Dreaming Awake at the End of Time

Can you hear in the back? Good, I assume so. Yes? Good.

I'm here to be in San Francisco. This is sort of a hometown of mine, one of my hometowns.

I've been on a tour or a rave, spoken three times and raved twice in the past five or seven days.

This is the end, so if I'm comfortable with this stuff at all, I must be comfortable with it this evening.

And it's nice to see a small, full house. That's the most exciting kind of audience to talk to, I think.

So thank you all for turning out on a rainy night.

Before I get into the main body of tonight's...

...entertainment, I want to call your attention to the propaganda for an event in Mexico and another event in Hawaii.

These events, in the case of the Mexico event, you get a major slice of the psychedelic community.

You get Robert Montgomery, Jonathan Ott, Ann and Sasha Shulgin, Manolo Torres...

...and others who unfortunately slipped my mind, at the ceremonial center of Palenque in Chiapas.

We've been doing these events somewhere in Mayan Mexico for the past 10 or 12 years.

Many of you are graduates, which doesn't mean you can't come again.

But I want to invite all of you there, if you're interested in ethnobotany, shamanism...

...ethnopharmacology, altered states of consciousness, the politics of all of this.

This is as intense and information-packed an exposure as you can have.

And it's straight from the mouths of the scholars and scientists and writers...

...who have spent a great deal of time in that area.

So I just want to invite you to that. It's also a great party.

It's the height of mushroom season.

There's nothing we could do about that.

So you just are on your own.

So when I start out on these tours, I usually have an agenda and prepared remarks.

And then as I make my way through my venues and I hear the feedback...

...and I feel the ambiance of the people and the throb of the zeitgeist...

...it all sort of just simply dissolves into an ongoing commentary on our moment in space and time...

...and the various dimensions, adumbrations and opportunities of our dilemma.

But I want tonight to couch it for you in the context of, I guess, an extended metaphor.

We could talk about these things many ways.

But I find this particular extended metaphor...

...illuminating.

And I start by recalling an observation from someone whose name rarely falls from my lips.

And that would be Gurdjieff.

And Gurdjieff said at one point, or was known to comment, that people are asleep.

He said.

And he, by implication, suggested people awaken.

I'm not sure if he fully grasped the implication for his own product line, had that occurred.

But in any case, you're on it, you're with me, yes.

It's very hard to give these lectures in such a way so that every person hears something different.

Which is what is supposed to be going on, you know.

Well, so thinking about this comment that people are asleep...

...I see several implications.

I asked myself, what is awake in my own notion?

And I thought to myself, awake is, for me, awake is where the laws of physics are fully operable.

You know, hurled objects shatter, electricity shocks.

I cannot fly.

The laws of physics are in operation.

In that domain, I consider myself to be fully awake.

Now, in terms of occult and spiritual traditions, the admonition to awaken always seems to imply that higher consciousness is approached through an expansion of clarity and awareness.

And that seems obvious.

I don't argue with it as a rationalist.

But as somebody who has run the edges, I've noticed something somewhat counterintuitive to that teaching.

And it's this.

It's that to contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples...

...white caps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will.

To achieve that requires...

A precondition is a kind of unconsciousness.

A kind of drifting.

A certain taking your eye off the ball.

A certain assumption that things are simpler than they are.

Almost always precedes what Mircea Leal says.

There's a term that God called the rupture of plane that indicates that there is an archetypal world.

An archetypal power behind profane appearances.

And in my own life, for those of you who are conversant with my output, when I went to the Amazon in 1971...

...and had the experiences that are described in true hallucinations...

...I had been, for many months before that, in Asia, smuggling, hanging out.

And I had taken my eye off the ball.

I had become very gentle, very relativistic in my approach to other people's opinions and behaviors.

I was easygoing, is what I'm trying to say.

Too easygoing.

Uh...

And in that situation of semi-unconsciousness and openness, the cosmic giggle approaches.

And I compare this...

This is closing of a theme.

I compare this to sleep.

Or to states that lie between waking and sleeping.

And so, again, an odd take on this remark of Gurdjieff's.

I remember someone, many years ago, said to me...

They evoked the symbol of the yin and the yang.

The two tiers folded against each other within a circle.

And this person, who was no rishi, roshi, geisha, or guru, but simply observant, said...

Uh...

It's not the black side.

It's not the white side.

It's the interface.

It's the edge.

And I found, by observing sleep...

And some of you may recall the motto in Athanasius Kircher's Amphiatrium Sapientium,

that's chiseled over the alchemist's doorway.

I can't do it in Latin, but it says,

While sleeping, watch.

And I've noticed that while going to sleep,

there is a barrier, a place in the process of going to sleep,

that is like a mercurial edge.

It's a river.

It's a zone of hypnagogia.

You often pass through it post-orgasm.

It's a place of drifting amoeboid colored afterimage lights.

True hallucination.

Images, strange, transcendental or transpersonal images.

Well, so then, so far in the context of pursuing this extended metaphor about sleep,

I've talked basically, essentially about the individual's relationship

to the concept, to the fact.

But there's also a sort of...

But there's also a social or a political, a species-wide implication.

It occurs to me that at any given moment,

because of the way the planet is as a thing,

some considerable percentage of human beings are asleep.

Always.

And many are awake.

And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness

of human beings, then it is never entirely awake.

It is never entirely asleep.

It exists in...

I guess you can hear me.

It exists in some kind of indeterminate zone.

And this to me is the clue to understanding something

that is personally fascinating to me.

And it revolves around why people believe such weird things.

And why, either as a consequence of the approach of the millennium

or the breakdown of traditional values

or the density of electromagnetic radiation

or for some reason,

a balkanization of epistemology is taking place.

And what I mean by that is

there is no longer a commonality of understanding.

I mean, for some people, quantum physics provides the answers.

Their next-door neighbor may look to the channeling of archangels

with equal fervor.

I mean, if this is not a balkanization of epistemology,

I don't know what it is.

It is accompanied by a related phenomenon

which is technology or the historical momentum of things

is creating such a bewildering social milieu

that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story,

a simple creation myth or redemption myth

to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork

of profane technology.

There is no consumerist, post-McLuhanist,

electronic pre-apocalyptic existence.

And so into that dimension of anxiety

created by this inability to parse reality

rushes a bewildering variety of squirrely notions.

Epistemological cartoons,

if you will.

And conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion,

I'm somewhat immune to paranoia,

so those of you who aren't,

you know, gaze in wonder.

Conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality.

I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys,

and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them

and we can solve our technological problems?

Or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything?

Or the Communist Party?

Or the Catholic Church?

Or the Masons?

Well, these are epistemological cartoons.

It's, you know, kindergarten stuff in the art of amateur historiography.

I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying.

That the real truth that dare not speak itself

is that no one is in control.

Absolutely no one.

You know, you don't understand Monica.

You don't understand Netanyahu.

It's because nobody is in control.

This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos.

Now, there may be entities seeking control.

The World Bank, the Communist Party, the rich, the somebody others.

But to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself.

Because this process that is underway,

will take the control freak by the short and curly

and throw them against the wall.

It's like trying to control a dream, you see.

The global destiny of the species

is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.

Well, now a Jungian would say, no surprise here,

history is the collective dream of humanity.

It is run by archetypal energies.

It is downloaded by the zeitgeist

into the various milieus and epochs of which it is composed.

This seems reasonable to me.

I don't want to give you the impression it's too linear

to understand that what I am saying is that

awake is good,

asleep is bad.

