Light Of The 3rd Millenium (Austin)

All right. Wonderful to see so many people turned out after having just been here a scant year ago.

I'm delighted that they invited me back.

The deal is no jokes about Camaro raffles, no jokes about Moldavite suppositories.

So just consider it as if it didn't happen.

No, it is a pleasure to be here.

I'm fascinated by this green and intelligent part of Texas.

I grew up with all the prejudices against Texas that you have in western Colorado,

where Texans arrive to kill our elk once a year and then depart and leave us once again bereft of glory and drawl.

So I did a radio show.

Some of you may have heard it.

And it was an occasion to be up at the campus.

Wonderful university.

I see a lot of universities, and a lot of them look like Air Force bases.

And you're very fortunate to have the University of Texas at Austin.

There are some great people associated with that faculty.

How many people have read at least one of my books?

A lot of people.

Well, so what I'm thinking is, I have some things on my mind, and I'll run through that.

But I'd like to leave a lot of time for Q&A, because my thing has several facets.

And maybe you're interested in Salvia Divinorum, and I'm raving on about modeling and animation.

Or maybe you're interested in the end of history, and I can't shut up about serotonin metabolism.

So this is all part of the picture, but driven by your needs and your agenda, I think it's much more fruitful.

It's much more fun for me.

The audiences in these things are the great joy.

And I should say to you, as I say to all my audiences, the psychedelic community is still small and tight.

And we look pretty much like everybody else out there.

That's part of our victory, I might point out.

It's not that we came to look like them, it's that they finally let it down, and now they all look like us.

But a gathering like this is an occasion to actually see your local psychedelic community.

So take a look around.

Somebody in this room has what you need.

And it's like an intelligence test, isn't it?

But all social interaction is, it turns out.

Okay.

I guess I should bring you up to date on what I've been doing before I plunge into the heart of this,

since my own life is my own adventure in how I then read the larger picture of reality.

I think everybody sees their life that way.

After all, if you're not the hero in your novel, what kind of novel is it?

You need to do some heavy editing.

Robert Anton Wilson once said, he said,

we should define reality as a plot run by a closely knit group of powerful insiders.

Yourself and your friends, of course.

I mean, if you don't believe that, you have a loser's scenario.

And who needs a loser's scenario?

So what I've been doing since I saw you last is basically a lot of traveling.

I went to South Africa last October, and that was an education.

It was a non-stop, two-week intensive education in humanness, third world colonial politics, Dutch-Africaner history.

A whole bunch of things I knew very little about.

It was inspiring, challenging, amazing.

Africa, the human home, is right now the great theater of struggle for the human soul.

How we deal with the political and social problems of Africa is going to say a great deal about how we will be judged by the future.

The problems of Africa are almost entirely created from outside of Africa.

And the solutions which are being produced on native soil need all the nurturing and support that we who cheer on the brotherhood of man can give it.

And then, in February, I went to Australia.

And if I had known about Australia what I know now, 30 years ago, I'm sure my life would be very different.

I said last night at a book signing, it's weirdly like Texas.

I mean, it's large, it's largely empty, and it has a very eccentric population of hard-driving folks

who are lovely to party with and know how to barbecue.

So, what more can I say?

Okay, so enough with personal reportage, local color, putting us all at ease, and all the rest of that forensic malarkey.

Cut to the chase.

When I think about talking to an audience like this, I go through my toolkit and try to say, you know,

what is cogent, what's meaningful, what can bring us forward?

And there seem to be, it's a changing list, but at the moment what seems to be going is

the old perennial psychedelic alteration of consciousness for purposes of personal exploration,

social reformation, creation of a new art, a new politic.

That's one of the major pieces of the puzzle.

Another major piece is the new communications technologies.

And I mean not only the internet, but the software that allows us, each and every one of us,

to be animators, filmmakers, visually expressive people who can produce emotionally moving works

of great depth and beauty.

This is something that technology has brought to us.

And strangely enough, a technology largely produced by psychedelic heads, people like ourselves.

I told you last year, I think when we discussed drugs and technology, that the only difference

between a computer and a psychedelic was one was too large to swallow.

Well, you know, great progress has been made in 12 months.

In another three or four years, we will be able to swallow the computer.

Some of us may never be able to swallow it.

The third piece of the puzzle, which is sort of mine alone to play with, since no one else

wants to be this publicly crazy, is the whole business of novelty theory, the approach of a singularity

theory in time, that is sculpting the human and natural world, and that is so large an

object in the intuitive sphere of human beings, that it almost has religious overtones.

And then the question for me, and the question for you, I suppose, is how much of this can you

take without having to take at all, how much of these ideas can you imbibe without having

to go the whole distance?

And the answer is, you know, it's a personal matter for each person to feel into their

circumstance, which means their history, both psychedelic and non-psychedelic, and then to

feel into the projection of their future.

Do you think you are repeating the lifestyles and algorithms of your parents and grandparents

ad infinitum back to Adam?

Or do you feel like you've stepped to the front of the train of human evolution, that you are

making yourself new every day?

If we reach too far back into the stabilizing metaphors of the past, we get rigidity, habit,

limitation.

If we step too quickly into the unlimited freedom of the future, we lose our grounding.

Socialism did this over the past hundred years.

And because it abandoned any contact with a realistic human psychology, the best intended

people ended up creating nightmare societies.

If your theory is not true to the nature of humanness, you will end up beating human beings like

metal on the anvil of your ideology.

And this creates great human suffering and historical catastrophe.

And I maintain that our own society suffers from a failure to adequately model and reflect

the true nature of human beings.

