Light Of The 3rd Millenium - Light Of 3 Rd Millenium Chicago

How's that? Cool. Okay. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to see so many people here. Once again, this strange, magical moment when we come together again, or perhaps for the first time.

You, having come from wherever you came from, me, having come from the slopes of the world's largest active volcano, actually, but via Manhattan and Austin last weekend.

And the purpose of these things is sort of to check the state of the condensing collective understanding about what is going on in the world, or what might be going on in the world.

This, it seems to me, is the subject worth talking about. What is going on? How can you find out what is going on? How do you know when you've found out what's going on?

Can one know what is going on? And my involvement with this is no different from your own. A sincere desire to untangle these questions before the yawning grave closes over the enterprise and the entire thing becomes moot.

One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve or understand or penetrate or appreciate or come to terms with the conundrum of being.

This amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves both individually and collectively. Collectively, we find ourselves, you know, somewhere between the slime and the archangels, making our way perilously over the millennia up the evolutionary ladder toward the platonic light or something like that.

At least this is the myth of intellectuals of the high-tech industrial democracies evolved over the past 150 years, the triumphant ascent of organic life toward ever greater complexity.

Individually, individually, we each find ourselves born into a culture we have no share in designing, but that we will be expected to inhabit, inculcate, and in fact pass on to our own progeny.

And so this is our circumstance, I think, individually and collectively, thrown into being, Heidegger said.

We didn't ask for it. Here it is. What are we to make of it?

And obviously, if you toured the halls of this exhibition, we are to make much of it and money of it. These two principles seem to emerge.

That there is much to be said, many ways to slice the pie, and the market economy is a very fertile domain in which to thrash this all out.

You can sell your answers, you can trade your answers, you can upgrade your answers, you can subscribe, serialize, retrofit, export, import, and reinvent answers.

Ultimately, I wonder how satisfying all this is.

And I'm always amused at my own position in this situation.

It's a great pain to the tolerance of the new age that they keep inviting me back.

I'm sort of like the crazy uncle, or, you know, you hope for good behavior, but you understand that it's a gamble.

Because I'm very, I'm very ambiguous about much of the methods and ways by which we do our intellectual business and pursue the matter of community and salvation.

The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society, almost like fat through meat, is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people

that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.

And of course, downloaded into language, it becomes easily ridiculed.

And downloaded into tasteless language, it should be ridiculed.

But, so, when we try to formulate our spiritual intuitions, they are inevitably, I think, tainted by what we bring to it.

And I was struck, as I moved through the hall, it was almost like an exhibition of language types, as much as an exhibition of products or possibilities.

What were being sold were closed systems of jargon, which once opted into, tended to produce answers in a short loop of possibilities.

All closed systems of thought are like this.

And, to my mind, at the, what seems to me, very elderly age of 50, and I know to some people in the room it does seem very elderly, and to others I seem a pup.

But, anyway, from this vantage point, it seems to me that all of these ideologies are cartoon-like.

They flatten, they simplify, they betray, they amuse, which is also cartoon-like.

And, in a musing, I think, that this is where their health-fulfilling and solitary worth lies.

They are intended to provoke a small smile.

That smile will lift you a little further up the ladder, the rungs of the ladder of being.

So, I thought today what I would talk about is some of the conclusions that I've come to out of a life of psychedelic voyaging,

living inside this insanely contradictory society,

and going through the standard moves, marriage, divorce, children, career, controversy, allies, enemies, attorneys,

counselors, consultants, accountants, so forth and so on, the same world you live in.

And, what have I, well, the first thing I concluded was to try and flee it,

which I did a pretty good job of by going to Hawaii, which, believe me, is a private Idaho.

But, the conclusions that I've reached are not politically correct anywhere.

And, so, I'm very happy to offend everyone, because of that thing to be what I did best,

and there's no sign of mellowing at this point.

So, the conclusion that I reach, vis-a-vis the individual and civilization, is this.

Culture is not our friend.

Culture is not your friend, it's not my friend.

It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.

A young man gets his first dose of the news that culture is not his friend.

When told that he's going to be given an air ticket and some training and sent to an exotic country to kill its inhabitants

in the name of some political ideal,

you have to be fairly dense not to get the message at that point that culture is not your friend.

It is using you for its purposes.

Because you would never dream of doing what it now proposes as the only conceivably right and righteous course of action.

Well, that's, you know, a black and white, a stark and enormous example of what I'm talking about.

But I think every day, in thousands of ways, we betray our impulses toward wholeness, toward community, toward freedom, toward the spirit,

by genuflecting two cultural values that are squirrely or toxic or simply wrong-headed or obsolete.

And this sort of leads on to my, the other thing I've come to.

It's a childish illusion, is the kind of illusion it is.

Recently, I had a physical examination with my doctor, and after it was all over, he leaned back in his chair, and he said,

Well, you know, most people your age in the 19th century were dead.

Yes, quite true.

People live a great deal longer in the 20th century.

And consequently, I think we, part of what drives alienation is, it's like being, culture is like being taken in a crap game.

If you play long enough, you will figure out that you're being screwed.

And, of course, if you die shortly into the game, it never enters your mind.

We are all, some of you may have seen the little saying that hangs behind bars in Minnesota,

We get too soon old and too late smart.

Well, some of us are getting smart earlier and earlier.

And what is seen through to them is the fact that culture victimizes, ideology victimizes.

These things are all con games.

Reality, culturally defined reality, is some kind of an intelligence test.

And those who are joining are failing the test.

This is very clear to me, looking at, well, phenomena like alien abduction.

