[00:00:00 - 00:00:07] Something like the smell of a late summer New York club crowd. [00:00:07 - 00:00:11] You get the old blood pounding this day. [00:00:11 - 00:00:14] Well, it's a pleasure to be in Manhattan. [00:00:14 - 00:00:23] Manhattan is my second most favorite island in the world, only because I live on Hawaii. [00:00:23 - 00:00:38] And I feel more affinity to this island than to the other Hawaiian islands, which have various cultural extremes I'm not really capable of relating to. [00:00:38 - 00:00:41] But you'll hear more about that. [00:00:41 - 00:00:47] Anyway, it's great to be here. It's great to see so many familiar faces. [00:00:47 - 00:00:57] I appreciate those literary trajectories so ably launched from this stage by Anais and Shirai. [00:00:57 - 00:01:03] And what can I tell you? It's a pleasure to be here. [00:01:03 - 00:01:14] I always feel when I come to wetlands that I'm like checking in with sort of my home base congregation. [00:01:14 - 00:01:28] About five years ago I moved out to Hawaii for the specific purpose of looking back at this scene and putting in a full-time effort to understand it. [00:01:28 - 00:01:31] Of course, this tells you I didn't have a job. [00:01:31 - 00:01:33] I still don't. [00:01:33 - 00:01:44] But if you're a cultural commentator, who needs a job, right? The glory alone is sufficient to pave one's way. [00:01:44 - 00:01:56] And I, probably like you, here at the end of the 20th century, having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, [00:01:56 - 00:02:08] I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receiving. The strangeness seems to be accelerating. [00:02:08 - 00:02:15] The theme of this evening is "Locos meets Eros." [00:02:15 - 00:02:19] Well, I don't know a lot about Eros. [00:02:19 - 00:02:25] I do think if you smoke after sex you're probably doing it too quickly. [00:02:25 - 00:02:33] But otherwise, my expertise lies in another direction. [00:02:33 - 00:02:40] I started out in psychedelic drugs and people said it was a flight from reality. [00:02:40 - 00:02:51] It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it so long ago. [00:02:51 - 00:03:05] Is that the victory of a cultural meme or is that just the yawning graves opening ahead of us? [00:03:05 - 00:03:23] My thing is to be amazed at the world as given by nature, but ever more as we approach this millennial speed bump in our calendrical highway, [00:03:23 - 00:03:35] to be amazed at people and about the direction that mass psychology seems to be taking. [00:03:35 - 00:03:46] Since I assume everybody here is a shaper of this mass psychology and the extremely powerful media-based jobs that you all occupy, [00:03:46 - 00:03:52] it might be worth talking about that a little bit tonight. [00:03:52 - 00:03:59] As I see it, well, I spend all afternoon at MoMA, as I always do when I come to town. [00:03:59 - 00:04:12] I know it's a thing, but I do it anyway, worshipping at the altar of modernism, so relieved now that it's almost over. [00:04:12 - 00:04:18] Because it's going to be bracketed in this century, the 20th century. [00:04:18 - 00:04:28] It's almost over. There's very little left to run, a few eyes to be dotted, a few code is to be played. [00:04:28 - 00:04:31] But essentially, it's a done deal. [00:04:31 - 00:04:52] And this end of the century psychology is a psychology of hysterical conclusionism and summation and to some degree a rhetoric of fear that we can never outdo ourselves. [00:04:52 - 00:05:04] And I think it probably felt the same way a hundred years ago. If you had been in Vienna in 1899, when Jugendstil was bursting at its seams, [00:05:04 - 00:05:13] and Freud was beginning to formulate his theories, and the Paris Air Show of 1905 was in the planning, [00:05:13 - 00:05:24] there has always been this sense of fatalistic and apocalyptic excitement at the end of the century, [00:05:24 - 00:05:30] and always throughout the culture at the edge of its technologies. [00:05:30 - 00:05:39] And to my mind, the most interesting technologies of the 20th century have all been communication technologies. [00:05:39 - 00:06:00] And I extend that to LSD, DVD, HDTV, GHB, 5-methoxy-DMT, all communication technologies for the purpose of transforming languages, [00:06:00 - 00:06:03] transforming understanding. [00:06:03 - 00:06:13] And now, it seems to me we've struck the main vein. I mean, maybe it's just that I live up on my mountain, and once a year in pursuit of money, [00:06:13 - 00:06:23] journey to cities not like this. There are no cities like this, but the lesser lights to gather the gold. [00:06:23 - 00:06:33] But I have this sense now of palpable acceleration, and it has many qualities. [00:06:33 - 00:06:44] But the quality that fascinates me most is one I hadn't predicted, which is it's getting funnier. [00:06:44 - 00:06:50] It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating. [00:06:50 - 00:06:59] And