We have ideas, we have ideals that get in the way of realism and immediate experience.

And when I was thinking about all of this and how to put it into a metaphor that would be appealing and amusing

and lead people to look deeper into these things, I began to play with the idea, it's a religious idea.

You all have heard, although probably more often in English than in Latin, the thought,

in principio, in principio, ad verbum, ad verbo caro factum est, which means, in the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh.

This is the great overarching myth of Western religion.

It equally informs Islam, Christianity, Judaism.

These three great flavors of monotheism all accept this primary statement,

in the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh.

What does it mean for a moment, taken away from the tired exegesis of the cults that have hammered at it for so long?

What does it mean in and of itself?

It means that language is somehow the privileged medium of exchange between human beings and the divine.

It means that the descent of the word into flesh makes the flesh more than flesh, makes the word more than the word.

The union of flesh and word launches the cosmic drama of fall and redemption that is the ur-myth of Western society.

And for centuries and centuries, we've concentrated on one end of this story of the fall and the redemption.

We have concentrated on the fall.

But meanwhile, through all the grimy betrayals and bloody backsliding of human history,

history, the word has quietly advanced its agenda.

And I've been thinking a lot about this recently, because in a new book I'm writing,

I'm writing a lot about spoken language, speech.

And I've come to a conclusion that typical of me is far from orthodoxy and far from much cover provided by anybody else's ideas on this matter.

I've come to the conclusion that language is very old, thinking is very old, communicating is very old by glance, by gesture, by dance, by meme, by intuition.

But speech is very recent.

It's a technological innovation as fresh as the Pentium chip or the spinning wheel.

It's something someone invented somewhere.

It's the most successful technological leap forward ever made.

It's the discovery of symbolic signification that a noise, meaning nothing, can by convention be given a meaning.

And that that meaning will then attend that utterance wherever it occurs in the presence of those who have joined in the agreement that attaches the symbol to the meaningless utterance.

It's a coding breakthrough.

Somebody hacked this about 35,000 years ago.

And immediately, as forms of media have a way of doing, it swamped the previous methods of communication.

Because, A, it worked in the dark.

Suddenly, evenings were not so boring anymore.

It worked in the dark.

It also, the touchy-feely forms of communication were generally one-on-one and related probably to having sex or aggressive physical encounters.

But, suddenly, one voice could reach many.

And many could respond.

And virtual reality was born at that moment.

Not here in the late 20th century, but at that moment.

Because acoustical environments, laden with symbolic meaning, became the name of the game.

Stories is what we call these things.

And they are the proper use of the advanced form of media known as human speech.

It's using human speech to create three-dimensional scenarios that unfold and everyone is carried along with the drama and the wonder of it.

From that beginning, and in a series of successively accelerating leaps, the word has made its way into the world.

It's interesting that straight linguists and paleolinguists believe human language is no more than 35,000 years old.

Imagine that.

We possess homo sapiens sapiens skeletons 110,000 years old.

People like the person who rode with you on the bus yesterday.

People that modern.

And yet, the experts tell us no one spoke until 35,000 years ago.

No one wrote until 5,000 or 6,000 years ago.

Reading and writing is simply a carrying forward of the original program of signification.

First using acoustical signals, and then some other hacker had the brilliant idea,

well, if we can use sound to carry abstract associations,

why not abstract symbols to carry abstract associations?

And writing was born.

And what writing allows is expansion of the database because things are not dependent on the wetware of human memory

to survive from generation to generation.

Suddenly, the mush of brain is replaced by the durability of wood and stone and clay.

And these things then become the medium upon which the primary database of the culture is being carried forward.

Well, the rest of the story you know, and this is not a lecture in the history of communication.

Each succeeding refinement in communication has brought the word deeper into its association with the flesh,

which intel the present.

And at this moment, there is a kind of a, what dynamisists call a cusp,

a turning of the system upon its axes.

And the word is now beginning to make the return journey

to the mysterious and hidden source from which it descended.

In other words, spirit is now beginning to disentangle itself from matter.

The 20th century will be remembered as the great clash point or the great arena of conflict

between the triumphal positivist and rational systems that European thought has developed over the past 300 years

and the new irrational systems of thought which anthropology cheerfully imported into white high culture

in the guise of reportage about the primitive.

But this reportage about the primitive turns out to be a kind of oroboric conundrum,

the snake taking its tail in its mouth.

In the past 100 years, as these super technologies have been developed in the West,

the smashing of atoms, the invention of radio, television, computers, immunology, so forth and so on,

data has been arriving about the practices of aboriginal cultures all over the planet,

that they dissolve ordinary realities, ordinary cultural values,

through an interaction, a symbiosis, a relationship to local plants

that perturb brain chemistry.

And in this domain of perturbed brain chemistry,

the cultural operating system is wiped clean.

And something older, even for these people,

something older, more vitalistic, more in touch with the animal soul,

replaces it, replaces the cultural operating system.

Something not determined by history and geography,

but something writ in the language of the flesh itself.

This is who you are.

This is true nakedness.

You are not naked when you take off your clothes.

You still wear your religious assumptions,

your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.

When you shed the cultural operating system,

then, essentially, you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.

Desmond Morris called it the naked ape.

And it's from that position,

a position outside the cultural operating system,

that we can begin to ask real questions about

what does it mean to be human?

What kind of circumstance are we caught in?

And what kind of structures, if any,

can we put in place to assuage the pain

and accentuate the glory and the wonder

that lurks waiting for us

in this very narrow slice of time

between the birth canal and the yawning grave?