And the great enthusiasm for conspiracy theory that now seems to attend so much modern thinking.

Again, these are epistemological cartoons where low production values made acceptable through tolerance of TV is allowing people to accept material into their own story, which should actually end up on the cutting room floor.

Everything, nothing, is what it appears to be.

Surely you have noticed that.

That's A, right?

A is nothing is what it appears to be.

Well, therefore, complex, difficult, tricky, and mercurial things are even less likely to be what they claim to be than other forms of reality.

So, confronted with the endless whispered rumors and doctored photographs and breathless testimony from the denizens of trailer courts and so forth and so on, what is one to make of all that?

Well, I think what you're, it's, the message is, return to basics.

The information matrix has become compromised.

The data stream is now suspect.

Return to first principles.

What are first principles?

That, that's what the 20th century is trying to figure out.

Yes, what are first principles?

I'd like to suggest to you that a place to begin is the body.

You have one.

It isn't ideologically defined.

It can be ideologically defined.

You know, in Catholic school, the nuns used to tell us we should dress in darkness so we wouldn't be an occasion of sin to ourselves.

That's an example of the body becoming ideologically defined.

But it, it precedes culture.

Culture has to deal with the fact that your eyes are on the front of your face and your anal pore is located near your genitals.

Culture would probably rather have it some other way.

It would be so convenient.

But, hey, it's a given.

I'm so happy we don't, our rumps don't swell in estrus the way some of the other primates do.

Can you imagine Giorgio Armani trying to create a line of fashion that comes to term with that?

But I, but I digress.

So, the body, the body is a pre-cultural given.

And coming with the body is this amazing thing, which everyone wants to give away, throw away, get away from, called the felt moment of immediate experience.

The felt moment of immediate experience.

This is you, now, here, in your body, with the cheeseburger slowly dissolving, the cup of coffee, the caffeine, the bladder, all of these things.

Collisions, collisions, concrescences, the crossing of trajectories of mental process, digestive process, metabolism, intent, income, emotional state.

The felt presence of immediate experience lodged in the body-mind system in the moment.

That's who you are.

That's what they can't take away from you.

Whether they drag you away to prison, beat you, drug you, whatever they do to you, you will still have some kind of felt presence of experience until you drift into the darkness of non-entity.

So, there, then, one can begin to build outward from that core and say, aha, so the stuff of understanding is not information passed by culturally validated coding systems among the primates at high chatter rate.

In other words, the truth is not in the public space or the historical space.

The space is, the truth is in the felt space of the body in the moment.

Well, so some great religions have gotten this far and they, whatever they are, and there are many of them, come at last to advocate something called meditation, which has many guises and travels under many names and methods.

But what it primarily is, is attention to attention, and what it primarily reveals in the ordinary metabolism is, frankly, bloody little.

Good meditators will tell you how incredibly boring it is, and the rhetoric of the religions that have made meditation the centerpiece of their ontology is a rhetoric of nihilism.

I mean, this is, you know, oh, I should have said nihilism, because this is sort of the dirty little secret of Buddhist ontology.

It isn't the cheerful new Buddhism being exported from California.

It's the old style Nagarjuna-ian Buddhism that says, you know, it is an emptiness within an emptiness, after an emptiness, before an emptiness.

This is Nagarjuna on the nature of the nature of Bodhi mind, but meditation, perceived not for years or lifetimes, but perceived as a cultural project over centuries,

leads not to a clarifying of this philosophical emptiness, but to a discovery that the depths of nihilism, the depths of non-entity, are, in fact,

multiforous in their aspects, not a plenum, is what I'm grasping for.

Not a plenum, not an undivided platonic thing, but an environment of spirit, meaning, power, intentionality, entities, intelligences, levels, swarming, swarming, swarming in the imagination.

And these things can be accessed through drugs, through extraordinary physical practices, or ordeals,

through various kinds of driving of physiological systems, like sonic driving through drumming,

or physiological driving through repeated chanting.

And then the ordinary boundaries of culture and of Bodhi dissolve into a much larger realm, the imagination.

And it is this imagination that I think is the place to put our attention.

The imagination is a dimension of non-local information.

Quantum physics is now moving towards securing the idea that in some kind of a mathematical super space,

all particles in the universe maintain a kind of super state of connectivity, called Bell's non-local connectivity.

What this means to me is that the imagination is literally another dimension.

A dimension that is non-local.

Now, the mind, the animal mind, the human mind, the paleolithic mind, evolved as a master coordinator of sensory data

coming into the body from the senses about the level of threat and danger in immediate three-dimensional space.

That's the mind's evolutionary function, to preserve the body, to preserve the genetic stream of unfolding,

by detecting and avoiding threat.

And so our minds have evolved in the same way that water takes the shape of its container.

Our minds have evolved to take the shape of three-dimensional space and time under cultural and environmental pressure.

Well, we've paid a huge price for this.

It probably also has ensured that we're here this afternoon to discuss it.

But it's been a long time since the instantaneous reflex to bash the brains out of anything moving near you that's unfamiliar has served us well.

You know, I mean, that got old 12,000 years ago.

The entire enterprise of civilization has been about something else.

The felt presence nearby, ineffable, unsayable, but uncannily penetrating, of beauty, of mathematical connectivity, of supernatural power.

And so these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, make us human beings.

The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.

It's why we are the way we are.

It's why we will be the way we will be.

It's how we got where we are.

How is it done?

It's done by dissolving ordinary cultural boundaries, by perturbing consciousness,

and by paying careful attention to the results and attempting to build models therefrom.