the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense. [00:06:59 - 00:07:08] So not making sense has become enshrined as a domain of cultural activity. [00:07:08 - 00:07:19] And God knows, I mind that. Somebody once said, actually it was the mushroom itself, it wasn't something like that. [00:07:19 - 00:07:28] But somebody who happened to be a mushroom once said, what did they say? [00:07:28 - 00:07:36] If you're not part of the problem, you're part of the solution. No. [00:07:36 - 00:07:47] What was said was that culture is like the shockwave of eschatology. Nothing is unannounced. [00:07:47 - 00:07:54] This is like a weird quality of experience. You can't learn this from physics or economics. [00:07:54 - 00:07:59] Maybe you can learn it from economics. But nothing is unannounced. [00:07:59 - 00:08:04] Everything is preceded by the shockwave of its coming. [00:08:04 - 00:08:23] And so somehow the spreading zaniness of reality is part of the boundary dissolving qualities that are going to make up this new cultural mix of disembodied human beings, [00:08:23 - 00:08:35] nanotechnologically maintained environments, dissolved self-definitions of people living at many levels at the same time, [00:08:35 - 00:08:47] intelligence as a kind of free-flowing, non-locatable resource that comes and goes as needed, prosthesis, implant, boundary dissolution. [00:08:47 - 00:09:06] These things are usually presented as fairly terrifying. But in fact, I think behind it all lurks the demons who do calisthenics in the angles of every room on this planet to keep it all from collapsing into a flat line. [00:09:06 - 00:09:27] In other words, the thing which lies at the end of any epistemic investigation of what reality is, is not religious awe, not that kind of astonishment, [00:09:27 - 00:09:42] but actually like pie-in-the-face hysteria, food fights and falling angles, explosions. This is what lies at the end of the epistemic enterprise. Why is that? [00:09:42 - 00:09:54] Well, I think it has something to do with the fact that we are simply loaded monkeys that our belief, you know, that we were perceiving as God's messengers [00:09:54 - 00:10:08] or his research assistants was somehow ill-betrothed, misbegotten. What we've shipped for is not a voyage of discovery, it's more like a ship of fools deal. [00:10:08 - 00:10:25] It's something which Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Bruegel the Elder could appreciate. It's probably best summed up in the work of Groucho Marx, but unfortunately he can't be here tonight. [00:10:25 - 00:10:42] So, I exist in this matrix, as you exist in this matrix, making our way through our lives, our affairs, our careers, our disasters, [00:10:42 - 00:10:55] and the thing that has struck me about it for some time, and don't bother telling me it's a symptom of serious mental meltdown, I know that, I've lived with it, [00:10:55 - 00:11:12] but the thing that struck me for some time is the artificiality of everything. How it's like plotted, how it's like constructed, artificial. It can't be that this is the first iteration. [00:11:12 - 00:11:28] This is not the first take. There have been many takes. The fingerprints of the editing suite are all over this scene. If you don't notice that, it must be because you take your life for granted. [00:11:28 - 00:11:36] If you take your life for granted and you think it makes perfect sense that you're doing whatever you do, this isn't an issue for you. [00:11:36 - 00:11:46] But for those of us who never thought that we would gaze on the things we've gazed upon, be the people we've become, see the things we've seen, [00:11:46 - 00:12:00] the whole thing has this extravagant, pincham-esque kind of efflorescence about it that rides right on the edge of insanity, dare we say. [00:12:00 - 00:12:19] And the interesting thing is I don't need drugs anymore. I need one to get away from this. This sense of everything opening into everything else. [00:12:19 - 00:12:42] You know that thing that W.H. Auden said about how the glacier rattles in the cupboard, a desert size in the bed, and the crack in the teacup opens, a door to the land of the dead. [00:12:42 - 00:12:50] Well, I first heard that maybe 30 or 40 years ago. I used to wander around in this number, but did you probably know? [00:12:50 - 00:12:58] And then I thought it was about acid, because that's what I thought everything was about at that time. [00:12:58 - 00:13:12] But now that I've replayed it to myself, I see that it's like an alchemical insight. It's the insight that everything gives way to everything else. [00:13:12 - 00:13:24] Everything is connected. We know this cliche imported from Malibu and Santa Fe, but it's connected in a way that isn't really, I think, sensed there. [00:13:24 - 00:13:40] Everything is connected in that it's emotionally accessible. This is what the eros part of this thing means to me, if I'm to make any stab at it at all. [00:13:40 - 00:13:58] When I was very