In other words, we have to return to first premises.

So, I've been thinking about this a lot.

And at first, it seemed to me only a metaphor,

this phrase,

culture is your operating system.

But because I travel around a lot

and get that jolting experience frequently

of, let's say, leaving London on a foggy evening

and arriving in Johannesburg 14 hours later

to a sweltering day in a city of 14 million

on the brink of anarchy,

I get to change my operating system frequently.

And so I notice the relativity of these systems.

And some work for some things

and some for others.

For instance, if you are a positivist,

if you're running Positivism 4.0,

you can't support UFOs.

Positivism 4.0 does not support UFOs.

If, on the other hand,

you're running your Rancho Book 5.1

as your operating system,

UFOs and a number of other things

can get in through the door.

That is what we would technically say

is a more tolerant operating system

or its plug-in support special effects

denied the positivist.

Well, it's fun to think this way

because it shows you

that you don't have to be the victim of your culture.

It's not like your eye color

or your height or your gender.

It's fragile.

It can be remade

if you wish it to be.

And then the question is,

well, how does one

download a new operating system?

Well, first of all,

you have to clear some space on your disk.

The best way to do this

is probably with a pharmacological agent.

You think of some

while I have a drink of water.

Psilocybin is an excellent disk cleaner.

You can put a lot of things in the trash

and have them just disappear

with a psilocybin upgrade.

Other pharmacological agents

that will clear your disk

are ayahuasca.

And, of course,

these are gentle clearings of the disk

which take five, six, seven hours.

If you're in a hurry

to dump that old data

and leap right into the new operating system,

click on the button marked

dimethyltryptamine,

a compressed disk erasure

will immediately be downloaded,

unstuffed, binhexed,

implemented, installed, run,

and you will find yourself

with an entirely different head.

Now, shamans have always known,

though they may not have used

the kind of language

I'm using here.

Shamans have always known this trick.

What trick?

It has two facets.

First of all,

that culture is an operating system.

That's all it is.

And that the operating system

can be wiped out

and replaced

by something else.

So, in essentially,

what's going on among shamans

and those who resort to them

for curing

and counseling

and so forth

is somebody's running

a slightly more advanced

operating system

than the customer.

The shaman is in possession

of certain facts

about plants,

about animals,

about healing,

about human psychology,

about the local geography,

about mojo

of many different sorts

that the client

is not aware of.

The client is running

culture-lite.

The shaman paid

for the registered

and licensed version

of the software

and is running

a much heavier version

of the software

than the client.

I think we should all aspire

to make this upgrade.

It's very important

that you have

all the bells

and whistles

on your operating system.

Otherwise,

somebody is going to be able

to get a leg up

on you.

Well,

what's wrong

with the operating system

that we have?

Consumer capitalism

5.0

or whatever it is.

Well,

it's dumb.

It's retro.

It's very non-competitive.

It's messy.

It wastes the environment.

It wastes human resources.

It's inefficient.

It runs on stereotypes.

It runs on a low sampling rate,

which is what creates stereotypes.

Low sample rates

make everybody appear alike

when in fact

the glory is in

everyone's differences.

And the current operating system

is flawed.

It actually has bugs in it

that generate contradictions.

Contradictions such as

we're cutting the earth

from beneath our own feet.

We're poisoning

the atmosphere

that we breathe.

This is not intelligent behavior.

This is a culture

with a bug

in its operating system

that's making it

produce

erratic,

dysfunctional,

malfunctional behavior.

Time to call

a tech.

And who are the techs?

The shamans

are the techs.

Well,

so I think

you get the idea.

Very important

to upgrade

your operating system

by dumping

obsolete

cultural subroutines.

They are simply

taking up disk space.

They are not

advancing

you

in any way

whatsoever.

Now,

a very large group

of people

who followed

this advice

and rebuilt

their operating systems

in the 1960s

went on

then

to build

this

most amazing

of all

cultural artifacts,

the Internet.

The Internet

is light

at the end

of the tunnel.

I don't care

if it's being used

to peddle pornography.

I don't care

if it's being trivialized

in a thousand ways.

Anything

can be trivialized.

The important point

is

that

it is leveling

the playing field

of

global

society.

It is creating

de facto

an entirely

new set

of political realities.

None of the

constipated

oligarchic structures

that are

resisting this

were ever asked.

Their greed

betrayed them

into

investing

in this.

