[00:00:00 - 00:00:06] [ [00:00:06 - 00:00:16] All right. Wonderful to see so many people turned out. After having just been here a scant year ago, [00:00:16 - 00:00:24] I'm delighted that they invited me back. The deal is no jokes about Camaro raffles, [00:00:24 - 00:00:32] no jokes about Moldovite suppositories. So just consider it as if it didn't happen. [00:00:32 - 00:00:43] No, it is a pleasure to be here. I'm fascinated by this green and intelligent part of Texas. [00:00:43 - 00:00:50] I grew up with all the prejudices against Texas that you have in western Colorado, [00:00:50 - 00:00:59] where Texans arrive to kill our elk once a year and then depart and leave us once again [00:00:59 - 00:01:08] bereft of glory and drawl. So I did a radio show. Some of you may have heard it, [00:01:08 - 00:01:17] and it was an occasion to be up at the campus. Wonderful university. I see a lot of universities, [00:01:17 - 00:01:23] and a lot of them look like Air Force bases. And you're very fortunate to have the University of [00:01:23 - 00:01:32] Texas at Austin. There are some great people associated with that faculty. Okay, let me get a [00:01:32 - 00:01:44] wet whistle here. How many people have read at least one of my books? A lot of people. [00:01:44 - 00:01:50] Well, so what I'm thinking is I have some things on my mind, and I'll run through that, [00:01:50 - 00:01:58] but I'd like to leave a lot of time for Q&A because my thing has several facets. [00:01:58 - 00:02:06] And maybe you're interested in Salvia divinorum, and I'm raving on about modeling and animation, [00:02:06 - 00:02:13] or maybe you're interested in the end of history, and I can't shut up about serotonin metabolism. [00:02:14 - 00:02:21] So this is all part of the picture, but driven by your needs and your agenda, [00:02:21 - 00:02:29] I think it's much more fruitful. It's much more fun for me. The audiences in these things are [00:02:29 - 00:02:39] the great joy. And I should say to you, as I say to all my audiences, the psychedelic community is [00:02:39 - 00:02:48] still small and tight, and we look pretty much like everybody else out there. That's part of [00:02:48 - 00:02:54] our victory, I might point out. It's not that we came to look like them, it's that they finally [00:02:54 - 00:03:03] let it down, and now they all look like us. But a gathering like this is an occasion to actually see [00:03:03 - 00:03:12] your local psychedelic community. So take a look around. Somebody in this room has what you need. [00:03:12 - 00:03:25] And it's like an intelligence test, isn't it? All social interaction is, it turns out. [00:03:26 - 00:03:34] Okay, I guess I should bring you up to date on what I've been doing before I plunge into the heart of [00:03:34 - 00:03:43] this, since I get my own life is my own adventure, and how I then read the larger picture of reality. [00:03:43 - 00:03:49] I think everybody sees their life that way. After all, if you're not the hero in your novel, [00:03:50 - 00:03:57] what kind of novel is it? You need to do some heavy editing. Robert Anton Wilson once said, [00:03:57 - 00:04:07] he said, we should define reality as a plot run by a closely knit group of powerful insiders, [00:04:07 - 00:04:12] yourself and your friends, of course. I mean, if you don't believe that, you have a loser's [00:04:12 - 00:04:20] scenario, and who needs a loser's scenario? So what I've been doing since I saw you last [00:04:20 - 00:04:30] is basically a lot of traveling. I went to South Africa last October, and that was an education. [00:04:30 - 00:04:40] It was a nonstop, two week intensive education in humanness, third world colonial politics, [00:04:40 - 00:04:49] Dutch Africana history, a whole bunch of things I knew very little about. It was inspiring, [00:04:49 - 00:04:59] challenging, amazing. Africa, the human home, is right now the great theater of struggle for the [00:04:59 - 00:05:06] human soul. How we deal with the political and social problems of Africa is going to say a great [00:05:06 - 00:05:14] deal about how we will be judged by the future. The problems of Africa are almost entirely created [00:05:14 - 00:05:25] from outside of Africa, and the solutions which are being produced on native soil need all the [00:05:25 - 00:05:34] nurturing and support that we who cheer on the brotherhood of man can give it. And then in [00:05:34 - 00:05:42] February I went to Australia, and if I had known about Australia what I know now 30 years ago, [00:05:42 - 00:05:46] I'm sure my life would be very different. I said last night at a book signing, [00:05:46 - 00:05:56] it's weirdly like Texas. I mean, it's large, it's largely empty, and it has a very eccentric [00:05:56 - 00:06:07] population of hard driving folks who are lovely to party with and know how to barbecue. So what [00:06:07 - 00:06:15] more can I say? Okay, so enough with personal reportage, local color, putting us all at ease, [00:06:15 - 00:06:29] and all the rest of that forensic malarkey. Cut to the chase. When I think about talking to [00:06:29 - 00:06:37] an audience like this, I go through my toolkit and try to say, you know, what is cogent, [00:06:37 - 00:06:44] what's meaningful, what can bring us forward. And there seem to be, it's a changing list, [00:06:44 - 00:06:52] but at the moment what seems to be going is the old perennial psychedelic alteration of [00:06:52 - 00:07:00] consciousness for purposes of personal exploration, social reformation, creation of a new art, [00:07:00 - 00:07:11] a new politic. That's one of the major pieces of the puzzle. Another major piece is the new [00:07:11 - 00:07:20] communications technologies. And I mean not only the internet, but the software that allows us, [00:07:20 - 00:07:29] each and every one of us, to be animators, filmmakers, visually expressive people who can [00:07:29 - 00:07:38] produce emotionally moving works of great depth and beauty. This is something that technology [00:07:38 - 00:07:47] has brought to us. And strangely enough, a technology largely produced by psychedelic heads, [00:07:47 - 00:07:54] people like ourselves. I told you last year, I think when we discussed drugs and technology, [00:07:54 - 00:07:59] that the only difference between a computer and a psychedelic was one was too large to swallow. [00:07:59 - 00:08:08] Well, you know, great progress has been made in 12 months. In another three or four years, [00:08:08 - 00:08:14] we will be able to swallow the computer. Some of us may never be able to swallow it. [00:08:14 - 00:08:21] The third piece of the puzzle, which is sort of mine alone to play with since no one else wants [00:08:21 - 00:08:31] to be this publicly crazy, is the whole business of novelty theory, the approach of a singularity [00:08:31 - 00:08:41] in time that is sculpting the human and natural world, and that is so large an object in the [00:08:41 - 00:08:50] intuitive sphere of human beings that it almost has religious overtones. And then the question [00:08:50 - 00:08:57] for me and the question for you, I suppose, is how much of this can you take without having to take [00:08:57 - 00:09:06] it all? How much of these ideas can you imbibe without having to go the whole distance? And the [00:09:06 - 00:09:14] answer is, you know, it's a personal matter for each person to feel into their circumstance, [00:09:14 - 00:09:21] which means their history, both psychedelic and non-psychedelic, and then to feel into the [00:09:21 - 00:09:29] projection of their future. Do you think you are repeating the lifestyles and algorithms of your [00:09:29 - 00:09:37] parents and grandparents ad infinitum back to Adam? Or do you feel like you've stepped to the [00:09:37 - 00:09:46] front of the train of human evolution, that you are making yourself new every day? If we reach too [00:09:46 - 00:09:57] far back into the stabilizing metaphors of the past, we get rigidity, habit, limitation. If we [00:09:57 - 00:10:08] step too quickly into the unlimited freedom of the future, we lose our grounding. Socialism did this [00:10:08 - 00:10:13] over the past hundred years, and because it abandoned any contact with a realistic human [00:10:13 - 00:10:22] psychology, the best intended people ended up creating nightmare societies. If your theory is [00:10:22 - 00:10:32] not true to the nature of humanness, you will end up beating human beings like metal on the anvil