Now, in the last few thousand years, in the West, this enterprise has been tamed by priestcraft,

which combines the enterprise with judicious politicking and a certain amount of ass-licking.

Before that, the enterprise was untainted by such secular concerns.

It was full force forward into the unknown.

And this is the great era of shamanism.

And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude?

Philosophy not made around the campfire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience.

That's how you figure out what the world is.

Not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.

The reason people refer to psychedelic endeavors with the vocabulary of travel,

taking a trip, and so on,

is because that is an extreme endeavor.

It's the same endeavor.

It's the leaving behind of the values of your own culture.

You know, take nothing but a change of clothes,

fly to Benares,

and take up residence at Dasasamid Gat among the Charis Sadhus,

and I guarantee you, whether you resort to psychedelics or not,

you will experience boundary dissolution,

a reorienting of categories,

and a reframing of your perspective on your life and your being.

So, extreme experience is the necessary key.

This is true in all forms of endeavor.

I mean, if you want to understand the atom,

you have to smash it.

You know, sitting around looking at it,

it will never yield its secrets.

You have to smash that sucker to bits and then collect the pieces

and then examine exactly how it all came apart.

In the same way,

and without, you know, going too far afield for the pun,

we must smash ordinary consciousness.

Get smashed.

And then look at the pieces flying in all directions

and say, you know,

gee, I didn't know minds could do that.

Well, they can't in the workaday rote of, you know,

living inside the little boxes of positivism

and constipated behaviorism and all the rest of it.

So, extreme experiences.

But, you know,

you don't want these experiences to be too extreme

or you will sever the connectivity

among the various subsystems

and then we'll have to bury you.

And this is always a huge strain on those left behind.

So, there is a practical element here,

which is,

okay, so we want to have extreme experiences,

but we don't want to have such extreme experiences

that we don't live to tell the tale.

We want control to some degree over these experiences.

Well, this is where the incredible thoroughness

of our human ancestors comes to our aid.

Throughout time and space on this planet,

our remote, the tribal societies that preceded us

made it their business to discover,

catalog, and learn to manipulate plants.

In the environment as the carriers,

as the sources of chemical compounds in the environment,

which would work extraordinary transformations on consciousness

without physical harm,

without physiological damage to the organism.

And of all the many techniques,

ordeal,

abandonment in the wilderness,

sexual abstinence,

hanging by your pectoral muscles

from hooks in the sun for days,

all of these sorts of things,

of all of these methods,

psychedelic plants and their judicious use

is arguably the most effective,

the most effective and the least invasive

and the most likely to produce negative long-term consequences.

Well, this was not news or even controversy

anywhere in the world

until within the confines of the 20th century, basically,

the presence of these substances and plants

began to alarm the order-keeping forces

of the high-tech industrial democracy.

Issues separate from the issue of stimulants and depressants,

it's an issue separate from the issue of addiction and dependency.

These things are not stimulants or depressants,

and they do not cause addiction or dependency.

What they cause is what I'm advocating,

a fundamental revaluation of cultural values.

Because culture, as we're practicing it currently,

is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people

and animals and ecosystems,

none of whom were ever allowed to vote

on whether they wanted this process

to go in this direction.

We do not feel what we are doing.

Remember, I spoke about the primacy

of the felt moment of experience.

If we could feel what we are doing,

we would stop doing it.

But between us and the consequences of our action,

there are...

endless veils of political rhetoric, stultification, denial, sedation, intoxication, ideological

delusion. Now, normally I think a rap like this tends to, if you have to pigeonhole it,

to come down on the side of pessimism. But I am not pessimistic. I see everything as though

it were integrated and connected, and there is an unfolding and a plottedness about our

situation. It's not for nothing that at the very pinnacle of the age of faith in the machine

and science and male dominance and projection of strategic weaponry and so forth and so on,

that there should come, from the gentler societies of the world, from the rainforests and high

deserts of the world, the news of these plants. You know, the Western mind, the cataloguing

mind, the Cartesian mind, in its frenzy to locate, list, isolate and define everything, carried

these plants and substances over the past hundred and fifty years into the confines of our society.

And they are much like Trojan horses, left there by the bedraggled, beat-down, disenfranchised,

third-world, shamanic people, to be found by the white-coated priests and priestesses of

science, and to be brought back into the laboratory to be picked apart for their efficacy and

treating addiction or overcoming neurotic behavior or something like that. But of course, the

neurotic behavior that they impact upon is neurotic behavior so wide, so deep, so revered that

it is in fact cultural values themselves. You see, what is happening, I think, is it's really

bigger than psychedelics. It's bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in this

ocean. We are corks riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged by perhaps chance alone

to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe. A moment when the universe goes through

some kind of self-transforming, evolutionary, inflationary expansion. That's what's happening.

I mean, it's been happening for a long time. It depends on where you pull back to to get your perspective.

One could say, looking at the universe in general, that this planet has been favored from the very

beginning. That by a billion years ago, the discerning could tell that this was a planet going places.

But certainly, by 500 million years ago, it was clear that this was a planet going places.

One complex animal life form gave way to another. Catastrophes, yes, but never catastrophes so total that the enterprise was wiped out.

We know that 65 million years ago, a catastrophe, an asteroid, a planetesimal impact occurred on this planet.

Nothing larger than a chicken walked away from that on this planet. A bad day, you say.

But were it not for that bad day, we would still be the egg-eating shrews at the edge of the reptilian garden party.

These marvelous flowering plants, chock full of psychedelic alkaloids, none of them would have existed.

The flowering plants and the higher mammals all arose in the wake of this planet scouring catastrophe.