young, I must have had a very non-traumatic upbringing, because I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true. [00:13:58 - 00:14:18] And it's that people are very easy to love. In fact, you can love anybody, if you are not constrained by expectation, class, the momentum of history, race, gender, the whole thing. [00:14:18 - 00:14:32] But for a child to make this discovery and recall it, stick with it, be able to mnemonically pull it up in such a situation like this, I think is extraordinary. [00:14:32 - 00:14:40] When I stand outside it, I don't draw any conclusion from it. It hasn't made me a nicer person. Don't try to buy me a drink. [00:14:40 - 00:14:54] Somebody said that if you love mankind, loathe individual human beings. I don't loathe individual human beings, but I do enjoy things the further I stand back from them. [00:14:54 - 00:15:17] This is the Hawaiian perspective, the motivation for being the hermit with the nightclub career. But I have not lost the thread. This is the thread. [00:15:17 - 00:15:25] And what it's about, it's an effort to generalize from one person's life to everybody's life. [00:15:25 - 00:15:37] Because the only thing I really bring to the party is a lot of experience and then some ability to articulate it. [00:15:37 - 00:15:58] It's not my story, it's not somebody else's story I tell, it's just the story. And this story is like the literary net of synchronistic connectivity that makes life something other than the laws of physics. [00:15:58 - 00:16:12] Particles flinging themselves through nothingness, waves dying out in empty space. This isn't our experience of being. Our experience of being is meaning. [00:16:12 - 00:16:29] That's my experience. Meaning is not always pleasant or life-affirming or even exactly rationally apprehendable. Sometimes meaning is a palpable thing. [00:16:29 - 00:16:44] And what liquid being poured through cracking ice, language moves ahead of its intent, it encloses its object and gives you almost a reverse casting of the thing intended. [00:16:44 - 00:17:05] There are many ways for words to hit themselves over the contours of intentionality. So, personality becomes an issue. Because in the future, personality, if it exists at all, is going to be a very fluid, dynamic thing. [00:17:05 - 00:17:22] One of our hang-ups is the idea that we come with one body, one mind, or one body and a mind split into two parts. All these are social fables, delusions. [00:17:22 - 00:17:40] The fabric of reality is defined by whatever large numbers of people believe about it. And now, in the absence of an overarching metaphor that can claim everybody's allegiance, reality is actually fracturing. [00:17:40 - 00:17:55] I call it the balkanization of epistemology. I quote one of the abductees and make jokes about pro bono proctologists from nearby star systems. [00:17:55 - 00:18:15] But for all of that, what this fracturing means is permission to manifest opinion as art. That's really all there is. There is no truth that is different from opinion. [00:18:15 - 00:18:27] There is no... nothing is secure. I mean, even mathematics, if you understand Kurt Gödel and people like this, even mathematics is an uncertain enterprise. [00:18:27 - 00:18:39] Even common arithmetic is an uncertain enterprise. So, what are we left with? [00:18:39 - 00:18:46] Well, I argued a couple of weeks ago with Sheldrake and Engerham about this. I said we have to look at our messengers. [00:18:46 - 00:19:03] We have to look at the people who bring the news of the pro bono proctologists from nearby star systems, who bring the news of military establishments trading human body parts for fiber optic technology. [00:19:03 - 00:19:21] We have to examine the messengers. Well, they quickly stomped on that and said, no, that won't work because if you go back into the history of ideas, lots of screwballs have attained great success with their ideas. [00:19:21 - 00:19:34] You don't want to look too hard at Newton or Wagner or Thomas Aquinas or anybody else. So, the squirrel test or the fluff test is insufficient. [00:19:34 - 00:19:43] Well, so then what are you left with? Well, basically a sense of humor and a battered sense of aesthetic, I think. [00:19:43 - 00:19:58] Now, I don't know how loose-headed the heads in this town are. I rather suspect they're screwed more tightly than the situation further west and screwed more loosely than the situation further east. [00:19:58 - 00:20:15] But I'm telling you, as the world reforms itself in these islands of defined opinion, the only thing which is going to make sense is sense which is conferred. [00:20:15 - 00:20:30] So, it becomes like about beauty, I think. Beauty. Beauty is an easier to realize value than political correctness, bodhisattva, compassion. [00:20:30 - 00:20:37] I mean, what are these things? Who knows? The ranker's debates start as soon as they're mentioned. [00:20:37 - 00:20:55] Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. And