in the first place

without ever fully grasping

what the implications of it were

for their larger agenda

the internet basically

means you can now be

as free as

you are motivated

to be

as free as you dare to be

Tim Leary years ago

it was something he used to say

that never got quoted as much

as turn on, tune in, drop out

but it seemed to me

it was maybe better advice

and he used to say

find the others

well

you know, if you are a gay kid

in Fargo, North Dakota

if you are a mescaline enthusiast

in Winnipeg

if you are a student of alchemy

in Moose Jaw

community is pretty much

out of reach for you

or it was

until the coming of the internet

and the internet

introduces everybody

no matter how weird

no matter how marginalized

no matter how peculiar

to the fact that

there are others

like you

there are others

like you

find the others

make common cause

realize

that

it's the deals you cut

and the friends you make

that determine

where you are going to be standing

when the flash hits

I mean that's just

obvious

and

by

you see the cultural game

is a game of

uniformitarianism

cultural myths

are that

we

are all alike

we Americans

each created equal

I mean if you can believe that

at an operational level

then I have some bridges

I would like to sell you

it's a necessary truth

to do political business

but it is not

the truth

the truth is

that you are not

created equal with yourself

from day to day

leave alone

any comparison

with anybody else

you are not

the person you were

yesterday

nor the person

you will be next week

what is an observation like that

what shadow does it cast

in a world of all people

are created equal

these are clashes

of operating systems

there is an axiom in one

all created equal

and an axiom in the other

each divergent

these things can't be

parsed

they can't be brought together

so

culture plays a game

of simplification

if you can make people

think alike

they will buy a like

they will worship a like

and if

you know

politics demands it

they will kill

a like

so

the uniformitarian

agenda

of culture

is not

an agenda

friendly

to you

or to me

or to any

other

individual

and if you start out

from that point of view

you will soon

realize

that culture

is not

your friend

now this is not

exactly

PC

to say

what with everybody

running around

recovering their

Latvian roots

and their

Irishness

and their

this

their

whatever

culture

is not

your friend

if you define

yourself

as a member

of a group

of any group

know

that that is a

gross

simplification

and that everything

about you

that is interesting

and unique

is

betrayed

by defining

yourself

in that way

you know

most racism

is practiced

by people

of the race

that they are

making racial

judgments about

white people

have far more

racial opinions

about white people

than any other

racial group

because that is

where they spend

their time

these gross

simplifications

betray humanity

betray uniqueness

make sane

politics

impossible

what we have to do

is get back

to

the reality

of the flesh

the reality

of the individual

identity

this is how

we come

packaged

a race

that is an

abstraction

these days

you have to have

three years

of genetics

under your belt

to give a

satisfactory

definition

of the word

if we are really

going to go to

the math

on it

I mean

it is an

abstraction

of modern

science

it is a notion

so far removed

from anything

you and I

come in contact

with

that we should

just junk it

what we need

to celebrate

is the individual

it is

have you not

noticed

I certainly

have

that every

historical

change

you can think

of

in fact

any change

you can think

of

forget about

human beings

any change

in any system

that you can

think of

is always

ultimately

traceable

to one

unit

in the system

undergoing a

phase state

change

of some sort

no group

there are no

group

decisions

those things

come later

the genius

of creativity

and of

initiation

of activity

always

lies

with

the individual

and it is

very interesting

that this is

what the

psychedelics

address

they address

us uniquely

as individuals

you can sit

next to

somebody

who drank

from the

same bottle

you did

and be

perfectly

confident

that their

experience

has very

little

congruency

with your

own

well

so then

if we

let the

scales

of cultural

values

fall from

our eyes

and try

not to

look at

the world

through the

eyes of

science

or

democracy

or

capitalism

or

Christianity

what

what is

there

beyond

ideology

what are

the facts

of the

matter

as I

see it

the most

visible

facts

on the

surface

of things

on the

surface

of being

I see

the law

of increasing

complexity

things have

gotten more

complicated

through time

I

have never

met anyone

who could

successfully

argue

against

this

that doesn't

mean it's

true

but it

means

that it

may be

as

Wittgenstein

used to

say

true

enough

true

enough

that

as you

approach

the present

moment

in the

only area

of the

universe

which we

have accurate

data about

which is

this planet

things have

things become

more complicated

a million years

a million years ago

there were no

human civilizations

a thousand years ago

there were no

machines to speak

of

a hundred years ago

there was no

communication infrastructure

to speak of

ten years ago

there was no

internet

eighteen months ago

there was no

java

things are

complexifying

intensifying

moving

together

this is

the universal

drama

that is

reaching

culmination

in our

lifetimes

because

and I offer

this

don't believe me

for God's sake

don't believe anybody

just take this

stuff in

and then measure it

against your own

experience

the second

extracultural fact

that I've been able

to discern

the first

being

things get more

complicated

as you approach

the present

and the second

being

that process

of complexification

is occurring

faster and faster

the early universe

was very slow

moving

it took a long

time for

things to

cool down

and life

to begin

its agonizing

march

out of the

slime

into animal

form

meeting

extinction

and catastrophe

and setback

after setback

but always

picking itself up

literally

out of the mud

and moving forward

well

as life

left the ocean

the pace

of evolution

quickened

as life

radiated

across the land

the number

of phyla

multiplied

the number

of species

multiplied

finally

a million years

ago

pick a number

a million and a half

years ago

the higher

primates

begin to use

tools

fire

enters the picture

and just as an aside

isn't it interesting

how long people

used tools

and fire

before

spoken language

enters the picture

I mean we possess

tools

a million years old

human tools

language

35,000 years old

when I was in

South Africa

last year

I was in this place

that reminded me of

like the four corners

area

around Moab

Utah

it was like nothing

like I had expected

South Africa to be

and when I wasn't

teaching

I would wander

the dry arroyos

and hunt

for human tools

and there was

