacrum of our highest hopes, and the effort to define the actual delimiting architecture of our hope is an intellectual exercise that we have never previously submitted to.
 And what I mean by that is when you can do anything, what do you do?
 We've always worked within the constraints of mortar, glass, steel, our economic scales, the physical scales.
 VR eliminates all of this.
 You know, the difference between a 10-story building and a 100-story building in virtual reality is one zero in a line of code.
 Well, with that kind of freedom, the human imagination, which has been defined by limitation, the planet's surface, the needs and wishes of others, is going to unfold in these super spaces.
 And, you know, it's a Gnostic epiphany.
 If you believe -- what it really comes down to in terms of the politics and psychology of it is a final resolution, to my mind, of the question, "Is man good?"
 In other words, with all constraints removed, do we descend into a world of, you know, Freudian nightmare and simulated sadomasochism, or do we express something which matter always mitigated against?
 So that's what I think is --
 Do we do both?
 I'm sure we will do both.
 I mean, the essence of choice means not only will we collectively do both, probably each and every one of us will do both, you know?
 Occasionally you flop on the seamy side.
 It gives a literary quality to life that's lacking among the tight ass.
 So, well, I don't know, it's a quarter of ten. Do you want to riff off that for a bit and then we'll send these folks packing?
 I've been piecing together an essay while I've been here, which I'm calling "West of Esalen,"
 which is interesting because if you take a look at what's west of Esalen, you see a gaping cliff which has been growing of late.
 And Esalen, as is all of California, is breaking off and falling into the sea, and there is no safe land anywhere.
 And that's more than a metaphor for where we are now.
 And it's interesting because there is talk about what Esalen has to do with the modern age,
 and yet so much of what we think of as modern language has been shaped by what's come out of this place.
 Talking about somebody's vibes or being touchy-feely or even doing yoga, which is now, of course, all the rage in late millennial culture.
 These are all impulses that came out of this place.
 So there's something about this space and about the body which is incredibly right,
 and even if Esalen vanished tomorrow, God, God, us forbid, even if it did, the impact of it as an institution has been profound.
 And I think perhaps what we're trying to do here this weekend and tonight is to extend the franchise of Esalen into another realm,
 to say that the values that make us human, the values that make us good, are the values that come out of what's done here,
 and maybe they're values that rely on the body in some way.
 That even as we talk about this Gnostic release, this uploading of the soul into some sort of silicon, which we will talk about,
 that there is this body that's behind sort of ditching, saying, "Excuse me, I'm real, and I am the potential, I am the ground in which you work."
 Because of that, I hope that we will spend some of the weekend not just speculating,
 but constantly looping and bringing it back into the body and where the body is.
 The question of the body is one of the largest questions in virtual reality.
 That's a curious contradiction, and yet it's true.
 Where is the body in cyberspace? Where are you when your email is flashing across the net, when your agents are doing your bidding?
 Where are you, and how do you maintain yourself?
 It was interesting because there was a comment that was made earlier about psychedelics as a shortcut versus yoga or one of the other traditions.
 I know that in my own life, I need both of them, because I need the psychedelics in order to be able to have the vision,
 but I need the yoga in order to maintain the stability to express the vision.
 There's both dials there. It's as if the internet is some sort of collective psychedelic.
 We're going to need the body as we pass through it so that we can explore the zones within ourselves that are the good.
 Yeah, it's great what you say about that we're trying to push the definitions of Esselin's relevance,
 because the entire intellectual and spiritual effort here over the past 30 years flies under the flag of the human potential movement.
 That's what it's called.
 And certainly what we're talking about here and trying to bring gently onto the stage is an enormous frontier of human potential.
 We are to some degree beginning to design ourselves or beginning to design our potential in the service of the idea of a perfected humanity of some sort.
 And what we're talking about here is not genetic manipulation or eugenics or any of these somewhat dubious enterprises with a clouded history,
 but using technological prosthesis to extend and enrich humanness, to enrich communication.
 It is, believe me, the want of good communication that is the thing probably, if anything undoes us, this will be it.
 That our language has failed, that we misread each other's intent, that we could not understand each other.
 So the project of refining language is the same project as the ending of history.
 I mean, history is the story of languages that failed.
 And when language grows perfect, history will end and language may not look like it looks today or sound like it sounds today.
 The realization that's flowered in the wake of the Internet and the rise of cybernetics is that everything is made of information.
 Information is the primary datum of being.
 Concepts like time and space and energy are orders of magnitude removed from the present at hand when compared with a concept like information.
 And as Mark said, every iota, every bit of information that passes through us, that we generate, that we transmit, changes us.
 So I'm seeing here almost a theosophical epiphany of language trying to bootstrap itself toward realms of platonic perfection,
 which as organic beings we experience as love.
 Love, beauty, truth, these are the vectors of human becoming.
 They always have been, they always will be, and the technologies that open these paths for us are no more and no less powerful than the human beings that wield them.
 So this is an enterprise of integrity and millennial implication, and what lies as the goal is true humanness in sympathetic symbiosis with the planet
 and with these strange children that we have brought into the world, our machines.
 I mean, that is the challenge at the end of history, and that's what we'll be talking about this weekend.
 Thanks for coming and get some sleep.
 Mark, I wanted to ask you, where is the yoga? Is it here?
 Yoga is 7, no, 7.30 tomorrow morning, so they have movements here.
 In the big room, in the meeting room in the big house.
 In the big house living room at 7.30.
 Everyone familiar with where the big house is? It's across the bridge and it's the big house.
 Okay.
 The big house.
 As opposed to the little house which it sits opposite from.
 And it's the big house, 7.30, please, you'll enjoy it.
 If you have a blanket or something, bring it, it'll be comfy, but if not, don't worry about it.


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