beauty is the stuff that lies under the skin of our individual existences. [00:20:55 - 00:21:10] You know, James Joyce said in "Pinning and Swing," he said, "We sprout on the sine side here in Moy-Kane," meaning in the red light district of Dublin. [00:21:10 - 00:21:26] But up in the Yen Prospector, you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings. Well, you don't have to go up in the Yen Prospector because right here, right now, is a good enough place to do this. [00:21:26 - 00:21:42] Relevant to the enterprise of the future. Oh yeah, I know that if you don't learn from history, you're bound to repeat its errors. But the most important thing to learn from history is not to do it at all. [00:21:42 - 00:22:04] You know, that it's a very bad idea, history. Look where it brought us. The only way we can essentially redeem what history has done to us is carry the understanding that it brought back into the enterprise of human, [00:22:04 - 00:22:27] of creating sane systems of education, resource extraction, of health care and community value. If we don't carry the experience of history back into those domains, history will continue. [00:22:27 - 00:22:38] I remember once when I was a fighting radical in the streets of Berkeley and someone had left a banner down over the front of a building. [00:22:38 - 00:22:50] It was a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre that said, "Socialism will not be transcended until we transcend the conditions which created it." True. [00:22:50 - 00:23:06] History even more true. And at the moment, the dialogue about the transformation of the species and the integration of communication technology, biotechnology, all of this stuff, [00:23:06 - 00:23:23] how it's going to work out is in the hands of short-sighted profiteering institutions that are not particularly interested in your welfare or my welfare. [00:23:23 - 00:23:37] In fact, I don't know if you've noticed that nobody is particularly interested in your welfare or my welfare in terms of the intellectual environment of risk through which you move every day. [00:23:37 - 00:23:53] I mean, the number of cons you're offered, the number of people who prey upon you, all of these things indicate that the culture has not yet realized the power of its own possibilities. [00:23:53 - 00:24:11] How will it realize the power of its own possibilities? I'm, at this point, pretty fatalistic through time. I mean, I don't feel I have to be here tonight or you have to listen tonight for us to come around any kind of corner. [00:24:11 - 00:24:23] The momentum now is inevitable. Now it's about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable. [00:24:23 - 00:24:38] It wasn't inevitable, but the 20th century made it inevitable through the Holocaust, modern medicine, psychedelic drugs, syncopated music, the dislocation of time and space through media. [00:24:38 - 00:24:54] All of that has now made this transformation inevitable. The human being adapted to the savannas of Africa 120,000 years ago is just dragged forward into the future by all of this. [00:24:54 - 00:25:08] And if you can get through life without trauma, heartbreak, agony, murderous rage, fury, betrayal, etc., etc., you're a better man or woman than I am, for sure. [00:25:08 - 00:25:36] I don't think anybody can get through the narrow net of, first of all, the incarnation in the body, but more trying, incarnation inside the historical society that is cannibalistic, low intentioned, and with values that are completely formed and modeled on the marketplace. [00:25:36 - 00:25:50] So I think about all of this all the time, and I feel great change. I try to monitor it, especially in the realm of society and technology. [00:25:50 - 00:26:16] Everything is redefined every 30 days, every 60 days, redefined toward some kind of singularity, some kind of extraordinary moment in the fractal pattern of historical unfoldment. [00:26:16 - 00:26:35] Fractals are always repetitious, always low levels build to higher levels, but nevertheless, somehow, intrinsically to the pattern, there comes a moment where there's an apotheosis, a breakthrough to a new level of understanding. [00:26:35 - 00:26:58] And then whatever the old world was, it simply dissipates, it goes away. Not that there isn't political struggle, but that once the, call it karmic underpinnings of a historical position, especially an oppressive historical position, [00:26:58 - 00:27:08] once those underpinnings are articulated, revealed, shown in the light of day, then the game cannot continue. [00:27:08 - 00:27:31] And I feel like we are, interestingly, in this calendrical moment, we can experience the calendar's transformation, or we can use it, as others are using it, to put forward the idea that certain things are now obsolete, [00:27:31 - 00:27:54] not, no longer to be practiced outside the confines of the 20th century, not part of the third millennium. And