What I would rather do is explain this whole gradient

of possible positioning vis-a-vis your life and your destiny,

these choices that you have,

and then have people understand that they choose,

you choose to be asleep or partially asleep or fully awake

or to be one part of the time and in some situations

and one part of the time.

And in other situations.

Now, if in fact we exist inside some kind of morphogenetic field

that is created by the sum total of human minds on the planet,

and if in fact in half or more of those minds at any given moment

the rules of the dream hold sway,

then it is no surprise that when we make our way into society

or just when we live our lives,

there's an eeriness to it.

There's a fatedness to it.

There's a plottedness to it.

You know, we are inside some kind of engine of narrative,

I believe.

You know, some science fiction writers such as Greg Egan

and others have suggested that this could even be a form of recorded medium.

You can see the thumb prints of editors on our reality

if you are truly paying attention.

I mean, if you're a devotee of the theory of stochastic

and random unfolding of events,

then you have to look very carefully

at how unrandom and how mythical

and archetypal most people's lives are.

You know, if you take psychedelics and hurl yourself to the edge

and spend time with strange aboriginal people

in remote parts of the world,

the cosmic giggle becomes your friend.

But in fact, ordinary people's lives,

everyone's lives,

are touched by deep magic.

And I've, you know, again,

the primary datum is experience

and then the models are built backward from the primary data

without prejudice

and in an attempt to transcend historical momentum.

And when I do that, what I see is that the carrier,

of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people's lives,

is love.

Love is some kind of output

which messes with the

entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior

in nature.

What do I mean by that?

I mean, you can be the janitor at Microsoft

and the vice president and chief of operations,

his daughter can bring him lunch one day

and you can, from a distance,

have your eye fall upon her

and fall in love with her.

And, you know, from that point

to having the five children she bears you

go off to Harvard and the Sorbonne,

it's just a matter of running the clock forward.

I mean, these things have,

I mean, to you it may seem like a miracle,

but to those of us who are students of human happenstance,

it's inevitable.

I mean, you can launch your story.

And I've, you know,

in the course of taking psychedelics

and looking at my life and other people's lives

and narrative,

I think that the,

the secret of,

I don't want to say anything as pretentious

as transcendence or enlightenment,

but the secret of taking hold

of one's destiny

is to understand that one is a character.

A character is a different thing

than this model you inherit

out of the idea that you're a three-dimensional animal

inside a democracy with a Christian heritage

and, you know,

a Dewey Decimal cataloging system or whatever.

Anyway, these are some of the notions

that occur to me in the context of,

of comparing dream

on many scales.

It's, you have to

really struggle, I think,

to believe that you actually live

inside the model of reality

that science

and Newtonian physics

and the mathematical analysis of nature

have given us.

You know, not to get too philosophical here,

but for positivist philosophers,

everything that is important,

color,

feeling,

taste,

tone,

ambition,

apprehension,

appetition,

these things are called secondary qualities.

In other words, they're peripheral.

They arise at a lower level of understanding.

They are somehow determined

by the presence of the animal body

and hence dismissible

by a theory of perception.

It's an absolutely pure abstraction,

which says, you know,

what is real is spin,

charge, angular momentum.

None of these things are very rich concepts

for a living human being.

Who knows what any of these things are?

You know?

So, one, I mean, there,

we don't have time in a situation like this

to explore all the implications

of this dream analogy that I'm pursuing.

But one that interests me

is the plasticity of time

in the dream.

And I think I would argue,

as the devil's advocate,

that it is the plasticity of historical time

and the acceleration,

the sense of an out-of-control spin-up,

or spin-down,

into new domains of possibility

that is the strongest evidence present at hand

that we are in some kind of dream.

I've struggled my whole life with,

I've always believed,

or I've always felt the power

of the statement,

the world is made of language.

But, of course,

you think about this proposition

for 30 seconds,

and the question that arises then is,

if the world is made of language,

then why isn't it the way I want it to be?

You know?

Why does it have this prepotent momentum

for its own,

it has its own raison d'être,

even if it is language?

Well, I think,

and it's appropriate to speak of this

to an audience as digitally sophisticated

as I assume you must be,

I think the primary insight

that has been secured

here at the end of the 20th century,

the primary contribution

of 20th century thinking,

if you will,

is to have understood, finally,

that information is primary.

That this world,

this cosmos,

this universe,

this body and soul,

are all made of information.

Information is a deeper

and more primary concept

than space,

time,

matter,

energy,

charge,

spin,

angular momentum.

The world is made of language.

The implication

for the digerati

is that reality can therefore be hacked.

If

reality is made of language,

then what we're saying is

that it's code.

And if it's code,

then it is far

more deeply open

to manipulation

than we ever dared dream.

I mean, we've been messing around

on the desktop

opening files

with religions

and political systems

and xenophobic theories

of racial superiority,

all this crap

that haunts

the human historical adventure.

It means we have not addressed

the deeper levels.

And in thinking about this

and the relationship to dream

and human culture,

I have realized

that cultures

are like operating systems.

We are like hardware.

The human animal

is a piece of

biological

wetware

slash

hardware.

And

it has been,

we know,

pretty much

as we confront it today,

for at least 140,000 years.

At Klasus River cave mouth

in South Africa,

they have excavated

homo sapiens,

sapien skeletons,

100,000 years old.

And that person could have sat

in the front row

here tonight

and nobody would have

batted an eyebrow.

So the human hardware

has been in place

for a while.

What has changed

rapidly in comparison

to the rates

of biological evolution

is

are the operating systems.

The people who excavated Ur,

which was

at that time

thought to be

the world's first city,

and in any case

is a city

seven millennia old.

When they excavated

the central plaza at Ur,

they discovered

that a black basaltic slab

had been set up there

by the earliest kings of Ur.

And that was the cultural operating system.

And if in a deal

trading goats for olives,

a dispute arose,

people had reference

to the central operating system

and these things were determined.

Well now,

Ur 101 was fine

for olives and goat trading,

but it didn't support

higher mathematics.

It didn't support

rational exploration of nature.

It didn't support

astrological knowledge

about the movement of the stars.

As we have gone forward,

through culture,

we have swapped out

these operating systems.

And at each swap out,

there has been a lot

of hair pulling

and cussing

and screaming.

Anyone who has installed

a new operating system

is completely familiar

with that sickening

from the bowels

kind of coldness

as you realize

it all hangs by

a thread.

Now, this situation

or this operating system metaphor

I think is a useful one

for understanding

and again,

a circle closes,

the balkanization of epistemology

that causes me such anxiety.

If you meet

an aboriginal person

from the Amazon,

for example,

they may be running

Witoto 3.0

as their operating system.

Nicely supports

animistic magic.

Huge capacity

when it comes to making

fish traps

and bird traps.

Witoto is a powerful

operating system

for a rainforest aboriginal.

In our culture,

you know,

there are,

I have no idea,

at least 10 or 20

operating systems

all going at the same time

some will run

Mormonism.

Some will support

Catholicism.

Others,

Kabbalah goes

at the speed of light.

Others support

quantum physics.

Some support econometrics.

Others support

political correctness.

And these things

are mutually exclusive.

And so,

looking at this

and looking at this

clash of operating systems,

I've come to the conclusion,

and some of you

may have heard me

say this before,

that culture

is not your friend.

That's the final conclusion.

You see,

well,

this came to me

a few months ago

when I had

my yearly physical.

And as I was buttoning up,

my doctor said to me,

he said,

in the 19th century,

most people your age

were dead.

