Personal Breast Beating

Oh, I know one other thought in assessing this year in science, I talked about Omega,

the cosmological constant, and that is really incredible.

In fact, let me do a personal breast beating thing and point out to you that this thing

that they have come upon, Omega, the cosmological constant, this absolutely, you know, 50 years

ago or so, Einstein called it the biggest blunder I ever made, because he played with the necessity

of this thing to keep the universe from falling in on itself.

And then he decided it was an unnecessary construct and that it led to such weird conclusions

that it had to be gotten rid of.

And so that was all very well and good until these recent measurements of the distances

of certain supernova carried out independently by several teams of astrophysicists brought

the news that the universe is expanding faster than the laws of physics allow.

And when they looked at how much faster they realized that it called the cosmological constant

back into existence.

Well, but here, there are a couple of things about this cosmological constant that are very

counter-intuitive.

The first is that it acts on empty space.

It does not require matter to manifest.

It is a property of space itself, the cosmological constant.

The second thing is, it's a repulsive force that is growing stronger and stronger.

Forces don't grow stronger and stronger.

They grow weaker and weaker.

Gravity grows weaker, light grows weaker, everything grows weaker.

This force, as time progresses, gets stronger and stronger.

Well that means when you project it out toward, you know, billions of years into the future,

it becomes the dominant force.

It overcomes gravity, it overcomes the strong force, the weak force, it overcomes all the forces.

It becomes the dominant force.

The other thing about it is, it becomes stronger, not on an even slope, but asymptotically, it

becomes stronger.

Well now, this produces something very much like what I've been yakking about since 1971,

the novelty wave, the so-called time wave.

It, too, grows stronger and stronger through time, and it, too, has this kind of built-in asymptotic

acceleration where it experiences a kind of inflationary expansion in power.

The two map over each other very well.

But when you talk, returning now to the cosmological constant, when the astrophysical community realized

the consequences of taking this on board, they realized that it was dissolving the entire

model of what cosmology has been throughout the 20th century.

Because what it's really saying, this discovery, less than six months old, is that space itself

is in the act of exploding.

That the universe is on the cusp of an inflationary phase of expansion, similar to the inflationary

expansion that occurred at the time of the Big Bang.

What would this look like?

What would it feel like?

Nobody can even imagine.

It is not upon us.

I don't mean that.

But I mean that in the near future of the universe, in the next billion or two billion years, things

will change very, very dramatically.

Everything will begin to rearrange itself according to the expression of this asymptotic power.

So that was the biggest news in astrophysics.

The other news, which has psychedelic implications, I think, also comes from astrophysics.

As you may recall, last August, I think it was, I can't remember exactly, every man, woman,

and child on Earth got the equivalent of a dental x-ray when there was a thing called a

star quake on a magnetar, a magnetic neutron star, 20,000 light years away, experienced

a catastrophic collapse, and there was a wave of gamma rays that were, well, turned on every

light in the system when it hit the planet.

An event like that had never been observed before.

And I got to thinking about this, and I realized, you know, well, we've only been looking for

this kind of thing for 30 years.

There's probably quite a bit of this kind of anomalous, high energy, short duration fluctuation

of radiation going on in the galaxy.

And then I had a kind of an image, I wouldn't say a vision, but a kind of an image of how things

are really arranged on the larger level in terms of the galaxy.

And I, the image was of a donut.

And you know, we're accustomed to being told that we're at the, out at the edge of the Milky

Way where stars are few and far between the, this is the boonies, in other words.

But I'll bet you the boonies are where biology thrives.

Because the low star density, and the distance from the galactic core, and these extremely

energetic events at the core would create a kind of a donut situation where it's the

toroidal area out near the rim where stars are slow burning and they don't collide with

each other and plans conform and you get the 5 billion year run you need to get to a civilization.

But, you know, our, a rule of biology and strategy and everything and religious practice as far as

that's concerned, is seek the light, where the light is at the core.