I'm thinking of fascism, sexism, racism, all the division-based consequences of old-style politics. [00:27:54 - 00:28:14] And people say, "Well, where then do psychedelic drugs fit into all of this?" Or, "Do they fit into it?" Of course they fit into it, because the felt presence of experience, the reclaiming of the body, that's the critical political battleground. [00:28:14 - 00:28:39] Your mind is now your own, in some sense. It was a mistake, it wasn't supposed to happen that way. But the acceleration of psychedelic use in the 20th century, the explosive spread of the internet, in some sense, it's as though we have broken from the slaves' quarters and are already milling in the streets. [00:28:39 - 00:28:52] But we don't yet have the power or the understanding to know where the centers of power are and how it is that they disempower and manipulate us. And that's because we haven't focused on the body. [00:28:52 - 00:29:09] The body, and this I suppose then is the thing which gives the Eros thing cogency. The body is the battleground for these various definitions of humans, you know. [00:29:09 - 00:29:30] And Eros, representing the erotic celebration of diversity, is a terrifying specter to hold up in front of the order of constipated hierarchists who actually have the illusion that they own the enterprise. [00:29:30 - 00:29:57] And nevertheless, this is what they're looking toward. This is what was made inevitable by their own rapaciousness in the past, that they painted us so quickly into a corner of resource extraction and disgust with the media manipulation, that a breakout was inevitable. [00:29:57 - 00:30:18] And that's why we have to come. You know, one of the things that has impressed me as I go through all of this is, well, my doctor brought it home to me because he was saying to me as I buttoned up recently after an examination, he said, [00:30:18 - 00:30:32] "You know, in the 19th century, most people your age were dead." This is true. I'm 52, you're soon to be 52. Very few people statistically reached that level. [00:30:32 - 00:30:52] And I think part of what's happening, and it's odd to address an audience so young on this matter, but here's something your parents may not be telling you, culture as a con is only good for about 35 years on average. [00:30:52 - 00:31:04] I mean, some people are impressed with culture until they go to the grave at 90. Some people are thoroughly apprised of the fact that it's horseshit by the time they're 19. [00:31:04 - 00:31:20] But the average person's experience with culture lasts about 35 or 40 years. In the past, that was enough. Most people then were ready to die without ever blowing their whistle on the game. [00:31:20 - 00:31:31] What is happening here is we are living past the age by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all. [00:31:31 - 00:31:57] They simply are, after the 10,000th piece of apple pie, the 16th Mercedes, the 500th, whatever, it's just seen to be intolerable, unbearable. The agony that resides in matter that the surrealists were so prescient in insisting upon. [00:31:57 - 00:32:11] So, culture generally is an infantilizing process. Some French people have mentioned this, but they didn't really put it in a historical context, [00:32:11 - 00:32:27] that this neotenizing trick, now so useful to advertising to create youth-crazed values in everybody, it hastens the end of this culture game. [00:32:27 - 00:32:44] It hastens the awakening of many people to the fact that the felt presence of immediate experience is not negotiable. It has no price. And yet, this is what's taken from you when you go to the job, [00:32:44 - 00:33:01] when you dress for the image, when you kiss up to the power establishment, when your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. [00:33:01 - 00:33:17] And let's be frank about it, it is enslavement, simply that the rules of the game have been changed. Of course, it's easy to say if you're unemployed like me, but on the other hand, [00:33:17 - 00:33:34] I'm meeting my obligations somehow, always have, without ever truly working, and without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course, I got to deal dope to do this. [00:33:34 - 00:33:54] Once I passed that, it worked. Well, I could go on in this vein for some time, as you see. But the thoughts that I wanted to leave you with tonight on this, because I feel like I am checking in with, in some weird way, [00:33:54 - 00:34:17] my peer group, and maybe my most critical group as well, which is fine. We don't need any gurus here. We don't need any laying down the law. Anybody who tells you they have a clue as to what's happening should be suspect for mental illness and delusions of grandeur. [00:34:17 - 00:34:39] But the thought is, and I haven't said this yet, but this is the conclusion from all of this, is culture is an effort to satisfy this weird desire human beings have to close off experience, to live