And I realized

that this was true.

And that one of the,

among all the revolutions

that we are enduring,

one of them is that we live

nearly twice as long

as people lived

very recently in the past.

Well,

culture

is a kind of

neoteny.

And I don't want to belabor that

at great length,

but for those of you

who are not biologists,

neoteny is

the retention of

juvenile characteristics

into adulthood.

It's used to describe

animal behavior.

For instance,

I'll give the most spectacular

example of neoteny.

There is a kind of animal

which lives in ponds

in Africa,

and it reproduces

like a fish.

It lays eggs

on the bottom of these ponds.

More fish-like animals

come from these eggs

and so forth.

However,

if the pond dries up,

the creature undergoes

metamorphosis

and becomes an animal

somewhat like a gecko

and lays eggs,

and from these eggs

come creatures

that are like geckos.

In other words,

this is an animal

which actually

achieves sexual maturity

in two forms,

depending on environmental stress.

Spectacular example of neoteny.

Turning to human beings,

a less spectacular example,

but relevant to us,

is our hairless,

our general body hairlessness

compared to other primates.

We look like fetal apes.

Human beings look like fetal apes.

Why?

What is neoteny?

Well, this is hotly debated

among evolutionary biologists,

but the point I want to make

is a socio-political comment,

which is culture itself

is some kind of neotenizing force

because what culture provides

is a bunch of rules,

so you don't have to think,

and a bunch of myths,

so you don't have to think again.

Culture has all the answers, you know.

You want to know

where people came from?

Well, when the sky god

got out of his canoe

at first waterfall

and took a leak,

then we, the true people,

appeared like ants,

and we've been living here ever since.

Oh.

Gee, thanks.

I'm glad I asked.

You know, this is what culture does for you.

So, but now technology throws a curve,

and the curve is that we live so long

that we figure out what a scam this is.

We figure out that what you're supposed to work for

isn't worth having.

We figure out that our politicians are buffoons.

We figure out that professional scientists

are reputation-building, grab-tailing weasels.

We discover that all organizations

are corrupted by ambition.

You know, you get the picture.

We figure it out.

Well, then, as intellectuals,

and anybody who figures it out

is an intellectual, believe me,

because they're slinging the programming

to push you the other way.

So then intellectuals,

defined as people who figure it out,

discover that you are alienated.

That's what figuring it out means.

It means you understand that the BMW,

the Harvard degree,

whatever it is,

that this is all baloney and manipulated and hyped,

and that mostly you have a bunch of clueless people

who are figuring out which fork they should use.

But this position is presented as alienation

and therefore somehow tinged

with the potential for pathology.

You know, it's a bad thing to be alienated.

Now let's speak for a moment

in order to fulfill the promise

read in the introduction

about psychedelics

and what are they doing in this fine situation.

Well, what they're doing is forcing

this maturation process

by dissolving boundaries,

which is what they do.

They are exposing the cultural operating system

for what it is,

which is just a bunch of hacked together rules

that evolved over time.

They weren't sent from God,

from Mount Sinai.

It's just a bunch of hacked together rules.

So psychedelics in that sense spread alienation.

But what they alienate us from

is preposterous,

earth-murding,

sexist,

consumerist,

shallow,

trivial,

inane,

insane,

and dangerous.

And that's what they alienate us from.

So again, this neotenizing thing

is like the condition of unconsciousness

that I described as the precondition

for the cosmic giga.

Glamour,

acts of magical conjuration,

hypnotic delusion and illusion,

hysterias,

fads,

pseudo-revelations,

strange truths

whispered in every quarter.

This is the character

of our time.

And people have seemed to believe

that they were fulfilling

their responsibilities intellectually.

People seem to feel they are doing that

when they reject the past.

Say, well,

that was all screwed up,

but since I got with Master Shuggie,

I've understood

the way it really is supposed to be.

No, this is just trading one set of

neotenizing operating systems

for another.

The real hard choice

that you're being pushed toward

and that you might consider making

before the yawning grave

rings down the curtain

on this cosmic drama

is actually intellectual responsibility,

freedom,

and a devotion to

what scientists call

elegance of thought.

You know, people say,

well, how can you tell one theory from another

and is science better than religion

and this and that?

After a lot of arm waving,

it should be conceded

that the final call is aesthetic.

That because we are monkeys,

because we are so far from God,

we cannot set knowing the truth

as the standard

for choosing among the models

we can produce.

We must set our aesthetic compass

towards the more true,

what Wittgenstein called the true enough.

And then the question is,

well, how do you recognize that?

Well, this is a rich field of human study

called philosophy.

Philosophy of science or theory,

epistemology and ontology.

How do we know what is real?

But Plato,

who all the rest of philosophy

is a footnote up on,

Plato said, you know,

that the key lay in the concepts

the good, the true,

and the beautiful.

The good, what is it?

Tricky, tricky, tricky.

The true, what is it?

Trickier, even trickier.

The beautiful, what is it?

Easy to discern.

The beautiful is easy to discern.

You are going to be condemned

to live out the consequences

of your taste.

Really, really.

And if you have no taste,

you know, God help you.

Because you are self-condemned

to an appalling nightmare.

You won't be getting it.

All the subtle stuff will go by you

while your head is filled with

can't, nonsense, foolishness.

So again,

the metaphor of the dream

and of making choices based on beauty.

And beauty is downloaded

into the human cultural milieu

largely through dreams.

Other ideas may also come in dreams,

but I think studies have shown

that architects, designers,

people who are actually,

at the top of the pyramid

in any design process,

are very aware of their dreams,

their reveries, their insights.

So that's the way to set the compass,

not toward truth,

not toward the good,

not because these aren't fine things,

but because they're so slippery,

but toward beauty.

And with that in place,

to my mind,

life, hope follows

as a natural consequence.

You know, we talk a lot,

and I'm sure there are people in this room

who are well versed and connected

into the world of virtual reality,

which is a very hot topic

and may have all kinds of implications

for our future

and the evolution of consciousness.

But it's worth pointing out

that we have been making virtual realities

for a very, very long time.

That language, spoken language,

is the original code

for hacking virtual reality.

And when you sit the children

down around the fire

and begin to tell the old, old stories

and the pictures rise out of the flames,

that is virtual reality.

And so is,

and this is the point I want to make,

so are all the artifacts,

all the impedimentia

of human existence.

I mean, a virtual reality

built in aluminum, stucco, steel, and glass

is not immediately erased

the way you clear a screen.

And the cost of making it is great.

But Ur was a virtual reality.

The Agora at Athens,

ancient Rome,

Canterbury Cathedral,

these are virtual realities.

Men and women have toiled

at agriculture,

at warfare,

at child rearing,

at many, many activities

in the long march towards self-definition.

But more and more we have,

and this is true even of societies

that are aboriginal

and without economy,

when we free ourselves,

we are not freed into a void.

When we free ourselves,

we are freed into the dimension

in which art is an obligation.

And this is the great turning point.

I mean, I think that the design process,

whatever that means,

must become conscious,

global,

integrated.

The entire human domain,

which means the entire planet

and its surrounding near space,

should be enclosed and included

in a coherent plan

driven by human values

and a thirst for transformational beauty.

And I mention this because I believe

that many of the people capable

of making major contributions to that

are in this room

or within 100 miles of this room tonight.

And we are people of immense privilege.

By any way of slicing the planetary demographic,

even the poorest among us

who wheedled their way in here this evening

are in the top 1%

of the planetary social pyramid

on a planet where hundreds of millions

of people are starving.