So, you see, there is, built in to the larger systems of nature, an enormous, what my mentor Eric Yonch used to call,

meta-stability. They are meta-stable. They are not easily deflected. An event as large as a planetesimal impact

basically only resets the evolutionary clock by a few million years. And then, almost over-leaping itself to make up for lost time,

out of all of that catastrophe come primates, animals of such complexity and coordinated sensoria that they are wonders to behold.

And from them, and quickly, then come abilities never before seen in the world of organic organization,

freely commandable languages, spoken languages, symbolic activity for the first time.

Well, at that point, you know, even the academics believe human language is less than 40,000 years old.

That means it's as artificial as the dirigible or the hypodermic needle. It's an invention of some sort within the confines of human history

or at the beginning of human history. Recall, in South Africa, we have fire pits and stone tools two million years old.

Those are not homo sapien tools, but they're the tools of homo habilis, the preceding ancestor in the human line.

My point is, we are caught up in a process of unfolding complexification that has now lodged in our species.

We are its source at this point. At one point, its source was the geology of the planet. At a later point, closer to us in time, its source was all biological diversity.

But as the novelty has increased, the domain of its expression has narrowed, and it is now confined largely to the human species.

Oh, yes, the rest of nature continues the slow unfolding of continental drift and gene mutation and transfer and so forth.

But these things have now receded into the background as the human adventure takes center stage.

So it's almost as though, in fact, this is what I believe, that we are not pushed from behind by the causal unfolding of historical necessity,

but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort which lies ahead of us in time.

And so we are not, as it were, following what the statisticians call a random walk across the temporal landscape.

In fact, the temporal landscape is a canyon with incredibly steep walls and we are only free to move within very narrow confines as the grip,

almost the morphogenetic intensity of the attractor at the end of time increases its penetration and its hold over our imaginations,

our city plans, our technologies, our religious ontologies, our medical strategies, so forth and so on.

Something is revealing itself to us through us.

And as we get closer, the chatter of noise and static being given off of this thing increases exponentially.

Because, you know, McLuhan said once, he said, we move into the future like a person driving who uses only the rear view mirror.

That's how we understand the future, by driving in the rear view mirror.

All of our models of what lies ahead are based on inverted models of the past.

And the one thing you can be certain of is that won't do it.

Because we can see a person standing in 1900 using that method would have been wrong about the late 1990s.

A person standing in 1600 using that method would have been wrong about the late 1900s.

And so forth and so on.

We cannot extrapolate from the future into the past into the future because the real nature of the future is its being on siege, the thing in itself.

And that's what it's trying to reveal.

And so the whisperings that reach the ears of the channelers, the visions that come through the hands of painters, sculptors, choreographers, musicians, all of the felt presence of the invisible world is now incredibly pregnant with this message of transformation.

And the challenge for each of us is to streamline our language sufficiently that we may mirror this thing in a way that is both true to it and rationally apprehendable to ourselves.

And this is a fractal boundary.

This is a test of intelligence because the thing in itself cannot be rationally beheld.

You know, the enzymologist J.B.S. Haldane once said, he said, the world is not only stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose.

That to me is a dizzying thought and obviously true.

So what we want is a model true to the stranger than we can suppose, but not so alien that there is no emotional or spiritual support in it for the enterprise of being human.

How do we do that? How do we inculcate the unspeakable mystery of the transcendental object at the end of time with the mundane nexus of real occasions that happens to be our own existence?

Well, to my mind, the answer is it lies in the ability to assimilate paradox.

And that means you have to transcend the idea of a closed logical system.

You have to live with the idea that there is no intellectual closure.

This is, in fact, the door marked freedom, but you've been taught that it's the door marked madness to live in the light of paradox.

Things cannot be, we are taught, both A and B simultaneously.

This is Aristotelian logic.

A is A. This is as old as thought in the West.

But it has to be overcome.

And in the felt presence of the moment of immediate experience, it is overcome.

The mystery does not lie far.

It lies in the immediate moment, in the act, the fact, of being.

The only time we really confront this is in the psychedelic experience or other moments of extreme epiphany.

The model that I have come to wrap around all of this, because I think it's simple and straightforward

and it leaves plenty of room for people to add their own filigree, is a dimensional model.

God forbid, a mathematical model.

But it works something like this.

I mentioned earlier that our senses have evolved as a threat detection device

and have sort of crunched us down into three-dimensional space.

The shaman, wherever and whenever he or she does their shamanizing,

the shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence.

They are, they know more than the people they serve.

The people they serve are like children within the game of culture.

Only the shaman knows that culture is a game.

Everyone else takes it seriously.

That's how he can do his magic.

I was recently in Australia.

And, of course, Aboriginal culture and shamanism is a topic of great interest down there.

And I learned, maybe some of you already knew this, that the term for shaman among English-speaking aboriginals,

of whom there are many, some who have spoken it for several hundred years, or over a hundred years anyway,

the term for shaman is simply clever fella.

And if someone says, I am a clever fella, they are making a professional claim of great weight.

But I love that, because it says it all.

You know, a clever fella.

When I was in the Amazon, in my exploring days, we would go up these rivers to these bare-ass folks,

and to spend time with them.

And the people would want to, you know, touch the outboard motors,

and look at your camera equipment, and the butterfly nets, and gather around, open-faced, totally innocent.

You could always tell the shaman.

Because, first of all, he usually didn't come out to see who was there, even though no one ever came.

Even though these people had visitors once every six months,

the guy who wouldn't come out of his hut for the only event in six months was inevitably the shaman.