of [00:10:32 - 00:10:44] your ideology, and this creates great human suffering and historical catastrophe. And I [00:10:44 - 00:10:55] maintain that our own society suffers from a failure to adequately model and reflect the true [00:10:55 - 00:11:06] nature of human beings. We have ideas. We have ideals that get in the way of realism and immediate [00:11:06 - 00:11:14] experience. And when I was thinking about all of this and how to put it into a metaphor that would [00:11:14 - 00:11:23] be appealing and amusing and lead people to look deeper into these things, I began to play with [00:11:23 - 00:11:32] the idea of, it's a religious idea. You all have heard, although probably more often in English [00:11:32 - 00:11:40] than in Latin, the thought "in principio ad verba med verbo caro factum est," which means [00:11:40 - 00:11:50] "in the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh." This is the great overarching myth [00:11:50 - 00:12:00] of Western religion. It equally informs Islam, Christianity, Judaism. These three great flavors [00:12:00 - 00:12:10] of monotheism all accept this primary statement, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was [00:12:10 - 00:12:19] made flesh." What does it mean for a moment, taken away from the tired exegesis of the cults that [00:12:19 - 00:12:28] have hammered at it for so long? What does it mean in and of itself? It means that language [00:12:28 - 00:12:37] is somehow the privileged medium of exchange between human beings and the divine. [00:12:37 - 00:12:49] That the descent of the word into flesh makes the flesh more than flesh, makes the word more than [00:12:49 - 00:12:59] the word. The union of flesh and word launches the cosmic drama of fall and redemption that is the [00:12:59 - 00:13:07] Ur myth of Western society. And for centuries and centuries we've concentrated on one end of this [00:13:07 - 00:13:17] story of the fall and the redemption. We have concentrated on the fall. But meanwhile, through [00:13:17 - 00:13:28] through all the grimy betrayals and bloody backsliding of human history, the word has quietly [00:13:28 - 00:13:36] advanced its agenda. And I've been thinking a lot about this recently because in the new book I'm [00:13:36 - 00:13:45] writing, I'm writing a lot about spoken language, speech. And I've come to a conclusion that, [00:13:46 - 00:13:54] typical of me, is far from orthodoxy and far from much cover provided by anybody else's ideas on [00:13:54 - 00:14:04] this matter. I've come to the conclusion that language is very old, thinking is very old, [00:14:04 - 00:14:12] communicating is very old by glance, by gesture, by dance, by meme, by intuition. But speech [00:14:13 - 00:14:25] is very recent. It's a technological innovation as fresh as the Pentium chip or the spinning wheel. [00:14:25 - 00:14:34] It's something someone invented somewhere. It's the most successful technological leap forward [00:14:34 - 00:14:43] ever made. It's the discovery of symbolic signification that a noise, meaning nothing, can [00:14:43 - 00:14:52] by convention be given a meaning. And that that meaning will then attend that utterance wherever [00:14:52 - 00:14:59] it occurs in the presence of those who have joined in the agreement that attaches the symbol [00:14:59 - 00:15:07] to the meaningless utterance. It's a coding breakthrough. Somebody hacked this about 35,000 [00:15:07 - 00:15:16] years ago and immediately, as forms of media have a way of doing, it swamped the previous [00:15:16 - 00:15:26] methods of communication because, A, it worked in the dark. Suddenly, evenings were not so boring [00:15:26 - 00:15:33] anymore. It worked in the dark. It also, the touchy-feely forms of communication were generally [00:15:33 - 00:15:41] one-on-one and related probably to having sex or aggressive physical encounters. But suddenly, [00:15:41 - 00:15:55] one voice could reach many and many could respond. And virtual reality was born at that moment, [00:15:56 - 00:16:02] not here in the late 20th century, but at that moment because acoustical [00:16:02 - 00:16:11] environments laden with symbolic meaning became the name of the game. Stories is what we call [00:16:11 - 00:16:20] these things, and they are the proper use of the advanced form of media known as human speech. [00:16:20 - 00:16:27] It's using human speech to create three-dimensional scenarios that unfold and everyone is carried [00:16:27 - 00:16:38] along with the drama and the wonder of it. From that beginning, and in a series of successively [00:16:38 - 00:16:49] accelerating leaps, the word has made its way into the world. It's interesting that straight [00:16:50 - 00:16:57] linguists and paleolinguists believe human language is no more than 35,000 years old. [00:16:57 - 00:17:06] Imagine that. We possess homo sapiens sapiens skeletons 110,000 years old. People like the [00:17:06 - 00:17:14] person who rode with you on the bus yesterday, people that modern, and yet the experts tell us [00:17:14 - 00:17:24] no one spoke until 35,000 years ago. No one wrote until five or six thousand years ago. [00:17:24 - 00:17:31] Reading and writing is simply a carrying forward of the original program of [00:17:31 - 00:17:40] signification, first using acoustical signals, and then some other hacker had the brilliant idea, [00:17:40 - 00:17:49] well if we can use sound to carry abstract associations, why not abstract symbols to carry [00:17:49 - 00:17:57] abstract associations? And writing was born, and what writing allows is expansion of the database [00:17:57 - 00:18:05] because things are not dependent on the wetware of human memory to survive from generation to [00:18:05 - 00:18:14] generation. Suddenly the mush of brain is replaced by the durability of wood and stone and clay, [00:18:14 - 00:18:21] and these things then become the medium upon which the primary database of the culture is being [00:18:21 - 00:18:28] carried forward. Well, the rest of the story you know, and this is not a lecture in the history of [00:18:28 - 00:18:35] communication, each succeeding refinement in communication has brought the word deeper into [00:18:35 - 00:18:46] its association with the flesh until the present, and at this moment there is a kind of a what [00:18:46 - 00:18:58] dynamicists call a cusp, a turning of the system upon its axis, and the word is now beginning to [00:18:58 - 00:19:07] make the return journey to the mysterious and hidden source from which it descended. In other [00:19:07 - 00:19:16] words, spirit is now beginning to disentangle itself from matter. The 20th century will be [00:19:16 - 00:19:25] remembered as the great clash point or the great arena of conflict between the triumphal, positivist, [00:19:25 - 00:19:33] and rational systems that European thought has developed over the past 300 years, and the new [00:19:33 - 00:19:44] irrational systems of thought which anthropology cheerfully imported into white high culture in the [00:19:44 - 00:19:54] guise of reportage about the primitive. But this reportage about the primitive turns out to be [00:19:54 - 00:20:04] a kind of oraboric conundrum, the snake taking its tail in its mouth. In the past hundred years, [00:20:04 - 00:20:11] as these super technologies have been developed in the West, the smashing of atoms, the invention of [00:20:11 - 00:20:20] radio, television, computers, immunology, so forth and so on, data has been arriving about the [00:20:20 - 00:20:28] practices of aboriginal cultures all over the planet, that they dissolve ordinary realities, [00:20:28 - 00:20:35] ordinary cultural values through an interaction, a symbiosis, a relationship to local plants [00:20:36 - 00:20:44] that perturb brain chemistry. And in this domain of perturbed brain chemistry, the cultural operating [00:20:44 - 00:20:55] system is wiped clean. And something older, even for these people, something older, more vitalistic, [00:20:55 - 00:21:03] more in touch with the animal soul, replaces it, replaces the cultural operating system. Something [00:21:03 - 00:21:11] not determined by history and geography, but something writ in the language of the flesh itself. [00:21:11 - 00:21:19] This is who you are. This is true nakedness. You are not naked when you take off your clothes. [00:21:19 - 00:21:25] You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, [00:21:25 - 00:21:33] your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand [00:21:33 - 00:21:40] naked before the inspection of your own psyche. Desmond Morris called it the naked ape. And it's [00:21:40 - 00:21:49] from that position, a position outside the cultural operating system, that we can begin to ask real [00:21:49 - 00:21:57] questions about what does it mean to be human? What kind of circumstance are we caught in? And what [00:21:57 - 00:22:07] kind of structures, if any, can we put in place to assuage the pain and accentuate the glory and the [00:22:07 - 00:22:16] wonder that lurks waiting for us in this very narrow slice of time between the birth canal and [00:22:16 - 00:22:25] the yawning grave? In other words, we have to return to first premises. So I've been thinking [00:22:25 - 00:22:33] about this a lot, and at first it seemed to me only a metaphor, this phrase, culture is your [00:22:33 - 00:22:42] operating system. But because I travel around a lot and get that jolting experience frequently [00:22:42 - 00:22:50] of, let's say, leaving London on a foggy evening and arriving in Johannesburg 14 hours later to a [00:22:50 - 00:22:57] sweltering day in a city of 14 million on the brink of anarchy, I get to change my operating [00:22:57 - 00:23:07] system frequently. And so I notice the relativity of these systems. And some work for some things [00:23:07 - 00:23:14] and some for others. For instance, if you are a positivist, if you're running positivism 4.0, [00:23:14 - 00:23:24] you can't support UFOs. Positivism 4.0 does not support UFOs. If on the other hand, you're running [00:23:24 - 00:23:32] your runcha book 5.1 as your operating system, UFOs and a number of other things can get in [00:23:32 - 00:23:40] through the door. That is what we would technically say is a more tolerant operating system, or it's [00:23:40 - 00:23:48] plug-in support special effects denied the positivist. Well, it's fun to think this way [00:23:48 - 00:23:55] because it shows you that you don't have to be the victim of your culture. It's not like your eye [00:23:55 - 00:24:05] color or your height or your gender. It's fragile. It can be remade if you wish it to be. And then [00:24:05 - 00:24:14] the question is, well, how does one download a new operating system? Well, first of all, [00:24:14 - 00:24:22] you have to clear some space on your disk. The best way to do this is probably with a pharmacological [00:24:22 - 00:24:39] agent. You think of some while I have a drink of water. Silicibin is an excellent disk cleaner. [00:24:39 - 00:24:48] You can put a lot of things in the trash and have them just disappear with a silicibin upgrade. [00:24:50 - 00:24:58] Other pharmacological agents that will clear your disk are ayahuasca. And of course, [00:24:58 - 00:25:05] these are gentle clearings of the disk, which take five, six, seven hours. If you're in a hurry to [00:25:05 - 00:25:14] dump that old data and leap right into the new operating system, click on the button marked [00:25:14 - 00:25:24] dimethyltryptamine. A compressed disk eraser will immediately be downloaded, unstuffed, [00:25:24 - 00:25:32] bin hexed, implemented, installed, run, and you will find yourself with an entirely different head. [00:25:32 - 00:25:44] Now, shamans have always known, though they may not have used the kind of language I [00:25:44 - 00:25:51] am using here, shamans have always known this trick. What trick? It has two facets. First of all, [00:25:51 - 00:25:59] that culture is an operating system. That's all it is. And that the operating system can be wiped [00:25:59 - 00:26:06] out and replaced by something else. So, essentially, what's going on among shamans and [00:26:06 - 00:26:15] those who resort to them for curing and counseling and so forth is somebody's running a slightly more [00:26:15 - 00:26:23] advanced operating system than the customer. The shaman is in possession of certain facts [00:26:23 - 00:26:29] about plants, about animals, about healing, about human psychology, about the local geography, [00:26:29 - 00:26:36] about mojo of many different sorts that the client is not aware of. The client is running [00:26:36 - 00:26:47] culture lite. The shaman paid for the registered and licensed version of the software and is [00:26:47 - 00:26:54] running a much heavier version of the software than the client. I think we should all aspire [00:26:54 - 00:27:02] to make this upgrade. It's very important that you have all the bells and whistles on your [00:27:02 - 00:27:08] operating system. Otherwise, somebody is going to be able to get a leg up on you. [00:27:08 - 00:27:20] Well, what's wrong with the operating system that we have? Consumer capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is. [00:27:20 - 00:27:32] Well, it's dumb. It's retro. It's very non-competitive. It's messy. It wastes the [00:27:32 - 00:27:40] environment. It wastes human resources. It's inefficient. It runs on stereotypes. It runs [00:27:40 - 00:27:47] on a low sampling rate, which is what creates stereotypes. Low sample rates make everybody [00:27:47 - 00:27:56] appear alike when in fact the glory is in everyone's differences. And the current operating system [00:27:57 - 00:28:08] is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. Contradictions such as we're cutting [00:28:08 - 00:28:16] the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not [00:28:16 - 00:28:22] intelligent behavior. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it [00:28:22 - 00:28:31] produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behavior. Time to call a tech. And who are the techs? [00:28:31 - 00:28:44] The shamans are the techs. Well, so I think you get the idea. Very important to upgrade your [00:28:44 - 00:28:52] operating system by dumping obsolete cultural subroutines. They are simply taking up disk space [00:28:52 - 00:29:03] they are not advancing you in any way whatsoever. Now, a very large group of people who followed [00:29:03 - 00:29:14] this advice and rebuilt their operating systems in the 1960s went on then to build this most amazing [00:29:14 - 00:29:23] of all cultural artifacts, the internet. The internet is light at the end of the tunnel. I don't [00:29:23 - 00:29:29] care if it's being used to peddle pornography. I don't care if it's being trivialized in a thousand [00:29:29 - 00:29:39] ways. Anything can be trivialized. The important point is that it is leveling the playing field [00:29:39 - 00:29:48] of global society. It is creating de facto an entirely new set of political realities. [00:29:48 - 00:29:56] None of the constipated oligarchic structures that are resisting this were ever asked. Their [00:29:56 - 00:30:04] greed betrayed them into investing in this in the first place without ever fully grasping what the [00:30:04 - 00:30:12] implications of it were for their larger agenda. The internet basically means you can now be as [00:30:12 - 00:30:22] free as you are motivated to be. As free as you dare to be. Tim Leary years ago, it was something [00:30:22 - 00:30:29] he used to say that never got quoted as much as turn on, tune in, drop out. But it seemed to me [00:30:29 - 00:30:41] it was maybe better advice. And he used to say, find the others. Find the others. Well, you know, [00:30:41 - 00:30:48] if you're a gay kid in Fargo, North Dakota, if you're a masculine enthusiast in Winnipeg, [00:30:48 - 00:30:56] if you're a student of alchemy and moose jaw, community is pretty much out of reach for you. [00:30:56 - 00:31:03] Or it was until the coming of the internet. And the internet introduces everybody, no matter how [00:31:03 - 00:31:10] weird, no matter how marginalized, no matter how peculiar to the fact that there are others like [00:31:10 - 00:31:24] you. There are others like you. Find the others. Make common cause. Realize that it's the deals you [00:31:24 - 00:31:31] cut and the friends you make that determine where you're going to be standing when the flash hits. [00:31:31 - 00:31:42] I mean, that's just obvious. And by, you see, the cultural game is a game of uniformitarianism. [00:31:42 - 00:31:52] Cultural myths are that we are all alike. We Americans, each created equal. I mean, [00:31:52 - 00:31:59] if you can believe that at an operational level, then I have some bridges I would like to sell you. [00:31:59 - 00:32:11] It's a necessary truth to do political business, but it is not the truth. The truth is that