an archaeologist

staying in the

bar

or in the hotel

there

and we would drink

in the evening

in the bar

and I would

lay my

days

find

out on the

bar

and he would

sort it into

piles

and he'd say

nothing in this

pile

is less than

165,000 years old

everything in this

pile

is from

human tools

we're talking

about

now I've lost

my thread

because I was

so thrilled

with my

sidebar

I think I can

get it back

here it is

and they say

potheads

can't

think

here it is

the second

obvious fact

which haunts

the post-cultural

viewpoint

is this

acceleration

of change

and I sort of

built my

career on this

because

I'm a rationalist

but I feel

the emotional

power

of this

thing

we are

caught in

a basin

of attraction

to use

a mathematical

term

in other words

we are

under the

influence

of something

which is

pulling us

into the

future

or into

novelty

if you want

to put it

that way

at a

faster

and faster

rate

so

problems

which are

presented in

the following

terms

if we don't

do something

in 500

years

we will

run out

of this

that

or the

other

or

if we

don't

do

something

in a

thousand

years

this

or that

will

happen

these

are

meaningless

statistics

because

the

acceleration

into novelty

is rewriting

the rules

now

every

months

we

are

descending

now

into

a well

of novelty

such

that

more

change

is now

occurring

in a

single

human

lifetime

than

occurred

in the

previous

10,000

years

of human

history

we are

approaching

at a

faster and

faster rate

something

unthinkable

something which is

sculpting us

in its image

something which

shamans have

always known

was there

though they may not

have used the

metaphor of

ahead of us

in time

that's a western

download of where it is

because you could just as well say it's in heaven

or behind us in time

or everywhere

or nowhere

the point is

we're about to arrive in its presence

and

it is shaping us

to prepare us

for the arrival

it is making us more and more in its image

this is not a new process

this began a long long time ago

but it's now reaching

its culmination

and

I

said

a few minutes ago

the internet is light

at the end of the tunnel

the internet is the beginning of a nervous system

that is knitting not only all human beings

but all life

together

all

information

together

because you know there already is an internet

it's called the integrated ecosystem of planet

three

it runs on pheromones

it runs on weather systems

ocean tides

telluric currents

moving in the earth

thousands of methods

give it that way

because our cultural tradition is one of reductionism

tear things apart

break them into their subordinate units

break those into still smaller units

well when you have a theory of reality like that

what you end up with

is

all the pieces spread out

and no car

and nowhere to go

but nature has always operated

as an integrated system

of communication

and the internet

is in a sense

nothing more than a human

aping

of a natural system

already in place

if we could do it through pheromones

light

mycelium

and electromagnetic pulses

through the earth

we wouldn't be stringing copper

and cable

and fiber optic

those things are simply

historical artifacts

of the moment

what lies ahead on the internet

what lies ahead I think for us

and this is the last point I really want to make

and then we can talk about all this

is

you know I have been

a true resistor

of the alien

penetration

of human civilization

because I just saw no evidence

for it

but

the

the chant

that they are coming

has now grown

so loud

that

I feel like

one sort of has to ask oneself

well

short of just

100% skepticism

what the hell is going on

with this alien

hype

and

I think

that the problem is one of modeling

and intelligence

there is an alien

we are in the cultural process

of meeting

this alien

but they do not come

in thousand ton

beryllium ships

from Zenebulganubi

to trade high technology

for human fetal tissue

I mean that

if you

that's an intelligence test

folks

that's not how it works

works

our own

hysteria

makes it very difficult

for us to deal

with the presence

of the alien

and the alien

knows

that

that's why it has

disguised itself

as a psychedelic experience

I think

where

you know how

in all those

fifties

b

science fiction movies

there was always this

theme

of the landing

area

and I saw it in Mars attacks

too

there must be a landing zone

somehow we must let them know

that we welcome them

by building

a landing area

and the Nazca plane has been claimed

and on and on and on

I think that

the alien is a creature

of pure information

information

it's purely

information

it's non-local

it comes out of the bell

non-locality

part of the universe

that exists

distributed

through

hyperspace

the alien is real

but it is only

made

of information

and therefore

the only

dimension

in which it can be

encountered

is a dimension

of pure information

fortunately

we are building

a dimension

of pure information

providentially

we have named it

the net

is a net

for catching

the alien mind

how will it come

will it descend

upon our websites

in a flash of light

I don't think so

how it will come

is

hacked

through human fingers

the alien

is real

but it is

within us

it can only

communicate

information

and that information

has to be made

real

in this world

by human coders

so if we were

to set out

lightheartedly

to build

a virtual reality

as alien

as we could

make it

I maintain

that

three quarters

of the way

our hair would

be standing

on end

because we would

realize

we are not

inventing this

we are discovering

it

you know

Michelangelo said

the form is in

the block of marble

what I do

is I take away

the part

that is unnecessary

and reveal

the human torso

within the block

of marble

in the same way

the alien

is already

within us

but we must

model it

we must

call it

forth

into

a dimension

of potential

dialogue

and I think

that

ultimately

this is

what

high-tech

society

can bring

to the

shamanic

equation

shamans

have been

dealing

with

spirits

entities

powers

for

more than

a hundred

thousand years

but it has

always been

on a

one-to-one

basis

one human

being at a

time

went up

Mount Sinai

to talk

to the fire

on the mountain

but with

virtual reality

we have a

technology

that allows us

to show each

other

our dreams

and yes

our

hallucinations

and as we

begin to show

each other

the contents

of our own

heads

and as we

begin to

explore

the alien

Niagara's

of beauty

that pour

through your

consciousness

under the

influence

of some

of these

substances

we are going

to discover

that we are

not what

we thought

we were

the monkey

flesh

is penetrated

by

something

dare I

say it

divine

or at

least

alien

transplanetary

and beyond

the power

of human

comprehension

I don't know

if we are

talking about

God Almighty

here

I don't know

if we are

talking about

the God

who hung

the stars

like lamps

in heaven

as Milton

says