And when you met him, he wasn't interested in your Velcro,

or your break-apart glow-in-the-dark little trinkets, or any of the rest of it.

He was looking straight at you through the eyes outside the culture,

saying, what kind of a person are you?

Are you a fool, or are you a clever fella?

What is your measure?

How much of the situation do you understand?

How many levels are you simultaneously aware of at this moment?

And, you know, looking into the eyes of that sort of person,

you either grow or turn away.

You have not much choice.

So, what's happening with the shaman, I think, is he's a hands-on mathematician,

a hands-on non-Euclidean geometer.

The shaman enters into the quote-unquote chaos of the psychedelic experience and sees that it is not chaos.

It is hyperspace.

And in it, the adumbrations of the trees of possibility can be followed.

One can see who stole the eggs.

One can see who cuckled the chief's nephew.

One can see who will die and who will live.

One can see how the weather is going to change.

And one can know where the game went.

And this is not magic.

Not in that world.

It's impossible in three-dimensional space and time.

But in fourth dimensional space and time, it not only is possible, it's inevitable and unavoidable.

It's a different kind of way of being with the information.

And, you know, I'm sure many of you have your own psychedelic epiphanies that are as gripping and as fascinating as anything that has happened to me.

Epiphanies that show that, under certain circumstances, the ordinary boundaries of information, space, time, limitation, are dissolved.

And it may happen only for a moment.

It may involve a curing with a laying on of hands.

It may involve a sudden insight into a set of complex relationships.

It may involve a sudden unexpected certitude about how a certain event went down that, when checked upon, turns out to be true.

What we know about the world is defined by our culture.

And the way culture does this is through language.

You can't know or perceive or appreciate what cannot be brought into the domain of language.

You can't publicly know or appreciate these things.

You can feel them as the rich contextual embeddedness of your own being.

But you can't communicate them.

Sometimes when I read Marcel Proust, I come upon passages where the conveyance of the information, of the emotion, is so exquisitely subtle that I have the feeling, I know what he means.

I felt this, but I never dreamed I would ever see it in print or have a thought about it that I could share with anyone else, because it is so subtle.

So the challenge to all of us, I think, is not this one dimensional chasing after of answers.

This is a fool's game.

But an actual stepping back to gain perspective and to realize, you know, salvation is always available.

It's in the moment.

It's an act of understanding.

It doesn't come down through a lineage.

It doesn't come through a substance, an empowerment, a word.

It comes through understanding.

But salvation is an act of rational apprehension of some sort.

And, you know, I really believe that we are now in a relationship to the transcendental object at the end of time, such that the revelations are daily.

The unfoldment, the connectivity, we can see light at the end of the tunnel.

I mean, I've had long practice at this.

I've been thinking like this since 1968, talking about it like this since 1980.

But I never knew how it would come or what it would be.

In the last few years, with the rise of a technological, a cultural artifact like the Internet, I now see how it will make its way into the world.

We are building the nervous system of the human oversoul.

We are individual units operating under social rules that are pushing us ever closer toward dissolving our societies,

societies, human groups run by rules, into telepathic collectivities of some sort.

I mean, the chaos of the Internet is chaos only to the constipated order freaks of the Habesian sociological machine.

It makes them uncomfortable because they can't find the head, they can't find the hierarchy.

It's head and hierarchy that have distorted and made human institutions so abrasive and uncomfortable for the people who inhabit them.

So I really believe there is no contradiction between technology and spirit.

There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience.

There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyper-spatial cyber-culture and paleolithic archaic culture.

We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter.

We have come to the end of our separateness.

This is all very scary.

None of us know what it means, but the forces that have been called into being are now beyond the control of any institution or any strategic planning committee or any banking committee.

These things have a life of their own.

There is a morphological unfoldment occurring on this planet.

It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being.

We are a privileged part of this.

Individually our hope is to understand and participate in the epiphany.

There is no blame.

Nothing is off-kilter or wrong or unnatural or artificial.

No principle has been betrayed.

This is how it is supposed to be.

But as it picks up speed, it's going to become more and more frightening as most metaphors fail.

And this is why the rise of cults and why the grasping at ontological straws and why the whisperings from various corners of the universe have grown to a roar.

Because we are uncertain.

We are not sure.

But I think you become sure by connecting to the source.

And then what you become for other people is a source of reassurance.

There is the perfect metaphor for understanding this situation is a birth.

If you had never seen a birth and you were rushing about your daily business and suddenly came around a corner and this was happening as, for example, could happen to you in India or in Africa somewhere.

And here you confronted human birth.

If you had not been prepared for that moment, you would have a real emotional thing on your hands.

It looks like a medical emergency.

Blood is being shed.

Organs are being stretched.

There is pleading and groaning and moaning.

You have to have your chops very together to look at this situation and say, how wonderful.

New life coming into the world as it has always coming to the world.

Now, a birth can be simple and easy or it can be prolonged and tormented.

It can be an occasion for joy or it can end in catastrophe.

The key is preparation, understanding, awareness, and a desire to meet the experience in all of its fullness.

The birth is coming.

And what it does to the social systems we've put in place, the groaning ecologies that are taking the weight of our billions,

what it does to the atmosphere, what it does to the economies upon which you and I depend.

This all depends on how educated and enlightened each one of us can make ourselves as the thing moves toward completion.

And it's no time for foolishness.

And it's no time for rumor mongering.

And it's no time for throwing away your epistemological razors and indulging in the spreading of unlikelihoods.

It's time to actually pull together.

The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention.

It's just not a coincidence that these plants tarry this immense spiritual message.

They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.