The obligation

upon the conscious people

near the control surfaces,

near the levers

of the human machine

is immense.

So with freedom,

and I know this is a cliché,

but hopefully not in this context,

with freedom of that sort

comes enormous responsibility.

And it's paradoxical.

Responsibility to dream

and coexisting and simultaneous with that,

an obligation to awaken.

In other words, an obligation to make sense,

be non-trivial,

not to squander resources in foolishness.

An obligation to awaken

and an obligation to,

at the same time, dream.

And then, you know,

the rational mind screams out,

but this is impossible.

This is paradox.

But the subtle mind

understands that

we have now reached square one

by openly confronting

the necessity for paradox.

And by openly confronting

the fact that

we can only

enclose our dilemma

by speaking

in at least two modes at once,

we begin to actually honour

the complexity

of the situation.

And so tonight,

the thought I want to leave

with you

is

the simultaneous project

of awakening

and the simultaneous

project of entering

deeper into the dream

for the purpose of

cultivating,

evoking,

experiencing,

remembering,

transmitting

and communicating beauty

which feeds back into

the awakening process.

Otherwise, the awakening

will be traumatic

and demoralizing.

We will awaken

to an AIDS-ravaged Earth,

to ecotastrophe,

planetary warming,

complete collapse

of any concern

for the destiny

of future generations.

This awakening

must not be disempowering.

And the mantle

that can be spread

over the awakening

to counteract

the possibility

of disempowerment

is this wish

to evoke,

realize,

and serve

the project

of bringing ever greater

amounts of beauty

into the world.

I think that's the end

of the formal lecture

here this evening.

Thank you very much.

I didn't say,

we will have an intermission

of about 20 minutes

so you can

what do you say?

What do you say?

And then we will get back together

and undergo

the more creative process

and the more organic part

of the evening

which is Q&A.

And for those of you

who can't stay for that,

I appreciate your attention

and your concern.

And thank you all very much

and we'll assemble here

in 20 minutes.

You have shamanic use

in the Andes of South America.

People take,

you can be a strict constructionist

in the matter of psychedelics

or you can cast your net

widely.

There are many substances

in nature

which alter consciousness,

either stimulate or sedate

or create more ambiguous

and spectacular effects.

I would describe

the effects of detour

as a delirium.

Now, the shamans

who use these things

have special techniques

both of preparation

and of training

that allow them to control

or navigate around

the more unpleasant aspects

of detour.

It tends to provoke memory loss,

shall we say,

bizarre behavior

such as taking your clothes off

in public and so on.

And it creates a general ambiance

of uncertainty

about the nature of reality.

And what I mean by that is

you talk to people

who aren't there.

You smoke cigarettes

that aren't there.

You answer phone calls

when you're standing in the woods.

From the outside,

it looks pretty

fucked up, you know.

But some aboriginal

and native traditions

have managed to tame this,

at least in the shamanic context.

I guess in this matter

I'm a kind of strict constructionist

in that

when I say psychedelic,

I have something very specific

in mind that a substance

or a plant should do.

It should not inhibit clarity.

In other words,

not episodes of forgetfulness,

lack of memory,

passing out or confusion.

It shouldn't interfere with that

and it should transform thought

and it should be accompanied

by visual hallucinations

with eyes closed.

That's what I love.

That's what I live for.

People have said to me,

you're some kind of a vision show.

It's true.

And usually the people

who are saying this

were people who were great

enthusiasts of LSD.

LSD, I would never argue,

is not a psychedelic,

but you have to take massive amounts

and usually in combination

with some other substance

like hashish or mescaline

in order to elicit from LSD

what I'm after,

which is cascades of Niagara's,

of visual beauty in darkness

with eyes closed.

I have had deep psychological insights

on LSD.

I have had creative breakthroughs.

I have had bonding experiences.

But I found it difficult

to get the visions like I wanted them.

And the best I worked out with LSD

was I would smoke as much

Afghani hash as I could

at the top of the trip.

And then it would do the thing,

in fact.

It would do it.

The thing that led me to psilocybin

or to grow mushrooms

and explore that

was the descriptions of Wasson

and the early workers

that it was easy to visually hallucinate.

And I had read the earlier accounts

of Havelock Ellis

and people like that.

And it was about,

if you've ever read,

and I think it's The Dance of Life,

Havelock Ellis' description of mescaline.

He talks about alien buildings,

jeweled ruins,

fantastically efflorescent rainforests

growing and transforming before his eyes.

That's what I was after.

I wanted not a disturbance

in the optic nerve,

like on LSD you get those little things

that look sort of like fans

that creep across the walls.

That's more like something

in the visual cortex

than something in the mind,

it seems to me.

And I was fascinated,

and who isn't?

I mean, I never hear this question discussed,

but to me it was the obvious question

about these visions was,

where do they come from?

You know, how can I be astonished

by the contents of my own mind?

And astonished over and over again.

Where is this stuff coming from?

And I looked at Jung,

and I entertained the fantasy

of extraterrestrial contact,

and I still haven't answered this question.

But I think it's a question

which the critics

of the psychedelic experience

haven't wanted to deal with.

You know, if you read

the psychedelic literature,

you can tell what psilocybin does

to heart beat, sperm count,

to perception of tone, on and on.

They never talk about

the real content, you know,

because it's always individual.

And they say,

well, science can't handle

individual phenomena.

We measure the properties

of large numbers of people.

Well, that hopelessly

flattens the thing.

I know this is a long answer

to this question,

but it's worth laying all this out

because the lady's question

raises issues of

how do you categorize psychedelics,

which are, which aren't?

Are some dangerous?

And to what degree?

Certainly, detour is dangerous,

not only because of its delirium quality,

which makes you irresponsible,

but also,

because it dilates your pupils

and you can't, you stumble around.

And at higher doses,

it can cause convulsion and death,

which is a rare thing

from what I consider

the true psychedelics.

There is, if we want to take

an excursion here for a moment

and learn a little pharmacology,

there is, if you're going to talk

about pharmacology,

there's one concept

that you should get straight,

and that's called LD50.

It means lethal dose 50.

What does this mean?

Well, you have 20 rats

and you give them a certain amount of,

let's say, mescaline.

When half the rats die,

that dose,

expressed as milligrams per kilogram

of body weight,

is called the LD50.

And when pharmacologists assess

the danger in a drug,

they ask the following question.

What is the ratio of the LD50

to the effective dose?

And if the LD50 of a drug

is only 20 times

the effective dose,

that's considered an incredibly toxic,

dangerous,

and dubious drug.

A good drug is a drug

where the LD50 is 200 times

more than the effective dose.

In the case of LSD,

the LD50 for man

has never been determined.

That's how safe LSD is.

And we're talking about lethality here,

not, you know.

But so it's,

and so people say,

well, are there unsafe psychedelics?

And yes, you just look up the LD50s,

line them up,

and see which has the,

which have the better ratios.

By that measurement,

by that standard,

LSD is the most desirable.

But there's,

the LD50 of psilocybin

is very impressive.

You know, you can take

100 times the effective dose

of psilocybin and expect to live.

Mescaline, not.

Mescaline has a bad profile.

As an amphetamine,

if you took 20 times

the effective dose of mescaline,

you would probably die.

Of course,

an effective dose of mescaline

is nearly a gram of pure material.

700 milligrams.

If you took 20 times 700 milligrams,

you would be taking almost a complete,

you know, nearly two-thirds of an ounce

of mescaline,

and why should you survive?