you [00:32:11 - 00:32:19] are not created equal with yourself from day to day. Leave alone any comparison with anybody else. [00:32:19 - 00:32:26] You are not the person you were yesterday, nor the person you will be next week. What is an [00:32:26 - 00:32:32] observation like that? What shadow does it cast in a world of all people are created equal? [00:32:32 - 00:32:41] These are clashes of operating systems. There's an axiom in one, all created equal, and an axiom in [00:32:41 - 00:32:50] the other, each divergent. These things can't be parsed. They can't be brought together. So, culture [00:32:50 - 00:32:58] plays a game of simplification. If you can make people think alike, they will buy alike. They will [00:32:58 - 00:33:08] worship alike. And if, you know, politics demands it, they will kill alike. So, the uniformitarian [00:33:08 - 00:33:18] agenda of culture is not an agenda friendly to you, or to me, or to any other individual. [00:33:18 - 00:33:26] And if you start out from that point of view, you will soon realize that culture is not your friend. [00:33:26 - 00:33:35] Now, this is not exactly PC to say what with everybody running around recovering their Latvian [00:33:35 - 00:33:44] roots and their Irishness and their this, their whatever. Culture is not your friend. If you define [00:33:44 - 00:33:55] yourself as a member of a group, of any group, know that that is a gross simplification, and that [00:33:55 - 00:34:03] everything about you that is interesting and unique is betrayed by defining yourself in that way. [00:34:04 - 00:34:14] You know, most racism is practiced by people of the race that they are making racial judgments [00:34:14 - 00:34:20] about. White people have far more racial opinions about white people than any other racial group, [00:34:20 - 00:34:27] because that's where they spend their time. These gross simplifications betray humanity, [00:34:27 - 00:34:37] betray uniqueness, make sane politics impossible. What we have to do is get back to the reality [00:34:37 - 00:34:48] of the flesh, the reality of the individual identity. This is how we come packaged. A race, [00:34:48 - 00:34:54] that's an abstraction. These days you have to have three years of genetics under your belt to give a [00:34:54 - 00:34:59] satisfactory definition of the word if we're really going to go to the math on it. I mean, [00:34:59 - 00:35:06] it's an abstraction of modern science. It's a notion so far removed from anything you and I [00:35:06 - 00:35:12] come in contact with that we should just junk it. What we need to celebrate is the individual. [00:35:12 - 00:35:22] Have you not noticed, I certainly have, that every historical change you can think of, [00:35:22 - 00:35:28] in fact any change you can think of, forget about human beings, any change in any system [00:35:28 - 00:35:37] that you can think of is always ultimately traceable to one unit in the system undergoing [00:35:37 - 00:35:46] a phase state change of some sort. No group, there are no group decisions. Those things come later. [00:35:46 - 00:35:57] The genius of creativity and of initiation of activity always lies with the individual. [00:35:57 - 00:36:04] It's very interesting that this is what the psychedelics address. They address us uniquely [00:36:04 - 00:36:10] as individuals. You can sit next to somebody who drank from the same bottle you did and be [00:36:10 - 00:36:18] perfectly confident that their experience has very little congruency with your own. [00:36:18 - 00:36:32] Well, so then if we let the scales of cultural values fall from our eyes and try not to look [00:36:32 - 00:36:41] at the world through the eyes of science or democracy or capitalism or Christianity, [00:36:41 - 00:36:50] what is there beyond ideology? What are the facts of the matter? [00:36:50 - 00:36:56] As I see it, the most visible facts [00:36:59 - 00:37:08] on the surface of things, on the surface of being, I see the law of increasing complexity. [00:37:08 - 00:37:17] Things have gotten more complicated through time. I have never met anyone who could successfully [00:37:17 - 00:37:23] argue against this. That doesn't mean it's true, but it means that it may be, as Wittgenstein used [00:37:23 - 00:37:32] to say, true enough, true enough, that as you approach the present moment in the only area of [00:37:32 - 00:37:38] the universe which we have accurate data about, which is this planet, things have become more [00:37:38 - 00:37:45] complicated. A million years ago, there were no human civilizations. A thousand years ago, [00:37:45 - 00:37:52] there were no machines to speak of. A hundred years ago, there was no communication infrastructure [00:37:52 - 00:37:58] to speak of. Ten years ago, there was no internet. Eighteen months ago, there was no Java. [00:37:58 - 00:38:07] Things are complexifying, intensifying, moving together. This is the universal drama [00:38:07 - 00:38:17] that is reaching culmination in our lifetimes because, and I offer this, don't believe me, [00:38:17 - 00:38:22] for God's sake, don't believe anybody. Just take this stuff in and then measure it against your [00:38:22 - 00:38:30] own experience. The second extra-cultural fact that I've been able to discern, the first being [00:38:30 - 00:38:36] things get more complicated as you approach the present, and the second being that process of [00:38:36 - 00:38:44] complexification is occurring faster and faster. The early universe was very slow moving. It took [00:38:44 - 00:38:53] a long time for things to cool down and life to begin its agonizing march out of the slime into [00:38:53 - 00:39:00] animal form, meeting extinction and catastrophe and setback after setback, but always picking [00:39:00 - 00:39:07] itself up literally out of the mud and moving forward. Well, as life left the ocean, the pace [00:39:07 - 00:39:16] of evolution quickened. As life radiated across the land, the number of phyla multiplied, the number [00:39:16 - 00:39:23] of species multiplied. Finally, a million years ago, pick a number, a million and a half years ago, [00:39:23 - 00:39:31] the higher primates begin to use tools. Fire enters the picture. And just as an aside, [00:39:31 - 00:39:39] isn't it interesting how long people used tools and fire before spoken language enters the picture? [00:39:39 - 00:39:47] I mean, we possess tools a million years old, human tools. Language, 35,000 years old. When I [00:39:47 - 00:39:53] was in South Africa last year, I was in this place that reminded me of like the Four Corners area [00:39:53 - 00:39:59] around Moab, Utah. It was like nothing like I had expected South Africa to be. And when I wasn't [00:39:59 - 00:40:08] teaching, I would wander the dry arroyos and hunt for human tools. And there was an archaeologist [00:40:08 - 00:40:14] staying in the bar or in the hotel there and we would drink in the evening in the bar. And I would [00:40:14 - 00:40:22] lay my days find out on the bar and he would sort it into piles. He'd say nothing in this pile [00:40:22 - 00:40:31] is less than 165,000 years old. Everything in this pile is from human tools we're talking about. [00:40:31 - 00:40:38] Now I've lost my thread because I was so thrilled with my sidebar. I think I can get it back. Oh, [00:40:38 - 00:40:48] yeah, here it is. Here it is. And they say potheads can't think. Here it is. The second obvious fact [00:40:48 - 00:40:55] which haunts the post cultural viewpoint is this acceleration of change. And I've sort of built my [00:40:55 - 00:41:02] career on this because I'm a rationalist, but I feel the emotional power of this thing. We are [00:41:02 - 00:41:10] caught in a basin of attraction, to use a mathematical term. In other words, we are under [00:41:10 - 00:41:16] the influence of something which is pulling us into the future or into novelty, if you want to [00:41:16 - 00:41:24] put it that way, at a faster and faster rate. So problems which are presented in the following [00:41:24 - 00:41:31] terms, if we don't do something in 500 years, we will run out of this, that or the other, or if we [00:41:31 - 00:41:38] don't do something in a thousand years, this or that will happen. These are meaningless statistics [00:41:38 - 00:41:47] because the acceleration into novelty is rewriting the rules now every 18 months. [00:41:47 - 00:41:58] We are descending now into a well of novelty such that more change is now occurring