We were not out of balance for millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years of intellectual existence in which we had humor and song and ribaldry and poetry and horsing around and art and theater.

We were not out of balance because our religion involved the dissolving of our cultural values once a week or once a month back into the mysterious mama matrix of primordial being.

Once we cut that off, once we began to make it up or to listen to the most shrill among us make it up, we were lost.

That's what we're returning to.

Our story is the story of the prodigal son.

We left the family farm, the balance, the domesticity, and we made a shaman's journey deep into the heart of matter and of energy of space and time.

We return with gifts, with understandings no shaman before ever had.

Quantum physics, fractal mathematics, astrophysics, cosmology, the knowledge of DNA.

This is real knowledge and we shed real blood to obtain it.

Now it can be given meaning by being brought under the umbrella of authentic, archaic, human values informed by relationships with psychedelic parents.

This is the comfortable future, the hopeful future that lies ahead to the degree that people turn their back on this.

They're going to have a rough, a rough time explaining to themselves and their children just what exactly is happening at the end of the 20th century.

Okay.

That's my rant.

Now I want to hear from you.

Thank you.

I mean, I really think, and let's say a couple of things.

These things are much more fruitful in the question and answer period, at least for me.

And then the other thing I want to say is about the psychedelic community of Chicago.

You know, it's all fine and good to come to hear the great ones pontificate.

But the reality of the situation is this is your community.

And we have self-selected ourselves to be here out of the millions who aren't and the thousands who came to this conference.

And we're also not here.

So look around.

Somebody in this room has what you're looking for.

And it probably isn't me.

We used to stand out, but then our sartorial choices triumphed everywhere.

And now we look like everybody else.

But I'd like to do questions now for the rest of the session.

Yeah.

I stay away.

I stay away from talking about my own mathematical theories, because the word mathematics is guaranteed to clear a hall in most situations.

But I think it's I'm it's perfectly.

Well, just to do this very briefly.

Two things are completely obvious to me that science has missed.

And you're smart people.

Check it out.

Isn't this true?

That the universe has gotten more.

complicated as we approach the present, that everything they ever told you on Discovery

Channel or anywhere else supports the idea that the universe in the beginning was simple

and then it got more complicated, right?

So that's a truth that reaches notice across biology, geology, astrophysics.

It's a cross-disciplinary truth of great power.

Well, then here's a second truth related to the first.

This movement into complexity from the remote past to the present is occurring faster and

faster and faster.

And that's where we come into the picture, you see.

We are animals, but we are animals plus animals, plus language, plus technology, plus religion,

plus analytical analysis, so forth and so on.

We represent some kind of an experiment in a deepening of complexity.

And historical change occurs at orders of magnitude faster than biological change.

And very recently, pick a number, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, something like that.

It seems like we entered into an even deeper involution of the spiral.

Well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the spiral closure that's

moving faster and faster is now moving so fast that its culmination can be imagined to occur

within a human lifetime.

And I think that that's true.

I think we are the last generation of proto-human beings.

And that beyond us lies something very hard to imagine.

The human-machine symbiote.

Something which is going to spring, you know, not from my loins, but as Zeus's daughter sprang

in a sense from his forehead, we are, and it's not simply a new species, it's a new order

of being.

It's as dramatic a break with the earlier orders of natural organization as the eukaryotes were

from the prokaryotes and the land animals were from the sea.

How does that make us feel?

Well, I don't know.

How does it make you feel?

It's a complicated, it's a complicated feeling here.

You know, in Silicon Valley, there are people every day who go to work with the phrase in

their mind, the great work.

And what is the great work?

The great work is the handing on of human civilization to a species intelligent enough to appreciate

the enterprise.

And, you know, it will be a symbiote, we hope.

It will be an AI, for sure.

It's here.

I mean, it depends on how much you understand and who you know and which technologies you follow.

We're all coming to terms with it at different levels, but in a sense, the only thing left

is the collective realization occurring individual by individual that, in fact, history has ended.

This is, you know, not only the postmodern dispensation, it's the post-historical dispensation.

What happens next?

Well, that that's the adventure we prayed for and claimed we wanted.

So it is upon us.

Yeah.

In the back.

Oh, thanks for bringing that all up.

Heaven's Gate.

Well, you know, we only have an hour and a half here and I have a lot of ideas about all

of this.

I think, you know, that was a perfect example.

Ideology kills.

And I was very amused, I mean, the Heaven's Gate thing was a tragedy, but there were curious

aspects to it.

I mean, it was the week before Easter.

All around me, I heard people saying things like, you know, how could people believe such

crazy stuff?

And by the way, honey, did you get a dress for service so we can go and celebrate the

resurrection of the Redeemer?

And you just wonder, you know, whose ox is getting gored here?

Because something is absolutely nuts, but 400 million people believe it, that makes it

okay, but if 20 people believe something nuts, that's a cult.

I have an absolute, all of this gives me the creeps.

I have an absolute horror of belief systems and cults.

And I've never met a guru I really liked.

I've never met one I've trusted.

You know, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt, some relative, I don't know, anyway,

she used to say at these White House dinners that they would give in the Roosevelt administration,

she said, if you have nothing good to say about anyone, sit by me.

And I'm sort of in that position, being on the celeb circuit and so forth, I have a chance

to sort of be behind the scenes.

And since I wasn't appointed, or nobody ever came to me, or I feel free to report to you,

because I identify with you, I don't identify with them, I identify with you, and I'm telling

you, you know, keep one hand on your wallet and the other hand over your anal pore.

This is the way to approach all of this.

Belief is hideous, it's also completely unnecessary.

