I always want to bring more under the umbrella of whatever metaphor it is that's being pushed.
 And what I have discerned is that time is actually speeding up.
 That the universe is not what physics tells us it is.
 Physics tells us that the universe is a physical system, an entropic system,
 that was born in immense energy and chaos and will run down with a bang,
 I mean with a whimper, not a bang, run down into heat entropy and dissipation.
 The psychedelic data on this is completely different.
 The psychedelic data says what that model left out was biology and mind.
 Now, biology you might imagine is a fairly ephemeral, recent, fragile phenomenon.
 It is not. The average star in this galaxy gutters out after about 700 million years.
 Not our star. We happen to have the good fortune to be around a very stable, slow-burning star.
 But there has been biology on this planet at least 2 billion years.
 Three times the average life of a star.
 So biology is not some Johnny-come-lately epiphenomena.
 Biology is a phenomenon more persistent than the life of the stars themselves.
 And biology is not a static thing.
 I mean a star evolving now is not greatly different from a star evolving a billion years ago.
 Biology doesn't work that way.
 Biology constantly changes the context in which evolution occurs.
 The way I have downloaded this into a phrase is the universe is, the biological universe at least,
 is a novelty-conserving engine.
 Upon simple molecules are built complex molecules.
 Upon complex molecules are built complex polymers.
 Upon complex polymers comes DNA.
 Out of DNA comes the whole machinery of the cell.
 Out of cells comes simple, aggregate colony animals like hydra and that sort of thing.
 Out of that, true animals.
 Out of that, ever more complex animals.
 Organs of locomotion, organs of sight, organs of smell.
 Complex mental machinery for the coordinating of data in time and space.
 This is the whole story of the advancement of life.
 And in our species it reaches its culmination and it crosses over into a new domain
 where change no longer occurs in the atomic and biological machinery of existence.
 It begins to take place in this world which we call mental.
 It's called epigenetic change.
 Change which cannot be traced back to mutation of the arrangements of molecules inside long-chain polymers,
 but change taking place in syntactical structures that are linguistically based.
 And people have probably been using language with considerable facility for probably 50,000 years, possibly more.
 In our own time we have created ever more elaborate languages,
 ever more elaborate technologies for transforming, storing and retrieving language
 so that we are actually on the brink of being able to give every single one of you the complete cultural inventory,
 the complete database of human beings' experience on this planet.
 That's what these data highways and networks are all about.
 The nervous system is being hardwired.
 But what I wanted to draw your attention to about this is it is not only an advance deeper and deeper into novelty,
 but it's an advance in which each successive stage occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it.
 So, you know, once you get the Big Bang, then nothing much happens for a long, long time.
 I mean, there's plasma streaming through the universe.
 The universe is slowly cooling, but that's the most dramatic complex process in the universe, this cooling.
 Then after a certain point, more complex processes come in.
 Complexification begins to build, and as it builds, it begins to happen faster and faster and faster.
 And the great puzzle in the biological record is the suddenness of our own emergence, of our emergence,
 human emergence out of the primate line.
 It happened with enormous suddenness.
 Lumholtz calls it the most explosive reorganization of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.
 And that's, you know, a great embarrassment to the theory of evolution,
 because this is the organ which generated the theory of evolution.
 We're not talking an appendix or an eyebrow here.
 We're talking the very organ which generated it.
 I think that we are not, that we have taken far too much responsibility for what is happening,
 and that what we took to be a staircase we were climbing is actually an up escalator.
 And if you will stop climbing, you will notice that it does not impede your upward progress,
 because the ground you're standing on is moving you toward the goal.
 I think that this idea, which may be the proof that I'm bonkers,
 requires a fairly radical reorganization of consciousness,
 because what I'm saying is the universe was not born in a fiery explosion
 from which it has been being blasted outward ever since.
 The universe is not being pushed like that from behind.
 The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal
 that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim.
 You know, if you do that, the marble will roll down the side of the bowl, down, down, down,
 and eventually it will come to rest in the lowest energy state, which is the bottom of the bowl.
 That's precisely my model of human history.
 Now, bear in mind what the competition is peddling.
 The competition is peddling the idea that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment for no reason.
 Now, whatever you think about that, notice that it's the limit case for credulity.
 Do you understand what I mean?
 I mean, if you believe, if you can believe that, it's hard for me to imagine what you would balk at
 if we were to sit down and say, "Let's see who can think of the most unlikely thing that could possibly happen."
 I submit to you, nobody could top the Big Bang.
 It is the improbability of improbabilities.
 It is the mother of all improbabilities right there.
 So, I'm suggesting something different.
 I'm suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that exists ahead of us in time,
 and that our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty
 is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor.
 All Western religions have insisted that God would come tangential to history,
 but they all lose their nerve when you ask when,
 which is the only interesting question about that hypothesis.