in a single [00:41:58 - 00:42:06] human lifetime than occurred in the previous 10,000 years of human history. We are approaching at a [00:42:06 - 00:42:14] faster and faster rate something unthinkable, something which is sculpting us in its image, [00:42:14 - 00:42:21] something which shamans have always known was there, though they may not have used the metaphor [00:42:21 - 00:42:28] of ahead of us in time. That's a Western download of where it is because you could just as well say [00:42:28 - 00:42:35] it's in heaven or behind us in time or everywhere or nowhere. The point is we're about to arrive in [00:42:35 - 00:42:46] its presence and it is shaping us to prepare us for the arrival. It is making us more and more in [00:42:46 - 00:42:54] its image. This is not a new process. This began a long, long time ago, but it's now reaching its [00:42:54 - 00:43:01] culmination. And I said a few minutes ago the internet is light at the end of the tunnel. The [00:43:01 - 00:43:09] internet is the beginning of a nervous system that is knitting not only all human beings, but all life [00:43:09 - 00:43:18] together, all information together. Because you know there already is an internet. It's called [00:43:18 - 00:43:27] the integrated ecosystem of planet three. It runs on pheromones. It runs on weather systems, [00:43:27 - 00:43:35] ocean tides, to lurid currents moving in the earth, thousands of methods. [00:43:35 - 00:43:43] If it that way because our cultural tradition is one of reductionism, tear things apart, [00:43:43 - 00:43:48] break them into their subordinate units, break those into still smaller units. Well, when you [00:43:48 - 00:43:56] have a theory of reality like that, what you end up with is all the pieces spread out and no car [00:43:56 - 00:44:06] and nowhere to go. But nature has always operated as an integrated system of communication. And the [00:44:06 - 00:44:16] internet is in a sense nothing more than a human aping of a natural system already in place. If we [00:44:16 - 00:44:22] could do it through pheromones, light, mycelium, and electromagnetic pulses through the earth, [00:44:22 - 00:44:30] we wouldn't be stringing copper and cable and fiber optic. Those things are simply historical [00:44:30 - 00:44:38] artifacts of the moment. What lies ahead on the internet, what lies ahead I think for us, and this [00:44:38 - 00:44:47] is the last point I really want to make. And then we can talk about all this is, you know, I have been [00:44:47 - 00:44:56] a true resistor of the alien penetration of human civilization because I just saw no evidence for it. [00:44:56 - 00:45:06] But the chant that they are coming has now grown so loud that I feel like one sort of has to ask [00:45:06 - 00:45:14] oneself, well, short of just 100% skepticism, what the hell is going on with this alien hype? [00:45:15 - 00:45:22] And I think that the problem is one of modeling and intelligence. There is an alien. [00:45:22 - 00:45:30] We are in the cultural process of meeting this alien. But they do not come in thousand ton [00:45:30 - 00:45:37] beryllium ships from Zinebel Ghanubi to trade high technology for human fetal tissue. I mean, [00:45:37 - 00:45:47] that, if you, but that's an intelligence test, folks. That's not how it works. Our own hysteria [00:45:47 - 00:45:54] makes it very difficult for us to deal with the presence of the alien, and the alien knows that. [00:45:54 - 00:46:00] That's why it has disguised itself as a psychedelic experience, I think. [00:46:03 - 00:46:10] Where, you know how in all those 50s B science fiction movies, there was always this theme of [00:46:10 - 00:46:18] the landing area, and I saw it in Mars Attacks too. There must be a landing zone. Somehow we [00:46:18 - 00:46:26] must let them know that we welcome them by building a landing area. And the Nazca plane has been [00:46:26 - 00:46:35] claimed and on and on and on. I think that the alien is a creature of pure information. It's [00:46:35 - 00:46:42] purely information. It's non-local. It comes out of the Bell non-locality part of the universe that [00:46:42 - 00:46:53] exists, distributed through hyperspace. The alien is real, but it is only made of information. And [00:46:53 - 00:47:02] therefore, the only dimension in which it can be encountered is a dimension of pure information. [00:47:02 - 00:47:11] Fortunately, we are building a dimension of pure information. Providentially, we have named it [00:47:11 - 00:47:22] the Net. The Net is a net for catching the alien mind. How will it come? Will it descend upon our [00:47:22 - 00:47:31] websites in a flash of light? I don't think so. How it will come is hacked through human fingers. [00:47:31 - 00:47:41] The alien is real, but it is within us. It can only communicate information, and that information [00:47:41 - 00:47:48] has to be made real in this world by human coders. So if we were to set out lightheartedly [00:47:49 - 00:47:57] to build a virtual reality as alien as we could make it, I maintain that three-quarters of the way [00:47:57 - 00:48:05] our hair would be standing on end because we would realize we are not inventing this. [00:48:05 - 00:48:15] We are discovering it. You know, Michelangelo said, "The form is in the block of marble. What I do is [00:48:15 - 00:48:23] I take away the part that is unnecessary and reveal the human torso within the block of marble." [00:48:23 - 00:48:34] In the same way, the alien is already within us, but we must model it. We must call it forth into [00:48:34 - 00:48:44] a dimension of potential dialogue. And I think that ultimately this is what high-tech society [00:48:44 - 00:48:54] can bring to the shamanic equation. Shamans have been dealing with spirits, entities, powers for [00:48:54 - 00:49:03] more than a hundred thousand years, but it has always been on a one-to-one basis. One human [00:49:03 - 00:49:11] being at a time went up Mount Sinai to talk to the fire on the mountain. But with virtual reality, [00:49:12 - 00:49:20] we have a technology that allows us to show each other our dreams and, yes, our hallucinations. [00:49:20 - 00:49:28] And as we begin to show each other the contents of our own heads and as we begin to explore the [00:49:28 - 00:49:34] alien Niagara's of beauty that pour through your consciousness under the influence of some of these [00:49:34 - 00:49:41] substances, we are going to discover that we are not what we thought we were. The monkey flesh [00:49:42 - 00:49:54] is penetrated by something, dare I say it, divine, or at least alien, transplanetary, [00:49:54 - 00:50:00] and beyond the power of human comprehension. I don't know if we're talking about God Almighty [00:50:00 - 00:50:05] here. I don't know if we're talking about the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven, [00:50:05 - 00:50:12] as Milton says. That seems a tall order. Maybe what we're talking about is the God of biology. [00:50:12 - 00:50:20] Something has happened to this planet. It has become infected with an informational, [00:50:20 - 00:50:31] call it virus, call it force, call it being, that is using matter and, yes, using our flesh [00:50:31 - 00:50:40] and our thoughts to bootstrap itself to higher and higher levels. And now the prosthesis of machinery [00:50:40 - 00:50:47] and the possibility of an artificial intelligence raises the real option of producing, [00:50:47 - 00:51:00] of actually midwifing the birth of an entirely new, not species, but order of biological and [00:51:00 - 00:51:10] intelligence in existence. The human machine symbiote is upon us. I mean, it's been with us [00:51:10 - 00:51:16] for a while, since the first wheel was carved, since the first stick was sharpened, but that was [00:51:16 - 00:51:27] all very simple stuff. Now it's clear that we are in partnership with an other mind which comes to us [00:51:27 - 00:51:36] through our machineries and through the biosphere. Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of [00:51:36 - 00:51:48] rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this [00:51:48 - 00:51:56] intelligent other, which beckons us out of history and says, you know, the galaxy lies waiting. [00:51:57 - 00:52:07] A galaxy of galaxies lie waiting. Lose the encumbrances of three-dimensional space. [00:52:07 - 00:52:15] Return with the word to its higher and hidden source, and at that point you will discover [00:52:15 - 00:52:29] the alchemical paraclete will be given unto you. The alchemical dispensation will be given, and, [00:52:29 - 00:52:39] as James Joyce said, man will be dirgeable. What did he mean? He meant that we will lose the [00:52:39 - 00:52:46] limitations of physical and three-dimensional space, that we are destined to become mental creatures. [00:52:46 - 00:52:50] People say, well, isn't this a terrible thing? What about this, that, and the other? All the things [00:52:50 - 00:52:56] you're worrying about we turned our back on 25,000 years ago. We have been marching through this [00:52:56 - 00:53:04] virtual reality of our own creation for the entire duration of what is called human history. Now, [00:53:08 - 00:53:14] is there a political implication to all of this? I think the political implication is, [00:53:14 - 00:53:23] A, a personal one. We all must try to understand what is happening. We need to try to understand [00:53:23 - 00:53:29] what is happening, and in my humble opinion, ideology is only going to get in your way. [00:53:29 - 00:53:36] Nobody understands what is happening, not Buddhists, not Christians, not government scientists, [00:53:37 - 00:53:47] not, you know, no one understands what is happening. So, forget ideologies. They betray, [00:53:47 - 00:53:56] they limit, they lead astray. Just deal with the raw data and trust yourself. Nobody is smarter [00:53:56 - 00:54:03] than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you? People who walk [00:54:03 - 00:54:07] around saying, well, I don't understand quantum physics, but somewhere somebody understands it. [00:54:07 - 00:54:12] That's not a very helpful attitude toward preserving the insights of quantum physics. [00:54:12 - 00:54:21] Inform yourself. What does inform yourself mean? It means, A, transcend and mistrust ideology. [00:54:21 - 00:54:30] Go for direct experience. What do you think when you face the waterfall? What do you think when you [00:54:30 - 00:54:37] have sex? What do you think when you take psilocybin? Everything else is unconfirmable [00:54:37 - 00:54:45] rumor, useless, probably lies. So, liberate yourself from the illusion of culture. Take [00:54:45 - 00:54:54] responsibility for what you think and what you do. And then, the other political implication [00:54:54 - 00:55:04] toward community is a lot of people are going to be very anxious because change raises anxiety [00:55:04 - 00:55:10] in people. And people who have limited opportunities to educate themselves because of [00:55:10 - 00:55:21] culturally inflicted abuse are scared because they can sense that everything familiar is giving way, [00:55:21 - 00:55:30] but they don't want to embrace the unimaginable. These people need to be reassured. They need to [00:55:30 - 00:55:39] be reassured by example and by hearing optimistic and reasonable rhetoric about the future. [00:55:39 - 00:55:48] Selling the future as an eight alarm fire, which is how the media does it, only makes the same [00:55:48 - 00:55:56] future impossible. So, we need a responsible approach to thinking about the future. And it [00:55:56 - 00:56:04] means taking personal responsibility for your drug taking, for the ideas, the means that you push [00:56:04 - 00:56:11] into society, and for the images that we share among ourselves. You know, one of the great truisms [00:56:11 - 00:56:18] of the new age is that images can heal. But I've never heard anybody discuss the obvious [00:56:18 - 00:56:27] contra implication, which is images can make you sick. And you are constantly bombarded with images [00:56:27 - 00:56:38] which disempower, divide, confuse, and make crazy, basically. So, I think the reason psychedelics are [00:56:38 - 00:56:45] such political dynamite in any culture is because they dissolve cultural assumptions. The scales fall [00:56:45 - 00:56:53] from people's eyes and they say, "Does this make sense? Does my job make sense? Does my relationship [00:56:53 - 00:56:59] make sense to my significant other, to my government, to my children, to my environment? Do [00:56:59 - 00:57:07] these relationships make sense?" And of course, the answer for most people in high-tech society is no. [00:57:07 - 00:57:14] We've been compromised, we've been deluded, we've been sold a massive potage. The way out, then, [00:57:14 - 00:57:21] is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means [00:57:21 - 00:57:30] from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants, and then a commitment to community and a motto of [00:57:31 - 00:57:52] "To the future, without fear, without fear." Thank you very much. [00:57:52 - 00:57:54] [Applause] [00:57:54 - 00:58:03] Well, so much for a promise to breathe brief. You just wind the guy up and point him, and off he goes, [00:58:03 - 00:58:15] the robot who preaches freedom. Questions? Challenge? Anything? Anybody? Yeah, you. [00:58:15 - 00:58:23] Well, yeah, it's a tricky question because what's being maximized as things come together is novelty. [00:58:24 - 00:58:31] And so then we have to have a discussion about what is novelty. To my mind, an explosion [00:58:31 - 00:58:39] takes a complicated situation and reduces, or as mathematicians would say, flattens its dimensionality. [00:58:39 - 00:58:48] An art gallery or a beautiful home is far more interesting before an explosion than after. [00:58:48 - 00:58:55] So I don't see how some kind of catastrophe would entirely fulfill the bill. On the other hand, [00:58:55 - 00:59:03] a partial catastrophe of some sort, because I believe primates are at their best when cornered. [00:59:03 - 00:59:09] And we aren't cornered yet. I mean, we talk about how we're cornered. People say, "This is the end [00:59:09 - 00:59:14] of the world." This ain't the end of the world. This is the long garden party before the end of [00:59:14 - 00:59:21] the world with strolling musicians and superbly catered food and women in diaphanous gowns and [00:59:21 - 00:59:27] high-toned conversation. Wait till you see the end of the world. It isn't about deciding to come [00:59:27 - 00:59:41] up to Austin to attend the whole life expo, let me tell you. So, yes. Yes, I should repeat questions. [00:59:41 - 00:59:50] Different part of the room. Back here. White shirt. You, sir. This guy, yeah. [00:59:51 - 00:59:58] [inaudible] [00:59:58 - 01:00:09] [inaudible] [01:00:09 - 01:00:30] [inaudible] [01:00:30 - 01:00:37] Yes, you eloquently represent the position that language was invented in order to lie. [01:00:39 - 01:00:44] Right? Well, that's what the second guy who got a hold of it, I'm sure, probably did with it. [01:00:44 - 01:00:54] You're right that I have an incredible enthusiasm for verbal speech, but it's only because it's [01:00:54 - 01:01:05] easy for me to do. If I didn't do this, I'd have to find honest work. However, I am aware, or, [01:01:05 - 01:01:10] yeah, I'm very aware of the limitations of language. And one of the things I've talked about [01:01:10 - 01:01:17] a lot is what I call visible language. You used the example of telepathy, that if we were in [01:01:17 - 01:01:26] telepathic communication, how could I lie? Because you would perceive my intent. The key to making [01:01:26 - 01:01:36] language more true is to make it more visual. Now, that can't just take the form of a bigger [01:01:36 - 01:01:43] vocabulary and more colorful metaphors. Like people will say, "When he spoke, he painted a picture." [01:01:43 - 01:01:51] Or, "Listening to him was like watching a movie." I think ordinary speech goes through a series of [01:01:51 - 01:02:03] stages from articulate to eloquent to poetic to demagogic. And demagogic is where you want to be [01:02:03 - 01:02:10] careful, because then you can turn, you know, essentially Hitler turned history on its head [01:02:10 - 01:02:20] with speeches. He just could really deliver a stem winder. I've been fascinated by the fact [01:02:20 - 01:02:30] that in the Amazon, under the influence of ayahuasca, people sing songs, but they see the [01:02:30 - 01:02:36] song they sing. And when you hear people talking about it afterwards, people will say, after [01:02:36 - 01:02:43] listening to a song, "You know, I love the part with the olive drab and the chrome, but I thought [01:02:43 - 01:02:50] when he got into the magenta and yellow stripe thing, it was just too much." Well, this is a [01:02:50 - 01:02:57] critique of a song. And then when you take