Ideology, imagine a monkey walking around with the idea that he or she possesses certain truth.

I mean, you have to lack a sense of humor to not see the absurdity of that.

If you met a termite who told you he was on a quest for certain truth, a small smile would

tug at your lips, I hope.

Do you believe for a moment that we are different from that termite?

I think not.

We understand what we can understand.

We build models.

To do this without realizing the tentative nature of the enterprise is just damn foolishness.

My brother put it very well one time, he said, have you ever noticed that as we build the fire

of understanding brighter, the greater the volume of darkness that is revealed?

Or here, I'll put it for you in a geometric model.

As the sphere of understanding expands, as the sphere of understanding expands, the surface

area of ignorance necessarily grows ever larger.

How could it be otherwise?

So then get a grip, you know?

All of these things are candles lit against the darkness.

But that's why I say the thing to keep coming back to is the felt presence of immediate experience.

Not how do I feel as a feminist or a Marxist or a devotee of Hieronymus Bosch or whatever.

How do I feel?

Period.

Not through the filter of ideology.

As I look back through history, as you look back through history, very few ideologies

last very long without going sour or becoming toxic.

So why should we assume, as all those naive societies in the past assumed, that we are,

you know, have 95% of the truth and the other 5% will be delivered by our best people in the

next three years.

People, fools have always believed that, but the smart money knows we ain't even close.

You know, you cannot today explain how I can think to myself, make a fist and make a fist.

What you're seeing is mind over matter.

I say, make a fist.

I make a fist.

This is the defeat of science, behaviorism, causal theory.

It's defeated by something as simple as that.

So get into the mysteries of the body, the felt presence of the moment.

Somebody else here.

Oh, I don't know.

Yeah.

Yes.

I must say, usually my daily meditations are accompanied by cannabis, which I don't consider

high pressure psychedelic, but it certainly makes meditation more tolerable.

But you raise an interesting question, which is, what is the preparation for the psychedelic

experience?

Meditation is a good one.

Meditation with these problems is a good one.

I mean, think about what you want to do.

Have clarity of intent.

The way I do psychedelics is quite infrequently at high doses on an empty stomach in silent darkness.

And then, and I add this, this is how I do it, but everything up to there I've advocated.

The final thing is alone.

And that's a biggie for people.

But to me that's the sine qua non, because if you don't go alone, you know who you take

with you?

Everybody.

Because the other person represents the cultural system.

Inevitably.

I mean, I'm not saying you should never take psychedelics with people you love and respect

and children and loved ones and parents and all that.

But the deep, deep work, you know, Plotinus called it the flight of the alone to the alone.

The deep, deep work has to be done alone.

Because, dig it, the last dance you dance, you will dance alone.

And I'm, you know, I see this pretty much in Buddhist terms.

In that, I really believe, at death, there is some kind of a landscape to be traversed.

Some kind of a process to be gone through.

And that it is critical not to fuck up at that point.

I mean, they all insist on this, right?

Whatever it is.

So, so the psychedelic seemed to me to map, to show the way into the bardo.

I once turned on to DMT, a very, very holy Tibetan man, not one of these Budweiser llamas, but the real McCoy.

He didn't have a growth center or a patient, but he smoked the DMT and he came back and he said,

those are the lesser lights.

He said, you cannot go further than that and return.

And I believe him.

I absolutely believe him.

I think they've seen the territory.

So, there is something about, and I made the analogy earlier to the collective birth.

Be, be prepared.

And these psychedelics are searchlights out into the, out into the great unknown.

People who, you know, people talk about recreational drugs and all that.

I regret that I have to be involved with all of that.

I take drugs very seriously.

Not that I've never done a sub dose and gone to a rave or something like that.

But I didn't do it with the illusion that this was spiritual work.

I did it to dance and to have fun with my friends.

But the remarkable thing about the psychedelics is how safe they are at levels no human being can stand.

You know?

I mean, we know the LD50 of psilocybin.

It's hundreds of, it's hundreds of milligrams per kilogram.

Nobody's ever taken more than 40 or 50 milligrams.

Because beyond that, the human cognitive machinery can't process the data.

I mean, it is literally beyond languaging.

I have a friend who every time he takes psilocybin, he says, he tries to stand more.

Stand more.

And I know exactly what he means.

I've had conversations with that entity in there.

Where you say to it, okay, you know, the dancing mice, all this, it's very nice.

We're feeling pretty comfortable here.

Show me what you are for yourself.

Show me what you really are.

Well, immediately, the temperature drops.

Black draperies begin to lift.

And there's an organ tone straight out of the Bach B minor mass that shakes the room.

And after about 30 seconds of this, you say, enough already of what you really are for yourself.

Because you realize it will fulfill the request.

It can lift a veil on vistas of reality that, like some hero in an H.P. Lovecraft tale, you will just be left gibbering for the rest of your life in a very small cell.

Because there are truths out there that the termite mind of man, I think, is not ready to handle.

The reason this whole non-local thing works the way it does is because we resonate with what is familiar.

In other words, the universe is full of things no human mind can cognize or apprehend.

But because we cannot cognize or apprehend these things, we do not even notice them.

They are, as it were, in the background.

What's in the foreground is everything at least familiar enough that we can relate to it as strange.

You know, the problem is not to encounter the alien, but to have enough sense to know when it's looking at you.

Because it ain't going to be like you think it is.

That's the one thing you can take to the back.

Yeah, back there.

Mm-hmm.

Do I consider psychedelics a door or a window?

Interesting question.

I think that until recently they were a window.

I think they can become a door.

Here's my rap on this.