After all,

stupidity does have consequences.

But really,

people always ask the question,

are psychedelics dangerous?

You know,

and they mean physically dangerous.

What should be said,

and it's recently been pointed out to me

that I don't say it very often,

is that the biggest danger

with psychedelics

is that while you are in that open state,

some moron

will mess with you

and either lay a suggestion

or plant an idea

or manipulate you

or scare you

or turn you in a way

that you wouldn't ordinarily go,

and this is why psychedelic etiquette

means knowing your tripping partners.

People who take psychedelics

with strangers at high dose

do come back with wild tales to tell

but I don't think you can do that

over and over again

without having some horrible thing befall you.

My mind is not,

I mean some people seem more resilient.

I am not.

You know,

people often ask me to trip them,

and I won't,

and it's not because of concern

for the legal system

or the fact that I am not licensed

for psychotherapy or any of that.

It's because I can't stand

it when people come apart

on psychedelics.

I am,

you know,

if you're interested in this subject

or if you share my sensitivity,

read Carl Jung's little book

called

On the Psychology of the Transference

and then you will understand.

In fact,

that should be a standard tome

for trippers.

Understand the transference.

Understand what it is,

how to fight it,

and you,

this is psychic martial arts.

Your psychic health

will be immeasurably improved

by understanding the dynamics

of the transference,

which is quite simple.

The book is not that thick.

Now to answer the lady's question.

When I took detour,

I had realities

of somebody distorting strange

and if I had been a personality

of a different sort,

I might have followed it deeper

but appeared to me

to be ambiguous and evil.

Not evil,

maybe evil.

What happened to me was

this was in Nepal years and years ago.

Nepali shamanism is based in part

on detour,

the taking of the seed capsules.

An English friend of mine

who had the room next to mine took it

and I took it in my room

and it was a situation

where to get to the facilities

I had to walk through his room

and he and I were friends

but we had a very slight rivalry going

for the attention of a woman

and I think this woman was not aware

that either of us was interested in her

but we were both aware

that the other one was aware

and midway through my trip

I decided I had to go to the bathroom

and so I stepped through

into this guy's room

and they were in bed together

having sex

and I guess I went outside

and then I,

the next morning

after sleeping many hours

I,

I encountered the guy

and I said how was your trip

and he said

it was wonderful

and I said yes

well I saw

and he said what did you see

and I said well I saw

that you were with Julieta

and he said

I thought so too

but she wasn't there

and so

you know

what conclusion do we draw from this

that this stuff is

well I'll tell you what took me off it finally

was about a week later

there seemed to be a rash of this detour taking

moving through the traveler community there

in this little Nepali village where I live

and about a week later

I was buying tomatoes in the market

and I encountered a different person

but this English friend of mine

and

he told me he'd been taking a lot of detour

and I said oh well that's interesting

I took it

I don't think I'll be taking it again

and as the conversation developed

I realized

he thought we were in his apartment

and

we were not

we were in the market

and

you know this tells you

it's time to dry out

anyway I used that as a springboard

to different subjects

you were very patient

next question

I hope I can remember what my question is

it's a test

I agree that

there's something

sort of mysterious about where

these psychedelic effects come from

and I refer again to the sort of classic psychedelic

psilocybin LSD

but

the fact that you

generally need to take

a substance or a drug

it's a material thing

does in some sense

sort of go in a strange way to reinforcing

a pretty basic scientific

almost mechanistic view of the universe

and

I just wondered if you had thought about that

or have any comments

well let me try to convince you otherwise

I mean I see what you're saying

you're saying that because this

transformative

possibly spiritual experience

is causally

connected to the act of taking

a

matter of a certain type

into your body

that it seems to argue for the

materialist proposition that

mind is an epiphenomenon

of the functioning of brain

and so forth

am I restating it right

what did you say

oh I see what you're saying

well

yes I mean

this relates to what I was saying

about the balkanization of epistemology

it's really strange to me

that science is in the act

of flinging open

the curtains

on a staggering vision

of what it is to be alive

in this cosmos

I mean we now can look back

through the Hubble and other telescopes

you know 13 billion years

to within 600 million years

of the primary explosion

that presumptively created

this universe

meanwhile we're tearing open

the nature of the human genome

the nature of the heart of the atom

science

this is the great great

age for the expansion

of the scientific vision

but the population

is somehow

incapable of staying up

with what's going on

and so

we have the greatest proliferation

of occultism in all forms

since the 16th century

it's almost as though

there's a bifurcation of the culture

the

the scientific

the makers of new science

are going deeper and deeper

in a direction that the rest of the public

not only cannot follow them into

but is actually

headed the other way

and it's a

it's a condemnation of our

educational system

that people have not understood

that science for all its flaws

is

the only tool

for understanding

the nature of reality

that has any kind of track record

whatsoever

the others just have a story to tell

you know

the Buddha story

the Jesus story

fine stories

but that's all they have is a rap

the amazing

you see

why is science different

somebody could just say

well but isn't it just a rap

well it's

it's

it is

but

it plays by slightly different rules

than these other

explanatory systems

science

is the only explanatory system

where you get points

for proving you're wrong

you know

I mean you form a hypothesis

you publish a paper

then you do further experiments

you discover your conclusions in paper A

were completely wrong

you retract paper A

and issue paper B

and your fellow scientists say

this guy does very good work

these are careful thinkers

you can bank on these people

they're not flaky

what religion operates like that

you know

can you imagine coming out of the ashram

and saying

having the guru say to his students

well we managed to

reduce that hypothesis to rubble

in morning meditation

didn't we

so

you know

it's

I

and then let me return

to answer that question

based on my original misunderstanding of it

and I would say this

you cannot

it is no reduction

of the psychedelic

experience

to say that it is caused

by drugs

because they are material

atomic systems

and therefore

we know all about them

every

electron

is the yawning mouth

of a wormhole

that leads to quadrillions

of higher dimensional universes

that are completely beyond

rational apprehension

matter is not lacking in magic

matter is magic

I mean

so when you hear these people

like David Dennett

and all these talk show materialists

running around

these people haven't gotten the news

that's coming out of quantum physics

I mean

you see there's a

there's a problem

or let me describe to you

the state of play here

the way science works

is science

respects

fidelity of theory

to experimental results

what really thrills a scientist

is when you have a theory

that makes a prediction

down to five or six decimal points

and then you perform an experiment

and it's spot on

down to five or six decimal points

and then everybody involved in what's going on

has extremely high confidence

that they're on the right track

well now only one science

is ever that good

physics

macro physics

by chemistry

it's good

but it's not that good

ecology

biology

demography

these are pretty loose

they play with numbers

but it's too high

it's a fig leaf

and by the time you get to

sociology or something like that

I mean these clowns

have just snuck under the tent

and should actually

be shown the door

and put back outside

with the card readers

so

so for several hundred years

you know

since let's say

Galileo

and serious physics

this is how

science has been

it's been a pyramid of envy

directed toward

the paradigmatic

the paradigmatic science

which was physics

and which could produce

this incredible

congruence of theory

and experimental data

well so then physics of course

charges forward

deeper into matter

asking deeper questions

well once you pass

below the level of the electron

it's like suddenly

it's like smoking DMT

or something

absolute madness

breaks out

where before you had

these wonderful theories

and they were feeding back

this data

now suddenly you have

backward flowing time

you have particles

which appear magically

on one side of an energy barrier

without apparently

crossing through it

you have non-locality

which seems to imply

that every particle

that exists

is somehow magically connected

with every other particle

we now have quantum

teleportation

we have black holes

we have singularities

and don't be fooled folks

what is a singularity?

it's just a place

where you agree

that the rules are cancelled

because you don't know

what the hell else to do

and it's fine you know

it used to be in physics

that they had one singularity

it was called the big bang

and so you say

well one singularity

essentially what science is saying

is give us one free miracle

and then we can

we can run it from there

but the theory of special relativity

then introduced the concept

of black holes

and of course black holes

are enormous gravitational masses

so massive that neither light

nor information can leave them

and what do black holes have

at the center of them?

well a singularity

well how many black holes

are there in the universe?