ayahuasca with these people, you discover to your amazement [01:02:57 - 01:03:06] that is a blue ribbon, a foot across that descends from floor to ceiling and has a yellow center. [01:03:06 - 01:03:16] And then puts knobs in the ribbon and you can start singing and building, modeling, animating [01:03:16 - 01:03:23] in three dimensions with sound. Well, I maintain that our insistence technologically on pushing [01:03:23 - 01:03:31] our media toward ever more immediate sensations so that if we have photography, it's black and [01:03:31 - 01:03:37] white, we demand color. If it's color, we demand motion. If it's motion, we demand sound. If it's [01:03:37 - 01:03:49] sound and motion, we want 3D. It's that we trust our eyes. And the natural domain of communication [01:03:49 - 01:03:57] is visual for human beings. We're like octopi in that way. So really language needs to evolve toward [01:03:57 - 01:04:03] the visual. And that's why I'm very keen for technically dense prosthetic environments where [01:04:03 - 01:04:11] every time you say the word "and" a yellow three-dimensional triangle appears in the air. [01:04:11 - 01:04:17] Every time you say "or" an orange ball appears. A computer is listening to what you're saying [01:04:17 - 01:04:24] and giving a geometric accompaniment to speech. I think that there are forms of telepathy that [01:04:24 - 01:04:31] we can evolve through the use of drugs and computer-assisted technologies that will allow [01:04:31 - 01:04:37] us to see each other's dreams. In spite of your correct assessment that I'm keen for the spoken [01:04:37 - 01:04:44] word, I spend all summer learning modeling and three-dimensional animation programs from my son [01:04:44 - 01:04:53] because I want to animate. I want to model. I see things on my trips that I have never been able to [01:04:53 - 01:05:02] English. But that if I were a fully competent modeler and animator, I would just say, "Check it [01:05:02 - 01:05:08] out." And I'm going to do that. And I urge you to do that. I mean, it's a funny thing to be told you [01:05:08 - 01:05:17] want to spiritually advance, study 3D animation. But these are the frontiers of communication. [01:05:17 - 01:05:24] We have an obligation to make our language more immediate. It is the most godlike thing we do. [01:05:24 - 01:05:30] If you're looking for the thumbprint of almighty God on the biological organization of this planet, [01:05:30 - 01:05:36] it is human language. It is a miracle. I don't give a hoot what the dolphins and the honeybees [01:05:36 - 01:05:41] are out there in the woods doing. It ain't like Milton. It ain't even like Bob Dylan. [01:05:42 - 01:05:50] It ain't even as good as this, I'm willing to say. No, human communication is what we are, [01:05:50 - 01:05:59] and it will lead us to be a symbiotic species if we put the pedal to the metal. For people like [01:05:59 - 01:06:04] yourselves, who I assume to be, no matter how you finagled your way in here this afternoon, [01:06:04 - 01:06:14] part of the upper 3% of the ruling elite on this planet, there is a real obligation to use privilege [01:06:14 - 01:06:21] to communicate and to make art. I think this is what, if the good life has any purpose other than [01:06:21 - 01:06:29] to drink beer and watch TV, it's to produce art. This is how you make a payback into the community. [01:06:29 - 01:06:35] And art is ambiguous. Your art may say things to people other than yourself that it would never [01:06:35 - 01:06:43] say to you, but that's how we make the community richer. That's how we enlarge the dimensions of [01:06:43 - 01:06:56] the human soul, by making art. [applause] [01:06:56 - 01:07:01] Stand up and yell. [01:07:01 - 01:07:14] Louder. [01:07:14 - 01:07:22] You said, "Do you take psilocybin and see self-transforming machine now?" No. [01:07:22 - 01:07:27] [inaudible] [01:07:27 - 01:07:27] Yeah? [01:07:27 - 01:07:40] [inaudible] [01:07:40 - 01:07:46] The question is, when you encounter the self-transforming machine elves in hyperspace, [01:07:46 - 01:07:52] do you think that's a reflection of ourselves, or do you think it's an alien or, I mean, [01:07:52 - 01:08:06] I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like that. It's tricky, because we are not what we think we are. [01:08:12 - 01:08:19] Maybe I didn't spend enough time on this alien thing. I referred to non-local domains of [01:08:19 - 01:08:27] information. This has to do with this idea in quantum physics that there is something called [01:08:27 - 01:08:36] Bell non-locality, that all particles that were ever associated remain associated in some mysterious [01:08:36 - 01:08:42] way, no matter how far apart in time and space they have drifted. Well, according to the Big Bang, [01:08:42 - 01:08:49] all particles were once closely associated. At the moment of the Big Bang, everything was in a space [01:08:49 - 01:08:55] less than the diameter of the proton, or some piddling distance like that. [01:08:55 - 01:09:03] So then this was an idea that was just thought so outlandish that there could be this instantaneous [01:09:03 - 01:09:10] dimension of connectivity that it was dismissed from quantum physics in favor of an acceptance of [01:09:10 - 01:09:16] a somewhat less outlandish but equally challenging notion, which was the Heisenberg uncertainty [01:09:16 - 01:09:22] principle. And that's how it was left for about 40 years. But there were thought experiments [01:09:22 - 01:09:28] that people talked about that could test for this Bell non-locality. Well, eventually, [01:09:29 - 01:09:36] these apparatus were actually built and these experiments were performed. And what do you know, [01:09:36 - 01:09:42] Joe? Bell non-locality can be demonstrated the same way any other physical phenomenon [01:09:42 - 01:09:50] can be demonstrated, given a sufficiently prepared laboratory situation. It's real. It's not woo-woo. [01:09:50 - 01:09:56] It's actually scientifically true at the fundamental core of physics that all space and [01:09:56 - 01:10:04] all time is in some form of simultaneous connection. Now, it gets a little dicey if [01:10:04 - 01:10:11] you ask questions like, can we use this to get and send information? And I don't want to go into that [01:10:11 - 01:10:16] because I think I already have the answer. No matter how good the argument's against it, [01:10:16 - 01:10:24] I believe this is what the human imagination is. That you have two eyes to show you local space, [01:10:25 - 01:10:31] and then you have an organ called the mind, which doesn't protrude anywhere on the surface of your [01:10:31 - 01:10:38] body, except occasionally in some cases, it will lodge on a surrogate. But generally, the mind is [01:10:38 - 01:10:48] invisible. But it gives you non-local data. That's what the imagination is. That's non-local data. [01:10:48 - 01:10:58] Everything in the imagination is real somewhere, somewhere so far away in space and time that it [01:10:58 - 01:11:04] makes absolutely no sense to give it another thought ever again. Don't ever think that thought [01:11:04 - 01:11:11] again. But know that everything in the imagination is real. So it's ridiculous to speak of my [01:11:11 - 01:11:19] imagination or the human imagination. There is just the imagination. But see, if all information is [01:11:19 - 01:11:30] there, 99.999% of that information is not intended for human beings and makes no sense whatsoever to [01:11:30 - 01:11:37] us. It's basically static. It's either above or below our cognitive power to organize, and so it [01:11:37 - 01:11:49] is meaningless. But 0.00001% of this non-local data is enough like local data that we can make [01:11:49 - 01:11:56] metaphoric bridges to it and say, "Well, it was like this, and it was sort of like this, and it [01:11:56 - 01:12:03] was a kind of a this, and it reminded me of something else." And that's the stuff of the [01:12:03 - 01:12:12] imagination. And to the degree that you can accept alien data without freaking out, you can go deeper [01:12:12 - 01:12:18] into the imagination. I have a friend who says of psilocybin mushrooms, "Every time I take it, [01:12:18 - 01:12:26] my goal is to stand more." And he doesn't mean stand more in terms of dosage. He means [01:12:26 - 01:12:34] stand more in terms of content, because it can always raise the bar higher than you can jump. [01:12:34 - 01:12:41] I mean, I've had dialogues with it