This whole business about the alien, and I could have spent the whole hour on a different tack and gone at it.

But the alien is real in some sense, but not real in any sense that I think would satisfy the marketplace here assembled.

The alien is somehow non-local.

That means that if we really want to contact the alien, we are going to have to understand that the alien is pure information.

The alien is only made of information.

Is that good news or bad news?

It's good news.

Here's why.

It just so happens at this time in history, we have produced a technology that can manipulate pure digital information.

The alien needs to be downloaded into cyberspace.

It's not for nothing that the net is called the net.

It is a net for catching an alien.

You know, in all the old B science fiction movies of the 50s, one of the tropes of the plot was always the landing zone.

We must build a landing zone, go to the landing zone, locate the landing zone.

The net is the landing zone.

And where is the alien?

The alien is trapped in the deeper interstices of the human soul, but can be downloaded onto the internet as a virtual reality of some sort.

And this, you do it very slyly.

You don't announce what I've just announced.

You say, we're going to hold a contest and we're going to have a prize for the best simulation of a psychedelic experience in VRML, in virtual space.

And you hold this contest and you hold it the next year and the next year and people are inspired to download what they think of as their weirdest visions.

But what they don't understand is their weirdest visions are the weird vision.

In other words, the collective oversoul exists, dispersed through all of us.

And if we as a collective project seek to model it, to animate it, to produce a reasonable simulacrum of it in virtual reality, it will come to be.

We will summon it out of ourselves.

And I think at a certain point we will understand the nature of the enterprise.

The alchemist dreamed of something like this.

The summoning into existence of the cosmic anthropos, the mystic atom, the sophic hydrolith, the philosopher's stone, the lapis philosophorum, the transcendental object at the end of time.

Once again, the living part of the universal panacea.

Now I think as we move into the empowering of the imagination through cyberspace, we can actually do this.

We can actually bring these archetypes, if you will, into existence in ways that will give them a terrifying immediacy.

I mean, I have visited virtual realities of low definition, slapped together in fairly short order, and it shows me what you could achieve if many people lovingly crafted and tooled these things.

We would discover that we can communicate to each other the Niagara's of epiphanous beauty that pour through us when we smoke EMT, take psilocybin, or something like that.

So, in answer to the gentleman's question, psychedelics were a window until the advent of virtual reality and the internet and the new information technologies.

And they melded to psychedelic intent, opened the possibility of opening that window and stepping through it into the most beautiful dreams human beings have ever dreamed.

Oh yeah.

Ever dreamed.

Yeah.

Mmhmm.

Yeah, well, this is a topic late in the game.

For this workshop, but there are, but people in all times and places have asked this question, is okay, if we reduce it all down to nothing, then how do we build it back?

And philosophers have developed what are called razors, or logical tools that allow this process to go forward.

The most famous razor, and the one that certainly could use some application around here, is Occam's razor, named after William of Occam, a 14th century nominalist.

Occam's razor says this, hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity.

Or, translated into common vernacular English, keep it simple, stupid.

In other words, the simplest explanation is always to be preferred.

Never choose a more complicated explanation over the simpler explanation.

So, for example, a light is seen in the sky.

Simple explanation, aircraft.

Complex explanation, you know what.

The simpler explanation is to be preferred until further evidence forces its abandonment.

And God knows, even with this razor in place, you're forced to some pretty complicated hypotheses by some situations.

But if you will rely on your own intuition, the felt presence of immediate experience, and logical razors, another good one, I call this one, the Gorbachev razor.

Trust, but verify, trust, but verify, you know, it's okay to trust, as long as you verify, this keeps you out of trouble.

So, these are simply the rules of mental hygiene, that are no longer taught, because commercial interests have determined that people who don't know these things are easily manipulated in the marketplace,

and people who do know these things are not.

It's horrifying to realize that whether you can think straight or not is a decision being made for you by the Fortune 500 corporations.

Is it one more argument for overcoming culturally reinforced childishness?

One more, and then we're going to have to clear this for Whitley Strieber, who has lots to say to you, I'm sure.

Over here.

Well, I'm certainly a printhead, formed by it and formed by McLuhanism.

I'm not an angry printhead.

In other words, I don't like all this denouncing of youth and all this talk about cyber-driven illiteracy and all that.

First of all, I don't think it's true.

I think people who spend hours and hours a day on the Internet are exposed to vast amounts of information that synchronistically or otherwise forms their opinion.

I think the printed word at this point is a glorious art.

It's funny you should ask this question.

Here it is, 1997.

We have many things to celebrate this year in America.

The mission to Mars, for example, but one thing we have to celebrate that probably hasn't been mentioned here today is American literature is alive and well.

Thomas Pynchon has written a brilliant new novel, a novel that will make you proud to be a reader of English and an American, a novel called Mason and Dixon.

Don DeLillo, a very different sort of writer, has written a brilliant end-of-the-century statement called Underworld.

American art and letters is very healthy.

And actually, that leads me to the final thought that I want to leave you with, which is the way to react to all of this stuff is not to believe or to denounce or to...

The way to relate to what is happening to us is to produce art.

Put the art pedal to the floor.

If you paint, if you sculpt, if you write poetry, if you dance, if you declaim, whatever you do, that is the oversoul trying to come through.

We are never closer to the quintessence of the human collectivity than when we produce art.

These are the larger semiotic messages that are seeking to pass between us.

And no one who creates art fully understands their own art.

But if they create it out of honesty and from close to the bone, it can't fail to elevate.

We don't have to understand what is happening to us to affirm our humanness and to contribute to the future that is unfolding.

Thank you very, very much.

Thank you.