that seems

a tall

order

maybe what

we are talking

about is

the God

of biology

something

has happened

to this

planet

it has

become

infected

with an

informational

call it

virus

call it

force

call it

being

that is

using

matter

and yes

using our

flesh

and our

thoughts

to bootstrap

itself

to higher

and higher

levels

and now

the prosthesis

of machinery

and the

possibility

of an

artificial

intelligence

raises

the real

option

of producing

of actually

midwifing

the birth

of an

entirely

new

not

species

but

order

of

biological

and intelligence

in existence

the human

machine

symbiote

is upon us

I mean

it's been with us

for a while

since the first

wheel

was carved

since the first

stick

was sharpened

but that was all

very simple

stuff

now it's clear

that we are

in partnership

with an

other

mind

which comes

to us

through our

machineries

and through

the biosphere

wherever we

press

beyond the

thin

curtain

of rationalist

culture

we discover

the incredibly

rich

erotic

scary

promising

presence

of

this

intelligent

other

which

beckons us

out of

history

and says

you know

the galaxy

lies waiting

a galaxy

of galaxies

lie waiting

lose

the encumbrances

of three-dimensional

space

return

with the word

to its higher

and hidden source

and at that point

you will discover

the alchemical

paraclete

will be given

unto you

the alchemical

dispensation

will be

given

and

as james joyce

said

man will

be dirigible

what did he

mean

he

he meant

that we will

lose the

limitations

of physical

and three-dimensional

space

that we are

destined to

become

mental

creatures

you say

well isn't

this a terrible

thing

what about

this that

and the other

all the things

you're worrying

about

we turned

our back

on

25,000

years ago

we have been

marching through

this virtual reality

of our own creation

for the entire duration

of what is called

human history

now

is there a political

implication

to all of this

I think the political

implication is

a personal one

we all must try to

understand what is

happening

we need to try to

understand what is

happening

and in my humble

opinion

ideology is only

going to get

in your way

nobody understands

what is happening

not Buddhists

not Christians

not government

scientists

not

you know

no one

understands

what is happening

so

forget ideologies

they betray

they limit

they lead astray

just deal with

the raw data

and trust

yourself

nobody is

smarter than

you are

and what if

they are

what good

is their

understanding

doing you

people who walk

around saying

well I don't

understand quantum

physics

but somewhere

somebody understands

it

that's not a

very helpful

attitude toward

preserving the

insights of

quantum physics

inform

yourself

what does

inform yourself

mean

it means

a

transcend

and mistrust

ideology

go for

direct experience

what do you think

when you face

the waterfall

what do you think

when you have sex

what do you think

when you take

psilocybin

everything else is

unconfirmable rumor

useless

probably lies

so

liberate yourself

from the illusion

of culture

take

responsibility

for what you think

and what you do

and then

the other political

implication

toward community

is

a lot of people

are going to be

very anxious

because change

raises anxiety

in people

and people

who have

limited opportunities

to educate

themselves

because of

culturally

inflicted abuse

are scared

because

they can sense

that everything

familiar is

giving way

but they don't

want

to embrace

the unimaginable

these people

need to be

reassured

they need to be

reassured

by example

and by hearing

optimistic

and reasonable

rhetoric

about the future

selling the future

as an eight alarm fire

which is how the media

does it

only makes

the same future

impossible

so we need

a responsible

approach

to thinking

about the future

and it means

taking

personal responsibility

for your drug taking

for the ideas

the means

that you push

into society

and for the images

that we share

among ourselves

you know

one of the great

truisms

of the new age

is that images

can heal

but I've never heard

anybody discuss

the obvious

contra implication

which is

images

can make you sick

and you are

constantly

bombarded

with images

which disempower

divide

confuse

and

and make

crazy

basically

so I think

the reason

psychedelics

are such

political dynamite

in any culture

is because

they dissolve

cultural

assumptions

the scales

fall from

people's eyes

and they say

does this

make sense

does my job

make sense

does my

relationship

make sense

to my

significant other

to my government

to my children

to my environment

do these

relationships

make sense

and of course

the answer

for most people

in high-tech

society

is no

we've been

compromised

we've been

deluded

we've been

sold a massive

pottage

the way out

then

is personal

responsibility

new operating

systems

downloaded

from outside

of culture

which means

from

the deeper

wisdom

of the

psychedelic

plants

and then

a commitment

to community

and a motto

of

to the future

without fear

thank you

very much

well so much

for a promise

to be brief

you know

you just

wind the guy

up

and point

him

and off

he goes

the robot

who preaches

freedom

questions

challenge

anything

anybody

yeah

you

well

yeah

it's a

tricky question

because

what's being

maximized

as things

come together

is novelty

and so

then we have

to have a

discussion

about what

is novelty

to my mind

an explosion

takes a

complicated

situation

and reduces

or as

mathematicians

would say

flattens

its dimensionality

an art gallery

or a beautiful

home

is far more

interesting

before an explosion

than after

so I don't see

how

some kind of

catastrophe

would entirely

fulfill the bill

on the other hand

a partial

catastrophe

of some sort

because I believe

primates are at

their best

when cornered

and we

aren't cornered

yet

I mean

we talk

about how

we're cornered

you could say

this is the end

of the world

this ain't the end

of the world

this is the long

garden party

before the end

of the world

with strolling

musicians

and superbly

catered food

and women

in diaphanous

gowns

and high-toned

conversation

wait till you

see the end

of the world

it isn't about

deciding to come

up to austin

to attend

the whole life

expo

let me tell you

so

yes

I should

repeat questions

different part

of the room

back here

white shirt

you sir

this guy

yeah

Deloquently represent the position that language was invented in order to lie

Right

Well, that's what the second guy who got a hold of it. I'm sure probably did with it

You're you're right that I have an incredible enthusiasm for verbal speech

But it's only because it's easy for me to do if I didn't do this. I'd have to find honest work

however I

Have I am aware or yeah?

I'm very aware of the limitations of language and one of the things I've talked about a lot

Is what I call visible language?