 I mean, if it's not now, then what the hell difference does it make?
 It's just pissing in the wind as far as I can see.
 I think that the very real social crisis that is upon us,
 the crisis of population, of resource depletion, of atmospheric degradation, of epidemic disease,
 all these crises indicate that we are now down to the short epochs
 of this process of universal ingression into novelty,
 and that in fact it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of a human future.
 There is no human future.
 It's inconceivable, given where we are today,
 that to speak of the human world a thousand years from now, or five hundred years from now.
 It is literally, it either doesn't exist, or it's beyond our power of imagining.
 It isn't simply going to be non-polluting cars and smaller hi-fi speakers.
 I mean, that's an idiot's notion.
 Yeah, clearer TV pictures.
 It isn't like that at all.
 I mentioned this this morning, how when you look at only one line of technological development,
 automobiles or computers, it looks like you can rationally anticipate what's going to happen.
 But when you realize that there are thousands of these lines of development,
 all transforming themselves, all moving towards some kind of omega point,
 then you realize that we're in the grip of what I call a concrescence.
 And I maintain that you don't have to believe me on this.
 You can see it from here.
 You just have to climb a high hill.
 There's one. It's called Psilocybin.
 There's one. It's called Ayahuasca.
 The view from the tops of these hills is of the concrescence.
 It lies now closer to us than the Johnson administration, for God's sake, in time.
 And, you know, I have an elaborate mathematical theory to back this up,
 which you should gratefully learn you are not going to be flayed with this afternoon.
 But I think it's going to become more and more important for people to delinearize their view of time,
 decondition yourself from the lie of history.
 After all, you know, if time were space, history would be a spider web.
 So bear that in mind.
 What is a concrescence?
 Ah, concrescence.
 Concrescence is a word that I cribbed from the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead.
 And, in fact, much of what I say Whitehead provides the foundation for.
 He, like myself, had the idea that history grows toward what he called a nexus of completion.
 And these nexi of completion themselves grow together into what he called the concrescence.
 So a concrescence is a domain of extremely high novelty in comparison to whatever it's embedded in.
 So, for instance, you walking in the wilderness, you are a concrescence
 because you are more complex than the medium you're moving through.
 A raisin embedded in a cornmeal muffin is a concrescence.
 It is more complex than the muffin matrix in which it finds itself.
 So a concrescence is a local state of unusually high complexity.
 And a concrescence exerts a kind of attraction.
 Let's call it the temporal equivalent of gravity.
 So that all objects in the universe are drawn through time, not space.
 Gravity draws you through time. Space... gravity draws you through space.
 Time draws you toward the concrescence.
 This is why the universe is seen to be becoming more and more complex, faster and faster.
 Yeah.
 What is your best scenario of December 21st 2012?
 Well, first of all...
 22nd or the 36th?
 No, no. We had a meeting of the Rebbes on this one and we got it figured out.
 We're using 1118 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, December 21st 2012 A.D.
 And this is all based on a bunch of fishy mathematics that need not concern you here
 but which you would pay dearly to hear in some other context.
 The idea being, you see, that each epoch being shorter than the one that preceded it,
 this generates an asymptotic curve of approach.
 And it's become a cliche of our culture that time is speeding up.
 It actually is speeding up.
 It's not that it seems like it's speeding up or it looks like it's speeding up.
 It is speeding up.
 We and our entire world are being drawn into confrontation with something that at this level
 is lost below the event horizon of rational apprehension.
 That's a fancy way of saying you can't know jack shit about it at this point in time.
 There will come a moment when it will rise above the horizon of rational apprehension.
 But, and I see, I really, I think that history is a set of nested resonances.
 This is what I mean when I say nothing is unannounced.
 Nothing can take you by surprise if you've really been paying attention
 because everything is preceded by its harbingers and heralds.
 And we are living in an era now where there is a great deal of apocalyptic expectation,
 anticipation, and hysteria for several reasons.
 First of all, because Christianity just is hysterical in all times and places.
 Second of all, there's a built-in goose in the calendar
 because we're approaching a millennial year and that always exacerbates this Christian thing outrageously
 because of the promise made, you know, "Amen, amen, I say to you, this generation shall not pass away
 before I return to clean your plow" or whatever it is.
 So, and there is the physical evidence all around us that we are the witnesses to a planetary crisis
 that we cannot control or manage.
 I mean, there are, it's very hard to believe that we could manage ourselves back into a steady state.
 I mean, yeah, the Jews are talking to the Arabs and they're trying to get things straightened out in South Africa,
 but what about the global population curve?
 What about the degrading atmosphere?
 I mean, you know, you don't necessarily, you're just as dead even if you're not killed by a racist or a fascist.
 So we can get certain problems under control, but it seems certain problems are beyond our control.