10 high 14?

that's a lot of singularities

if you're trying to produce

a theory without singularities

I mean essentially that's an admission

of total intellectual defeat

my god if there are 10 high 14 singularities

you're not even doing science

you just might as well be

you know channeling

Atlantis or something

so it troubles me

because I think this stuff is rich

that physics is feeding back

and that ultimately

a model of consciousness

will come out of studying

the deeper levels

of the behavior of matter

but the conclusions

are all going to support

the non-scientific

non-rational factions

in other words

Bell non-locality is real

all matter in the universe

is in contact

with all other matter

through some kind of higher space

based on their original connectivity

quantum teleportation

is a possibility

these violations

backward flowing time

and violations of rational casuistry

are all real

in other words

science meaning physics

at this point

prosecuted its agenda

of deconstructing nature

to the point where

it let loose the elves

of madness paradox

contradiction and peculiarity

and that can now

never be put back

I mean the dirty little secret is

that at bedrock

the universe is more like a DMT flash

than it is like an 18th century garden party

as we were previously assured

by the practitioners of science

I think that's enough ranting

on that subject

if you want to

excuse me

if you want to ask a question

I guess

what the consensus of the group is

is to go and stand

or I'll point to you

the reason we didn't

originally say

go and stand

is because

if you get a nut in the line

there's a certain fatedness

to their eventually getting

to the microphone

which is

to the microphone

which is

to the microphone

which is

to the microphone

which is

to the microphone

which is

to the microphone

which is

to the microphone

and if I am sensitive enough

in the pointing out process

could never happen

so this is that

we're trusting that you're saying

that's why I got up here early

yeah good

thanks for being patient

thanks Terence

I have a technical question

but I think it's an interesting one

and maybe important

your name has become

identified with the date 2012

because you have said that

at a certain

moment in the year 2012, an event will take place of tremendous or even

infinite novelty. And this is based on your work on what you call the time

wave and novelty theory and so on, which seems to indicate that around that date

something extraordinary will happen. And you confirm this by saying

that, interestingly and synchronistically perhaps, I'm not sure

whether that's what you appeal to, but you say that the Mayan calendar also

points to precisely the same date, and number three you say that at that time

also an astronomical event will take place,

namely, the conjunction of the winter solstice with the Galactic Center, an

event, which I've done a lot of research on. Right? The world is going to

only happens every 25,000 years, roughly 26,000 years.

So the last time that happened, our ancestors

were painting bison on the walls of caves.

It's a long, long cycle, this precession of the equinoxes

that brings the winter solstice around the circle

of the zodiac every 26,000 years.

And you say that this is going to happen

again in the year 2012.

What my question is concerned with is that third element,

namely this precession of the equinoxes in the year 2012.

As you know, the galactic center is not on the ecliptic,

is not on the zodiac, but is a bit above it.

And so the sun on the winter solstice will never be

in conjunction with the galactic center.

But an event that is linked with that,

and I think far more precise and significant,

is the fact that not in the year 2012,

but right now as we sit here, the winter solstice

is moving into conjunction with the place

where the galactic equator crosses the zodiac.

This is happening now, 1998, 1999.

And I'm wondering why you look to this year 2012

and the imprecise conjunction with the galactic center

rather than the precise and remarkable return

of the winter solstice to the galactic equator

where it was again 25,000 years ago when the cave paintings,

when the first bursts of self-consciousness were occurring

in our species.

And I raise this not because I think or know

that there's any truth to the meaning of this,

but I do find it exquisitely beautiful

that this is happening right now.

I'm wondering what you think about that.

Well, thank you for framing and imparting

an extremely intelligent question.

I mean, you got it almost all right and all the details

are right.

And for those of you who have no idea what that was all about.

I'm not, I'm not sure I can help you,

but for those of you who do know what that was all about.

Here's my response.

First of all, your statement

that the galactic center is now transiting the Solsticeal node

rather than in 2012, that's the only part of,

of, of the thing, you, of the twelfth century

you laid out that I would, yeah, that I would disagree with and here's why.

When we say the galactic center, it turns out when you turn the lights on on that concept

that it's extremely slippery.

The galaxy is not a basketball.

It has a center of mass which we can't determine from where we are because we're out on one

limb edge of it.

It has a center of luminosity.

It has a volumetric center.

I mean how do you in fact even define what the galaxy is because at its outer edges it

feathers out into extra galactic space.

Now what we're.

What we're arguing over here is a difference of 12 years if we accept the premise that

we're trying to locate a point in time where this conjunction of the galactic center and

the heliacal rising of the solsticeal sun occurs.

Now if you run out and buy a program to run on your PC like Voyager and you look at these

solsticeal sunrises.

Over the next 14 or 15 years it actually depends on the program you buy what the contention

is that is supported.

This is a deep subject very interesting raises issues of bio astronomy archaeo astronomy

galactic dynamics complicated issues.

I mean.

Because this is a very complex issue.

Now a book has come out in the last six months called Maya Cosmo Genesis 2012 by John Major

Jenkins.

He's a fine scholar.

I wrote an introduction to the book but he over hundreds of pages can educate you and

bring you up to speed about these issues.

If the Maya had never existed.

Wow.

We would still be looking at the end.

Of a new world.

a millennium based on the Gregorian calendar. Now, we tend to say, well, the Gregorian calendar

is out of sync with the Maya, that if there is a collective unconscious, then the European

mind somehow made a sloppy download of it because the Gregorian calendar is off-keyed

the Mayan by 12 years. But on a scale of a thousand years, that's a difference of 0.12%

or something. And on a scale of a billion years, what is being off by 12 years? On the

scale of a million years, what is being off by 12 years? So it seems crazy to me to have

violent factions.

I mean, the point is that something, the galactic mind, the intelligence of the species,

the integrated Gaian and galactic entelechy, something is trying to deliver a message.

And it is writ large, this message, in our largest systems of defining and understanding

time.

We are at the end of a cosmic cycle. You can say a thousand years if you're a Gregorianist,

or you can say a 5,300 and X year cycle if you're a Mayanist, or you can say a 26,000

year cycle if you're a processionist. But the point is, we are there.

We are there. We are in parking orbit around the eschaton. And it permeates our lives.

All you have to do is sit down, smoke a bomber, and look, and it's there. It is pregnant.

We are pregnant with this eschatological breakthrough. And people want it to arrive in the form

of ships the size of Manitoba hovering over the surface of the ocean. And they want it

to arrive in the form of ships the size of Manitoba hovering over the surface of the

ocean. And they want it to arrive in the form of ships the size of Manitoba hovering

over the oval office, perhaps offering oral sex. I'm not sure.

But you see, we are such ephemeral creatures in time. We're like mayflies or something.

Mayflies who only live for seven days. In other words, our temporal window perception

is so extreme. People say, well, nothing much ever seems to happen. Well, 100 years

A hundred years ago, there were no movies, automobiles,

airplanes, telephones, internet, atom bombs,

antibiotics, DNA, it's endless.