You use the example of telepathy that if we were in telepathic communication

How could I lie because you would perceive my my intent?

The key to making language more true

Is to make it more visual?

Uh now that can't just take the form of a bigger vocabulary and more colorful metaphors

like people will say when he spoke he painted a picture or

Listening to him was like watching a movie. I think ordinary speech goes through a series of stages from

Articulate to eloquence to

Poetic to demagogic and

Demagogic is where you want to be careful

Because then you can turn you know

Essentially hitler turned history on its head with speeches

He just could really deliver a stem winder

Uh I've been fascinated by the fact that in the amazon under the influence of ayahuasca

Uh people sing songs

But they see the song they sing

And when you hear people talking about it afterwards people will say after listening to a song

You know, I love the part with the olive drab and the chrome

But I thought when he got into the magenta and yellow stripe thing. It was just too much

Well, this is a critique of a song

And then when you take ayahuasca with these people you discover to your amazement that

Is a blue ribbon a foot across that descends from floor to ceiling and has a yellow center and then

Puts knobs in the ribbon and you can start singing and building modeling

Animating in three dimensions with sound well

I maintain that our insistence technologically on pushing our media toward ever more

immediate

Sensations so that if we have photography

It's black and white we demand color if it's color we demand motion if it's motion we demand sound if it's sound and motion

We want 3d we it's that we trust our eyes and the natural

Domain of communication is visual for human beings we're like octopi in that way

So really language needs to evolve toward the visual and that's why I'm very keen for

technically dense prosthetic environments where

Every time you say the word and a yellow

Three-dimensional triangle appears in the air every time you say or an orange ball

Appears a computer is listening to what you're saying and giving a geometric

Accompaniment to speech I think that there are forms of telepathy that we can evolve through the use of drugs and computer-assisted

Technologies that will allow us to see each other's dreams

In spite of your correct assessment that I'm keen for the spoken word I spend all summer learning

modeling and three-dimensional animation programs from my son

Because I want to animate I want to model I see things on my trips that I have never been able to English

But that if I were a fully competent

Modeler and animator I would just say

Check it out and I'm going to do that and and I urge you to do that

I mean it's a funny thing to be told you want to spiritually advanced study

3d animation

But these are the frontiers of communication we have an obligation to make our language more immediate

It is the most god-like thing we do if you're looking for the thumbprint of Almighty God on the biological

Organization of this planet it is human language

It is a miracle I don't give a hoot what the dolphins and the honeybees are out there in the woods doing it ain't like Milton

It ain't even like Bob Dylan that it ain't even as good as this I'm willing to say

No human human communication is

What we are and it will lead us to be a symbiotic?

Unbiotic species if we if we put the pedal to the mantle that for people like yourselves who I assume to be no matter how you finagled your way in here this afternoon?

Part of the upper 3% of the ruling elite on this planet. There is a real

obligation to use

privilege to

Communicate and to make art

I think this is what if the good life has any purpose other than to drink beer and watch TV

It's to produce art. This is how you make a payback

Into the community and art is ambiguous your art may say things to people other than yourself that it would never say to you

But that's how we make the community

Richer that's how we enlarge the dimensions of the human soul by making art

See

Stand up and yell

Louder

You said do you take psilocybin and see self-transforming machine now? No

Yeah

The question is when you encounter the self-transforming machine nails in hyperspace

Do you think that's a reflection of ourselves or do you think it's an alien or I mean?

I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like that

It's it's tricky because we are not what we think we are

I

Maybe I didn't spend enough time on this alien thing

I

Referred to non local domains of information

This has to do with this idea in quantum physics that there is

Something called bell non locality that all particles that were ever

ever

Associated

Remain associated in some mysterious way no matter how far apart in time and space they have drifted

Well according to the big bang all particles were once closely associated

That they're at the moment of the big bang everything was in a space less than the diameter of the proton or some

Piddling distance like that

Well, so then this was an idea that was just thought so outlandish that there could be this instantaneous

Dimension of connectivity that it was

Dismissed from quantum physics in favor of an acceptance of a somewhat less outlandish but equally

Challenging notion which was the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and that's how it was left for about 40 years

and

But there were thought experiments

That people talked about that could test for this bell non locality will eventually

These apparatus were actually built and these experiments were performed and what do you know Joe?

Bell non locality can be demonstrated the same way any other physical phenomenon can be demonstrated

Given a sufficiently prepared laboratory situation

It's real. It's not woo-woo. It's actually

Scientifically true at the fundamental core of physics that all space and all time is in some form of

simultaneous connection

Now it gets a little dicey if you ask questions like can we use this to get and send information and

I don't want to go into that because I think I already have the answer no matter how good the arguments against it

I believe this is what the human imagination is

That you have two eyes to show you local space and then you have an organ

Called the mind which doesn't protrude anywhere on the surface of your body except occasionally in some cases

It will lodge on a surrogate, but generally the mind is invisible

But it gives you non local data

That's what the imagination is. That's non local data everything in the imagination is

real

somewhere

Somewhere so far away in space and time that it makes absolutely no sense to give it another thought

Ever again, don't ever think that thought again, but know that everything in the imagination is real

So it's ridiculous to speak of my imagination or the human imagining there is just the imagination

But see if all information is there

99.999% of that information is

Is not intended for human beings and makes no sense whatsoever to us. It's basically static

It's either above or below our cognitive power to organize and so it is meaningless

But 0.00001% of this non-local data is

Enough like local data

That we can make metaphoric bridges to it and say well

Well, it was like this and it was sort of like this and it was a kind of a this and it reminded me of something else and

That's the stuff of the imagination and to the degree that you can

Accept alien data without freaking out you can go deeper into the imagination

I have a friend who says of psilocybin mushrooms every time I take it my goal is to

Stand more and he doesn't mean stand more in terms of dosage he means stand more in terms of content

Because it can always raise the bar higher than you can jump

I mean I've had dialogues with it where after hours of dancing mice and personal revelations and kind of a sense of familiarity

Familiarity I've said to it. Well, but what are you really show me what you are for yourself?