 Also, there's another level to all this, which is when you take cores from the Greenland ice
 or make side-ranging radar maps of the Canadian shield, you discover that we are not the only force
 for disruption and chaos wandering around the universe looking for trouble.
 The universe is an incredibly chaotic and unstable place.
 Planetesimal impacts on the Earth have reset the biological clock at least three times in the last billion years.
 What we have been living through for the past 50,000 years is an unusual era of metastability,
 and it has allowed us to create a global civilization.
 But we can't assume that we have 50,000 years of stability ahead of us, or even 100,000 years of stability ahead of us.
 And finally, you know, this curious resistance to the idea of the end of the world always amuses me
 because maybe the world will end and maybe it won't end, but have you ever noticed that the end of your world
 is an absolute certainty? You're going to go into the yawning grave, and rather soon, I should suspect,
 and possibly sooner than you're prepared for. So, quibbling over the end of other people's world
 seems like a philosophical argument compared to the certainty of your own finality.
 A lot of people have been recently playing around with a Stephen Hawking's book, and I wondered if you could comment
 or critique it and say how that creates parallel universes or not. Do you have a view of them at all?
 Well, that's an interesting question, and I've been thinking about it.
 The question is, out of Stephen Hawking's book about parallel worlds and black holes and stuff,
 how can these physical oddities or anomalies be related to what I'm talking about?
 Well, first of all, we don't know what a black hole is. A black hole has at the center of it a singularity.
 The definition of singularity is you don't know what it is. A fishy way of making theories, by the way.
 Stephen Hawking is a prime example. At one point in his career, he was very keen for what were called mini black holes,
 and these were black holes that were under a centimeter in size, and a certain reading of his theory required
 ten high sixteen of these things in the universe.
 So when you realize that there's a singularity at the center of each one of them, you say,
 "Well, hell, what kind of physics are you doing if you have a physical theory that has ten high sixteen exceptions
 to whatever rules it lays down? This isn't a theory. This is a sieve that you're waving around in the air."
 However, the black hole does bear on this because imagine an observer standing outside the event horizon of a black hole
 watching an object approach the black hole. What you see, and this is similar to the argument or the example I gave a few minutes ago
 about the marble on the edge of the bowl, what you see is this, let's make it a spacecraft.
 This spacecraft approaches the event horizon of the black hole, and then it's caught in the gravitational tidal forces
 of the black hole, and it begins to go faster and faster, around and around, faster and faster,
 and at a certain point, it disappears into the singularity.
 This is from the point of view of an observer outside the system. Now we flash to the stalwart captain and crew
 on the bridge of this starship. What happens, from their point of view, what happens is as they sink below the event horizon
 of the black hole and start the descent toward the singularity, time and space are dilated so dramatically
 that the singularity recedes to an infinite distance and you fall forever toward it.
 Well, what I would like to suggest, based on, well, here's what I'd like to suggest.
 This is one way of thinking about it, that our planet is on a collision course with something
 which we actually, at our present state of knowledge, don't have a word for.
 A black hole is simply a gravitationally massive object, so massive that no light can leave it.
 What I'm talking about is something like that, except that it isn't so much gravitationally massive as temporally massive.
 We are being sucked into the body of eternity and I think it's going to happen very soon.
 Now, an obvious objection that someone would make to this, it's a probabilistic objection, is they would say,
 "Don't you find it rather unusual that your own very minute and finite life should occur so close to this moment
 of universal dramatic climax? Doesn't that clue you to the fact that you might be slightly deluded?"
 To which I reply, "Not at all!"
 Because I think of this event horizon as a series of, like, ghost horizons.
 And once you enter into history, what history is, is the outer shell of the gravitational field of the attractor of the concrescence.
 In other words, history is the disturbance in nature which precedes the concrescence.
 It precedes it by only 50,000 years, a microsecond.
 So a geological microsecond before all life is melted down in the presence of the singularity.
 There is a curious interface zone that is not the singularity and not the absence of the singularity.
 It's the singularity in the act of becoming.
 And it only lasts, as I say, a geological microsecond.
 When the first subject first came out about this date, you said that, described it as something we could know absolutely nothing about.
 So how do you substantiate the criteria in which you pointed towards this date?
 Well, no, no. You can predict where an electron will be without knowing what an electron is.
 In fact, no one knows what an electron is, and we predict their occurrence very easily.
 What can't be known about the singularity or the concrescence, it simply lies beyond rational apprehension.
 But the map of the phase space in which this concrescence is happening looks very much like an involuting spiral of some sort.
 In principle, the thing is unknowable in time, because if you could know it, you would not be in time.
 Actually, it maps rather well onto Thomas Aquinas' notion of the nature of God, but I don't think we should make too much of that.
 The question was, you described the multiple, multidimensional waves that are being lifted, specifically in the last few minutes.