So in the space of, and yet people say,

nothing much ever seems to happen.

An incredible ability to not register radical change

seems to be a precondition of existing

in the presence of radical change.

Now, for those of you who care about my theories

in this area of mathematics and deconstruction

of the I Ching and analogizing to the Mayan calendar,

it is a mathematical game, it is an intellectual game.

I discern patterns in nature that cause me

to believe that science, which I recently praised,

has overlooked very important aspects of reality

that you don't need an atom smasher, or a DNA sequencer,

or a probe to Ganymede to register.

And what do I mean by that?

Science has overlooked two aspects,

aspects of nature that as you sit here,

I believe you can hear my case

and that you will find in my favor.

Here is what it is.

The first thing which science has not taken on board

is the fact that as you get nearer and nearer

the moment in time that we call the present,

things become more and more complicated.

Now that may seem like a trivial statement,

but there's no reason for the universe to work like that.

Why does the universe go from simple to complicated?

Why do you get, at first, moments after the big bang,

an ocean of free electrons

at such a state of temperature and energy

that no molecular bonds can form,

atomic systems can't even form,

because the, the-

bond strength is overwhelmed by the thermal energy in the system. Then it

cools down and atoms condense, a more complicated thing than electrons, by

orders of magnitude. Further cooling, further nuclear cooking of the most

primitive elements, hydrogen and helium, in gravitationally aggregated masses

called stars, cooks out the heavier elements. They emerge. They were never

seen before until fusion began to occur in these hydrogen masses. And these

fusion processes cook out iron, sulfur, carbon. Bingo! Carbon molecules! Now an

order of magnitude in their complexity,

greater

than atoms as atoms are compared to electrons and then you know and i'm compressing 13 billion years

of emergence here into 30 seconds then out of the molecular soup you get long chain polymers

out of the long chain polymers you get molecular transcription systems i.e prebiotic stuff

out of that you get non-nucleated dna out of that nucleated dna out of that membranes organelles

organisms higher organisms differentiation of tissue our dear selves culture language technology

and the eschaton now why this is so obvious i mean leaving out the eschaton if you like

but all the rest of it is self is totally self-apparent

why doesn't science take that on board as a major problem in the description of nature

the emergence of complexity will you ask a scientist they say well you see

these are separate domains of nature how atoms become molecules has nothing to do with how

animals become human beings this is this is just some kind of compartmentalized

thinking where you don't want to come to grips with the overarching metaphors that are working

on various levels the advent of the understanding of the fractal ordering of nature now makes it

clear that voting patterns in orange county distribution of anemones on the great barrier

reef and the cratering of europa all follow the same power laws so that's the first thing

which science has staring in its in the face and has never taken on board

now i said there were two things the second thing is related to the first

a double shot of espresso you're really getting your money's worth here

uh the second thing which science has taken on board has refused to take on board is that this

process of complexification that i just described to you as you approach the place in time called

the present happens faster and faster that was not necessarily implied by the first observation

the first observation was simply that there was a process which was moving from simple

to complex now we have the concept of a process which is ever accelerating

as it moves from the simple to the complex so uh more and more happens

as you approach the present and since these processes have been running since the big bang

there is no argument to be entertained that they will reverse themselves

suddenly no they're not going to reverse themselves after 13 billion years duh so

so then but the implication of that carried to its ultimate extreme leads to a conclusion most

people find too wild to entertain if the universe is evolving deeper and deeper into complexity

faster and faster and if now in a human lifetime we can see a small portion of this curve it's no

longer appears flat to us because of our nearness in relation you understand I'm

saying and that we can actually discern the curve and so that means I believe

that by extrapolating this process we should then logically conclude that we

are very near relative to the life of the universe we are very near to the

place where this ramping up of complexity will become so excruciatingly

rapid that more change will happen in a single week than happened in the

previous 13 billion years and that then there will come a moment where more will

happen in a single minute than happened in the previous 13 billion and then a

moment will come when more will happen in us in six point five five times ten to

the

you

I 23rd and erg seconds more will happen than has happened people say well but

that's crazy I mean how what kind of universe is that that ramp that mmm well

wait a minute what's so crazy about this let's look at what the competition is

peddling what the competition would have you believe is that the universe

sprang from nothing in a single

moment for no reason well now whatever you think about that theory in the

interests of being awake please notice that that is the limit case for

credulity you know what I mean by that I mean that if you can believe that you

can believe anything that is the most improbable proposition the human mind can

conceive of I challenge you to top it you know

I mean I know the Scientologists think God is a clam on another planet but I

don't think that tops this idea that the universe sprang from nothing in a

single moment for no reason that is the art that's article-of-faith number one I

say no no this is if we're talking about universes that spring from nothing right

I'm really thinking that it is we are talking about interactions like if there's no knew Church that does not have a story

universes that spring from nothing, if we're going to talk like that, then surely such

universes occur in a situation of great complexity. In other words, if we're going to look for

an enormous eruption of emergent phenomena, an enormous sudden unexpected download of novelty,

we shouldn't look in a domain of zero space, zero time, zero energy, zero anti-entropic

organization. That's the worst place to look. That's the least likely place where such a

singularity would spring out. Where should you look if you believe in this jabberwock,

this chimera, this particular beast? Where should you hunt this snark?

You should hunt it in domains of immense complexity, where you have matter, energy,

light, chemistry, language, machines, people, cultures, intentionality, minds, minds, minds.

And if you throw all that stuff together and shake it up, it's maybe not a sure thing that you will

get a singularity, but you're certainly betting right. Now you've figured it out. So I'm

going to go back to the idea that science is extremely hostile to the idea that the

universe is complexifying and complexifying more and more rapidly. Why? It's just a matter,

it's just a historical issue. It has to do with the fact that 19th century English biology

was extremely hostile to what it called deism. Deism was the reigning religious paradigm

of the 19th century.

And it's the idea that science is extremely hostile to the idea that the universe is

complex. It's the idea that God is a clockmaker, and that God made the universe and wound

it up like a clock and went away. And what irked those, what irked Darwin and Lyle and

those people was the idea that the universe has a purpose. You see, they thought that

if it has a purpose, this somehow means there is a God. And they weren't up for that. They

were trying to build rational science into a…

Into a tool for understanding nature. I think we have grown beyond that. And that's a, it's

foolish to wear those tight 19th century high-button shoes. We can believe that the universe is

following an organizational vector. We can believe that the universe is under the influence

of a strange attractor. We can believe that the universe is pulled toward a future denouement,

was pushed by the unfolding of causal necessity. We can believe all of that without evoking

the 19th century concept of God. Now, why do I spend so much time on this? And what's

so great about all this? Here's what's so great about all this. If you will join me

in this belief that the universe works as I have described, it's an engine for the generation

of complexity.

And it preserves complexity. And it builds on complexity to ever higher levels. If you

entertain this, guess what happens? It's like a light comes on on the human condition.

Who are we in my story? Well, first let me tell you who are we in science's story. We

are nobody.