where after hours of dancing mice and personal revelations [01:12:41 - 01:12:49] and kind of a sense of familiarity, I've said to it, "Well, but what are you really? Show me what [01:12:49 - 01:12:57] you are for yourself." Well, my God, the temperature in the room begins to fall towards zero. Black [01:12:57 - 01:13:03] draperies rise. There's an organ tone that shakes the earth. And after about 30 seconds, I said, [01:13:03 - 01:13:11] "Hey, enough of what you are for yourself. Let's go back to the dancing mice and [01:13:12 - 01:13:21] the little candies rolling in the dark." And it knows that you have a limited capacity to absorb [01:13:21 - 01:13:28] its alienness. That's why we have what's called human history. Human history is the process of [01:13:28 - 01:13:35] standing more. And it's now we've sort of come to the short and curly part of the process where [01:13:35 - 01:13:41] they're just around the corner. I mean, all you have to do is smoke a doobie, look out at the [01:13:41 - 01:13:50] evening sky, have a dream, talk to a friend, and the alien is very, very, its trailing aura, [01:13:50 - 01:13:57] or its leading aura, I guess, its leading aura has now intersected human psychology. [01:13:57 - 01:14:05] But cheerful stories of space brothers and scary, silly stories of people trading high technology [01:14:05 - 01:14:11] freaks and lead with the government, hey, it's so much bigger than that. It's so big that it [01:14:11 - 01:14:18] has disguised itself as an alien invasion to keep from really alarming us with what it really is. [01:14:18 - 01:14:24] Couple more questions. [01:14:24 - 01:14:27] If you could come to the microphone so the taker can hear you. [01:14:27 - 01:14:34] A lady, yes. Would you like to come up and get you on tape here? [01:14:40 - 01:14:43] I was just wondering what you thought about the possibility of [01:14:43 - 01:14:50] as we become more aware of what we're doing to the environment and the responsibility of those [01:14:50 - 01:14:56] industrialized nations that are consuming more than their share, that when we, if we could get [01:14:56 - 01:15:04] on an equal playing field, then those underdeveloped countries that have a great deal of the resources [01:15:04 - 01:15:12] that they're using up to basically pay their national debt, if they could receive technology [01:15:12 - 01:15:19] so that they can be on an equal playing field on the internet, et cetera, in exchange for our [01:15:19 - 01:15:26] consumption, that it might be an interesting evolution in terms of... [01:15:26 - 01:15:34] Well, I think it's happening. In other words, some people have objected that the internet [01:15:34 - 01:15:39] and computers are an elitist technology in the hands of a bunch of white folks. [01:15:39 - 01:15:47] To some degree, that's true. But on the other hand, if the automobile had followed the same [01:15:47 - 01:15:54] curve of cost benefit that the computer has followed in its development, then the average [01:15:54 - 01:16:04] automobile today would cost a buck and a half, and it would go 100,000 miles on 10 cents worth of gas. [01:16:04 - 01:16:11] That's the kind of bang for your buck you're getting from the modern PC compared to where [01:16:11 - 01:16:19] it was 35 years ago. No technology in history has had its costs fall so quickly, and there is no [01:16:19 - 01:16:26] reason to think that those costs will level off. If a good PC today is $1,400, there's no reason [01:16:26 - 01:16:33] why in five years it shouldn't be $140, and there's no reason why in 10 years it shouldn't be $14 [01:16:33 - 01:16:42] and be worn on your thumbnail. This can all be done. All these prices are artificially inflated. [01:16:42 - 01:16:50] The other thing about the internet is it is going wireless. As it goes wireless, it goes totally [01:16:50 - 01:16:58] global. If I can just brag for a minute and make an example of myself, I have a wireless connection [01:16:58 - 01:17:03] to the internet. At first, I got a wireless connection because I couldn't get any other kind [01:17:03 - 01:17:09] because I lived way up in a volcano. But now, my wireless connection is one megabyte. [01:17:10 - 01:17:20] That's 45 times faster than 28.8. The poor people down on copper, they can't do better than 56 [01:17:20 - 01:17:26] because the infrastructure already exists and therefore limits the bandwidth. By going outside [01:17:26 - 01:17:33] the infrastructure, this sounds like a reprise of my talk, by going outside the infrastructure [01:17:33 - 01:17:39] and building alone from ground up, I suddenly find myself looking down the gun barrel of a T1 [01:17:39 - 01:17:44] connection. It is heaven itself, let me tell you. The people who sold it to me, and there must be [01:17:44 - 01:17:51] dozens of other companies, are bent on conquering the world, meaning putting everybody who wants to [01:17:51 - 01:17:59] be online for pennies in the next five to six years. If you live in Manhattan or even Austin, [01:17:59 - 01:18:04] what is the internet? It's another diversion. It's another piece of entertainment. [01:18:05 - 01:18:13] What is it like in Somalia, in Seychelles, in Bangalore? What kind of impact does it have there? [01:18:13 - 01:18:20] You talk about a culture dissolving effect based on psychedelics. How about a culture dissolving [01:18:20 - 01:18:28] effect based on access to the internet? And people say, "Well, Western values will swamp all others." [01:18:28 - 01:18:34] Certainly, to some degree, that is true. But did that just begin yesterday? [01:18:35 - 01:18:40] Isn't that what the bloody business has been about for 500 miserable years, [01:18:40 - 01:18:47] ever since the barbarian Cortez arrived in Mexico? I think so. Well, don't get me off on that. [01:18:47 - 01:18:56] One last question. Who's just burning? Anybody burning? There's somebody burning. [01:19:02 - 01:19:06] So where do you think we're going to be on December 22nd, 2012? [01:19:06 - 01:19:11] All together. All together. [01:19:11 - 01:19:22] It's a nice answer. Here's another one. Why I have only one answer? [01:19:22 - 01:19:32] It's too early to tell. In other words, asking that question in 1997 is like asking a man [01:19:32 - 01:19:41] looking east at 1 a.m. what he thinks the sunrise will be like. It's just too early. The sun lies [01:19:41 - 01:19:48] over the event horizon of the planet. In other words, we can't see around the corner yet. [01:19:48 - 01:19:55] In terms of our analogous cultural development, right now we've reached approximately the year [01:19:55 - 01:20:04] 1000 A.D. And between now and 2012, at an incredibly accelerated rate, we have to do a [01:20:04 - 01:20:12] number of things. Discover the new world, invent the calculus, have the Renaissance, then have the [01:20:12 - 01:20:19] Reformation, then have the Industrial Reformation, then have the 20th century. All that has to be [01:20:19 - 01:20:26] squeezed into the next 14 years. The real outlines of what is tearing toward us will probably be [01:20:26 - 01:20:37] the province of squirrels and visionaries like myself until around 2004 and five. And by that [01:20:37 - 01:20:45] time, it will be clear to everyone what is on the end of every fork, as William Burroughs once said. [01:20:45 - 01:20:53] In other words, it will be clear that history has been cancelled. It will be clear that there is no [01:20:53 - 01:20:58] human future except through hyperspatial breakthrough. We will all be walking around [01:20:58 - 01:21:06] on an internet that is 90 percent VRML based and hence three-dimensional and interactive. [01:21:06 - 01:21:15] And nanotechnology will be beginning to deliver its goods to society. New forms of propulsion [01:21:15 - 01:21:20] system are going to move the outer planets to within a few weeks travel, so forth and so on. [01:21:20 - 01:21:30] So we cannot at this moment know the true nature of the eschaton because at this moment, if we knew [01:21:30 - 01:21:37] the true nature of the eschaton, it would shatter our cultural assumptions and our individual [01:21:37 - 01:21:43] understanding completely. We have a lot of heavy lifting to do. There's a lot of self-education, [01:21:43 - 01:21:51] hard tripping and heroic dosing that needs to be done before we can meet the eschaton on a level [01:21:51 - 01:21:56] playing field. Be there or be square. Thank you. [01:21:56 - 01:22:00] [APPLAUSE]