Well, my god the temperature in the room begins to fall towards zero black draperies rise

There's an organ tone that shakes the earth and after about 30 seconds. I said hey

enough of what you are for yourself. Let's go back to the dancing mice and

the little candies rolling in the dark and

You know it knows that you have a limited capacity to absorb its alienness

That's why we have what's called human history human history is the process of

Spending more and it's now we've sort of come to the short and curly part of the process where they're just around the corner

I mean all you have to do is smoke a doobie

Look out at the evening sky have a dream talk to a friend and the alien is

very very

It's trailing aura or it's leading or I guess it's leading aura has now

intersected

Human psychology, but cheerful stories of space brothers and scary silly stories of people

Trading high technology freaks and lead with the government. Hey, it's so much bigger than that

It's so big that it has disguised itself as an alien invasion

To keep from really alarming us with what it really is

Couple more questions

You could come to the microphone

A lady. Yes, would you like to come up and to?

On tape

I was just wondering what you thought about the possibility of

as

We become more aware of what we're doing to the environment and the responsibility of those industrialized nations

That are consuming more than their share that when we if we could get on an equal playing field and

those

Underdeveloped countries that have a great deal of the resources that they're using up to

Basically pay their national debts

If they could receive

Technology so that they can be on an equal playing field on the internet etc

In exchange for our consumption

That it might be an interesting

Evolution in terms of well, I think it's happening in other words

Some people have objected that the internet and computers are an elitist technology in the hands of a bunch of white folks

to some degree that's true but on the other hand if the automobile

Had followed the same curve of cost-benefit that the computer has followed in its development

Then the average automobile today would cost a buck and a half

And it would go a hundred thousand miles on ten cents worth of gas

That's the kind of bang for your buck you're getting from the modern PC

Compared to where it was 35 years ago. No technology in history has had its costs fall

So quickly and there is no reason to think that those costs will level off if a good PC today is

fourteen hundred dollars. There's no reason why in five years it shouldn't be a hundred and forty dollars and there's no reason why in ten years

It shouldn't be fourteen dollars and be worn on your thumbnail

This can all be done all these prices are

Artificially inflated the other thing about the internet is it is going wireless

And as it goes wireless it goes totally global

If I can just brag for a minute and make an example of myself

I have a wireless connection to the internet at first

I got a wireless connection because I couldn't get any other time because I lived way up on a volcano

But now my wireless connection is one megabyte

That's

45 times faster than 28 eight the poor people down on copper

They can't do better than 56 because the infrastructure already exists and therefore limits the bandwidth by going outside the infrastructure

This sounds like a reprise of my talk by going outside

The infrastructure and building alone from ground up

I suddenly find myself looking down the gun barrel of a t1 connection and it is heaven itself

Let me tell you and the people who sold it to me and there must be dozens of other companies

Are bent on conquering the world meaning putting everybody who wants to be online for pennies in the next five to six years?

And you know if you live in manhattan or even austin. What is the internet? It's another diversion

It's another piece of entertainment

But what is it like in somalia in seychelles in bangalore?

What kind of impact does it have there?

It is you talk about a culture dissolving effect based on psychedelics

How about a culture dissolving effect based on access?

To the internet and people say well western values will swamp all others

Certainly to some degree that is true, but did that just begin yesterday?

Isn't that what the bloody business has been about for 500 miserable years ever since the barbarian cortes arrived in mexico?

I think so

Well, don't get me off on that

One last question who's just burning

Anybody burning there's somebody burning

So where do you think we're going to be on december 22nd 2012?

All together

It's a nice answer

Here's another one

Why i have only one answer

It's too early to tell in other words

Asking that question in 1997 is like asking a man looking east at 1 a.m.

What he thinks the sunrise will be like

It's just too early the sun lies over the event horizon of the planet in other words

We can't see around the corner yet in terms of our cultural

Analogous cultural development right now. We've reached approximately the year

1,000 a.d

And between now and 2012

At an incredibly accelerated rate

We have to do a number of things

Discover the new world

invent the calculus

Have the renaissance

Then have the reformation

Then have the industrial reformation

Then have the 20th century

All that has to be squeezed into the next 14 years

The real outlines of what is tearing toward us will probably be

The province of squirrels and visionaries like myself

Until around 2004 and 5 and by that time

It will be clear to everyone what is on the end of every fork as william burrows once said in other words

It will be clear that history has been cancelled

It will be clear that there is no human future except through hyperspatial breakthrough

We will all be walking around on an internet that is 90 percent vrml based and hence three-dimensional and

interactive

And nanotechnology will beginning be beginning to deliver its goods to society new forms of propulsion system

Are going to move the outer planets to within a few weeks travel so forth and so on

So we cannot at this moment

Know the true nature of the eschaton because at this moment if we knew the true nature of the eschaton

It would shatter our cultural assumptions and our individual understanding completely

We have a lot of heavy lifting to do

There's a lot of self-education hard tripping and heroic dosing that needs to be done

Before we can meet the eschaton on a level playing field

Be there or be square

Thank you

You