with closure, to force closure. [00:34:39 - 00:34:53] And that's why cultural trips are so bizarre, you know, why they don't make sense to anybody but the, like, the Wittoto or the Waorani or the Americans or the Japanese. If you're not inside the culture, it seems crazy. [00:34:53 - 00:35:14] The cultures don't make sense because they're not trying to make sense. What they're trying to do is produce closure, which then somehow makes a human being who is living in the light of closure a more manipulatable, a more malleable, a lesser thing. [00:35:14 - 00:35:27] And so, you know, if the experience of the 20th century didn't do it for you, if psychedelics didn't do it for you, I don't know what could do it for you. [00:35:27 - 00:35:50] The message coming back at all of us is live without closure. That's the honest position given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some kind of a primate, some kind of creature on a planet, in an animal body, incarnate, in a time and space. [00:35:50 - 00:36:06] In the face of that, life without closure is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is. If you have to inoculate yourself against the various means of closure that are around, psychedelics do that. [00:36:06 - 00:36:25] That's why they are so politically controversial and potent, because more than any other single act that you may voluntarily undertake, they pull the plug on the myth of cultural meaning. [00:36:25 - 00:36:51] They show that these things are provisional and that beneath the level of culture there is lurking this erotic time and space bound, feeling defined, pre-linguistic mode of being, which is real being, not becoming, [00:36:51 - 00:37:03] not caught in the various fetishistic forms of tension that commodification of culture and belated gratification and all these other buzzwords create. [00:37:03 - 00:37:26] But a deeper level of authentic feeling that was there all the time but is denied by the culture, and if we don't come back to that, if we don't re-access that, then this historical thing which grinds so many people down, none of whom are here tonight, [00:37:26 - 00:37:38] they are lost in the barrios of third world cities and in the disrupted environments created by this system. But history will continue. [00:37:38 - 00:37:59] You know, I'm fond of quoting Stephen Dedalus where he says, Joyce's character, where he says, "History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake him." But it's really, nightmare is not a strong enough metaphor, it's a narcoleptic paralysis. [00:37:59 - 00:38:11] It's that horrible thing that happens at the edge of sleep, it's that place where the pro bono proctologists from other star systems get their wedge into the scene, you know. [00:38:11 - 00:38:33] And if you've never had that paralysis at the edge of sleep, you don't know the panic, the constriction that it engenders. We're really at a very terminal point in the process of our historical unfoldment. [00:38:33 - 00:38:48] In the same way that our hunter-gatherer phase led into agriculture and advanced role specialization and urbanization and all that, now we're ready to make another leap. [00:38:48 - 00:39:03] But this time it's going to be done in the light of consciousness, because consciousness is what was garnered in the last leap. And how this is done depends essentially on the collective state of mind. [00:39:03 - 00:39:22] How malleable it is, how aphobic of closure it is, how open to the logos, to the downloading of universal intent into human understanding, which is what I would call the logos, it is. [00:39:22 - 00:39:46] And finally, how deeply it operates in the light of logos. How much love is there in this culture, how much love has been carried intact from the plains of Africa through the Minoan civilization and the medieval period and the spread of people around the planet. [00:39:46 - 00:40:08] How much of what we call true humanness made the journey with us to this new time. We're going to find out. We're going to find out by cooling the love that is in each of us in a form in which it is coextensively shared by all of us. [00:40:08 - 00:40:26] There may be many ways to talk about what this will feel like, what it will look like, but what it will be if it works is love. If it isn't love, then it's less than a perfect sublimation of the alchemical purpose. [00:40:26 - 00:40:49] And less than perfect is now off the menu. So the only way up is out. Up and out. That's all I have to say. [00:40:49 - 00:41:09] Thanks for putting up with what critics will surely describe as another meandering diatribe. I know there are some people here from the novelty list. It would be nice to have a flesh meat downstairs and anybody else who wants to chat and then we'll get out of here and Olatunchi is going to do percussive. [00:41:09 - 00:41:14] And if that ain't the felt presence of immediate experience, I don't know. [00:41:14 - 00:41:19] [Applause]