 Yes, well, here is my notion. It's fairly simple, I think.
 It's a series of nested cycles, where each cycle is only 1/64th in duration of the cycle which precedes it.
 So let's start with a cycle big enough that we can drop the whole life of our cosmos into it with plenty of elbow room.
 Okay? So astrophysics tells us that the universe is between, at one end of the spectrum, 15 billion years, at the other end of the spectrum, 25 billion years.
 So let's give it plenty of elbow room. Let's use a figure like 70 billion years.
 That's our great cycle. Now, inside that cycle, there is a concrest cycle at the terminal end, the end which we call the future end.
 It has a past to future. At the future end, there is a terminal cycle which is 1/64th of 70 billion years.
 That's roughly 1 billion years. And nested at the end of that billion year cycle, at the future end, is a 640 million year cycle.
 No. Whatever a billion divided by 64 is, anyway. And then at the end of that cycle, another cycle, 1/64th as large.
 Well, eventually, if you keep collapsing these, you'll get down to a cycle that is 4,300 years long and change.
 That is the domain of true human history. I mean, granted, there were things went on before 4,300 years ago, but bloody little.
 I mean, 4,300 years in the past takes us back to before the building of the great pyramids, basically.
 So you can see, okay, well then, in that 4,306 year cycle, at the end of it comes a 67 year cycle that has all the themes of all these larger cycles compressed
 and folded into it. Only 67 years. It began on August the 5th, 1945, with a faint echo of the Big Bang as the atomic flower blossomed over Hiroshima.
 It runs from that day, August the 5th, 1945, to December 2012, December 21, 2012, but 384 days before you reach that date, you cross into a cycle only 384 days long
 that has all these larger cycles compressed in it. And six days before you reach the zero point, you cross through into a domain of only six days duration
 that has all these huge cycles compressed in it, from six days to an hour and 35 minutes, and six seconds to 1.3 seconds to .035 seconds,
 down to the domain of Planck's constant, 6.55 times 10 to the minus 23rd erg seconds. Technically we refer to it as a jiffy.
 You finally get down to one jiffy. Well, now, what is happening, imagine the complex... Oh, well, here's the point I want to make.
 If you have a universe like that, 72 billion years in duration, it will undergo half of its evolution in the last 30 seconds of its existence.
 Can you imagine? Now, this is what the scientists do, except they spin it around, and that's why... I can't remember who wrote it, but the book called
 The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg's book, The First Three Minutes, a book about the first three minutes in the life of the universe,
 where he leads you through all this complex physics, as matter is crystallizing out of hyperspace and all this stuff.
 All I'm saying is, let's put the complexity in the more likely end of the cycle. Let's put it at the end, when after billions of years of evolution
 and all kinds of complexity and that sort of thing, everything comes together. So this kind of a cycle, if we were actually living in a universe like this,
 could completely unfold itself according to its natural laws and yet provide a miracle, the miracle of the concrescence.
 That's why I'm so keen on boundary dissolution. The more boundaries that have dissolved, the closer to concrescence we are.
 And when you finally reach it, there are no boundaries. You are eternity. You are all space and time. You are alive and dead, here and there,
 before and after. The singularity is a coincidencia appositorum. It can simultaneously coexist in states which are contradictory.
 It is Thomas Aquinas' vision of God. It's something which transcends rational apprehension. But it gives the universe meaning,
 because all process, then, can be seen to be a seeking and a moving and an effort to approximate, connect with, and attend to this transcendental object at the end of time.
 One way of thinking of it is like those bar balls that they hang in discos that send out thousands of reflections off everybody and everything in the room.
 Well, think of the transcendental object at the end of time as that bar ball, and then those reflected, twinkling, refractive lights are religions, scientific theories,
 gurus, works of art, poetry, great orgasms, great soufflés, great paintings. In other words, anything which has, we even use this phrase,
 anything which has a spark of divinity in it is, in fact, referent to the original source of the sparks of all divinity,
 which is the concrest, compressed experience of life and mind after billions and billions of years of unfolding itself within the confines of three-dimensional space.
 And you can make this vision your friend through psychedelics, because as I said at the beginning of this rave, you can see it from here.
 Of course, not if you have your face plunged in your stock portfolio, you're not going to see it, no.
 But if you will go up on the mountain and take five dried grams in silent darkness and pray through the night, you will absolutely, guaranteed, come into a sense of this thing.
 It's real, and history is simply a perturbation on the surface of the waters of time as we approach the lip of this cascade into concrescence, novelty, and completion.
 And the psychedelics raise you out of the historical matrix and give you a sense of participation in this transcendental reality.
 It's the essence of religion, it's the essence of psychic balance, it's the source of shamanic power and mental health.
 Thank you.
 [Silence]


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