We are lucky to be here. We are a cosmic accident. We exist on an ordinary star at

the edge of a typical galaxy in an ordinary part of space and time. And essentially our

existence is without meaning or you have to perform one of those existential pas-de-douxs

where you confirm meaning or, you know, one of these postmodern.

soft shoes. But if I'm right, that the universe has an appetite for novelty, then we are the

apple of its eye. Suddenly, cosmic purpose is restored to us. We left the center of the

cosmic stage in the 13th century and haven't been back since. But this idea says, no, people

matter. You are the cutting edge of a 13 billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts

matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose, to add to the complexity. Your enemy, disorder,

entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness. And so suddenly then, you have a morality,

you have an ethical arrow, you have contextualization,

and the processes of nature. You have meaning. You have authenticity. You have hope. You have the

cancellation of existentialism and positivism and all that late 20th century crapola that people used

to entertain back in the old days. So that's why I am so keen for the idea of novelty, because it

seems self-evident.

And, you know, we can argue about whether the eschaton will arrive in 2000 or 2012 or 3000, but I cannot believe that there is anybody in this room tonight who can, that the hardest thing to imagine is human history going on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of more years.

That's impossible.

We have, we see around us the processes that make of history a self-limited game. The clock's ticking, folks. You think we can do gene splicing and internet and psychedelic drugs and manipulation of our genetic material and star flight and atom anti-matter and quantum teleportation and all these things? You can extrapolate that 500 years into the future? Don't be ridiculous.

No, history is some kind of a phase transition. It only lasts about 25 000 years. Some people think that's a long time. Some people think it's a short time. It depends on where you stand. I think of it as snap. You know? One moment you're hunting ungulates on the plains of Africa and the next moment you're hurling a gold eternally.

superconducting extra stellar device toward Alpha Centauri with all of

mankind aboard in virtual space being run as a simulation in circuitry you

know it's just first the one thing then the other thing but now history which

lasts 25,000 years is this weird period where you're neither fish nor fowl you

know you're not the hunting ape anymore but you are not yet the 16 dimensional

digital god you know and and in that transition phase there is confusion

there is angst but now we're at the end we have no I

I know

maintain anybody who's peddling angst and peddling pessimism and peddling all

this stuff is just that so two minutes ago question I I heard you on the radio

being interviewed a while back talking about its DMT is that the that is and that

got me really interested and you you said

that it was basically unavailable from me well is that your question yeah

Hardman no I I was really wondering

yeah I I had interpreted it would said it was pretty much unavailable period

and I was wondering if in fact was available and i'm if not i mean that

just sort of renewed my interest in psychedelic Glitch now you think is the

second best choice well first let me say because it's an and I'd like to hear

maybe just a little more about my DMT okay well first thing let me say which

is a piece of practical advice the psychedelic community is is cleverly

invisible because our choices in gender expression fashions over and so on have

by crypto osmosis come to dominate the values of the culture we can no longer

tell ourselves from from straight people so the only opportunity where we really

come out of the woodwork is a thing like this and but then of course there's a

tendency to fall into old think and everybody focus on the alpha male spiel

my

I stir at the front of the room so let me point out to you I'm leaving I'm going

home to Hawaii tomorrow morning but this is your community this is your community

and whatever it is that you think you need there are a dozen people in this

room who can help you out and I am not one of them

because I have a different assignment but look around and and of course be

careful but after all this is about consciousness right I mean if you're not

conscious enough to conduct that social transaction without flubbing it up

that's probably God's way of telling you you shouldn't be proceeding toward high

doses anyway

Yeah. Oh, you wanted me to say more about it.

The black and red poncho.

The man in the black and red poncho.

Yeah, I mean, in a way it's impossible to talk about DMT,

but on the other hand it's fun to try to talk about it

because it pushes the horse of language into a lather.

Basically, when you smoke DMT, what happens is pure confoundment.

And, you know, I'm trying to speak generally here

in the sense that different people are confounded by different things.

So, of course, it addresses you personally.

Your level and tolerance for confoundment is a very personal thing.

People have asked me about DMT.

Is it dangerous?

And the real answer is only if you fear death by astonishment.

You know, and you deliver that line and then people laugh,

except the people who've done DMT don't laugh

because they understand, you know, death by astonishment

is no remote possibility.

Death by astonishment is right there.

You know, when was the last time you were,

you know, astonished?

Unless I smoke DMT, it doesn't happen to me.

Amazed occasionally.

Astonished never.

Astonishment is when your jaw hangs for a long time, you know.

And DMT is simply confounding.

Now, how could something be that confounding?

I mean, you can imagine taking a drug and realizing that you should

treat your partner better or realizing that God really exists

or realizing that you should exercise more

or realizing that the planet is an organized intelligence.

But how could something be as confounding as DMT is?

Well, I think the answer to that,

and it took me a while to get to this,

is that the reason it's so confounding is because

its impact is on the language-forming capacity itself.

So the reason it's so confounding is because the thing which is trying

to look at the DMT is infected by it,

by the process of inspection.

So DMT does not provide an experience

which you analyze.

Nothing so tidy goes on.

The syntactical machinery of description

undergoes some kind of hyperdimensional inflation instantly.

And then, you know, you cannot tell yourself

what it is that you understand.

In other words, what DMT does can't be downloaded

into as low-dimensional a language.

It can't be translated into language as English.

And so you're like...

I remember a bee movie I saw when I was a kid,

and it was set somewhere in Mexico,

and there was a big swamp,

and there was a dinosaur in the swamp.

And at one point, this campesino comes,

who encounters the dinosaur,

comes rushing out of the swamp,

and the patron of the ranch is there,

and this terrified guy is there in this serape.

He can only point to the forest

and sort of make a croaking sound.

And that's what English allows you to do

with the experience of DMT.

You just come down a sputtering mess,

if it works.

You just come down saying, you know,

my God, you know, it's not what I thought it was.

And this is after you've done it 20 times.

It's not what I thought it was.

It's not what I can think it is.

It's something...

And I...

My intellectual arrow

and how I brought myself up

in terms of all these things was,

I am a rationalist,

and I am interested in testing and verifying

and proceeding to define truth

by non-exotic means.

In other words,

no archangels, no none of that.

And as I matured intellectually,

I began to eliminate mystery from the world.

You know, I'd look into some spiritual discipline,

conclude, no, that's a bunch of crap.

I'd go to some teacher,

conclude, no, this guy is a weasel.

I tested...

I sought the weird,

but with an attitude of critical skepticism.

And I assumed blithely

that with this flashlight,

I would soon prove there were no elves

out there in the darkness.

Turns out, no, no.

This is the way to proceed.

Because stuff which is malarkey

will be exposed as malarkey instantly.

You know, you just go to the guru and say,

what can you show me?

And if the guy wants you to sweep up

around the ashram for a dozen years or so,

you say, no, I'm out of here.

But when you get to DMT, it delivers.

It delivers.

It is as strange as anything can be.

It is...

It is not only stranger than you suppose

as you sit here,

it is stranger than you can suppose.

And what makes me wild about this is

we're not talking about something

that you have to go 500 miles up a jungle river

and live with primitive people

and study techniques for 30 years.

We're talking about something

which if I had,

a pipe loaded with it in my hand,

each one of you would be 30 seconds away

from what I'm talking about.

Well, you know, you've tripped

and yeah, you lived in Paris

and you went to Trebizond and all these things,

but nothing like this ever descended.

It's not...

It's so near.

It's not attained by practicing tantric techniques

or building up...

It's none of that.

It's just near, very near.

One toke away is this absolutely reality-dissolving,

category-reconstructing, mind-boggling possibility.

And I feel like this is a truth that has to be told.

I'm like the campesino

running out of the swamp

and saying, you know, over here,

you know, the orange thing.

Oh, do that.

All right, that's enough about DMT.

You've got to take hold here.

Thank you very, very much.