And so then I saw, aha, maybe the true seeking of the light requires biology to go into partnership

with something beyond biology because the environment at the core is so energetic.

And I'm not suggesting the, the actual core, that's beyond contemplation, that's a black hole.

No technology imaginable can, can get even near the event horizon of an object like that.

But I mean in the vicinity of the galactic core where, you know, there are star, the star density

is two to three hundred times greater than it is in our vicinity.

And those kinds of environments are so fraught with peril for, for biology that probably downloading

ourselves into machine symbiotes of some sort is the only, is the only way to go to those places.

In, in one of Greg Egan's novels, he pictures a, a human future where this is one option.

You can fuse yourself with the starship and set out to check out the neighborhood.

Or you can join the Amish and till rye in Pennsylvania.

Actually, I think you can't do that because something's happened to the earth.

But some Hamish possibility is still available.

Well, this is not like the sort of thing the other faculty members will be talking to you

about, which is an intense and, and primarily important download of the, the, the homework,

the chemistry, the botany, the behavioral impact, the archeology, the ethnography of, of

of these substances.

I ask myself all the time, you know, how are we different from other people?

Are we morally superior?

Are we smarter?

Are we richer?

Are we kinder to the people we meet?

And actually, the longer I look, the less I can tell, uh, uh, there are extraordinary examples

of all of these things in and outside of our community.

And extraordinary nudniks and jerks inside and outside of our community.

But we have in our hands tools that I think if people were correctly presented with them

and understood, without hype and hysteria and hyperbole, what this psychedelic enterprise

is about, that we would win them to our cause.

Because our cause is, uh, the human cause.

The cause of thinking, and communicating, and building, and bringing into existence, uh,

new forms of beauty.

New possibilities for being.

And this can be done without psychedelics, certainly.

But with psychedelics, it, it, uh, is accelerated.

And it has a feeling, not only of immediacy, but of, uh, the only way I can put it is, is

correctness.

It isn't the, it isn't the lonely neurotic artist thrashing towards some kind of self-reflection.

It's the firm guiding hand of a greater mind.

The logos, the earth, I'm not sure.

But a greater mind.

I mean, art, true art truly is, truly inspired.

And, and the, the muse, I don't think was more real for Homer than it is for each and

every one of us when we're in presence of the mushroom, or ayahuasca, or DMT, or LSD,

or LSD, or something like that.

Uh, so, you know, I suppose I will go to the grave with life as, uh, mysterious to me as

I found it when I came to consciousness, uh, around six or seven.

But I think life is, uh, whatever it is, it's an opportunity of some sort.

And the things I have been most grateful for were the things that I met at the frontiers

of, uh, of, of knowledge, of sexual experience, of psychedelic experience.

Uh, knowing, feeling, and being one with being are how I would categorize, uh, that breakdown.

So, I think the future is, uh, bound to be very confusing and demanding for most people.

And there are many claims on, on each of us and our intellectual loyalties and where we put our energy.

Should we tolerate relativism? Should we be Mahayana Buddhists?

What's our position on the Huichol? How do you relate to Monica?

All these things have been sorted out, you know.

But, uh, uh, I feel, I feel actually like the thing that I, I always dreamed of in my early youth was, uh, a miracle.

I, I, I, I didn't particularly like Oshvensky's book, In Search of the Miraculous, but I loved the title.

And I used to just sort of chant it as a mantra, In Search of the Miraculous, just one.

I knew the rules. Just one is enough.

Because one secures the possibility of an infinitude of miracles, whether you have observed them or not.

Well, now I'm 52 and I've seen, I don't know, four or five, which is four more than necessary to make me a lifetime optimist.

But the, the recurrent, the enduring miracle, however it's achieved, is the, the psychedelic rush.

You know, that giddying moment when all, all bets are off, all boundaries dissolve, the machinery of language fails, the adjectival wheel wells burst into flame.

And then, you know, you achieve orbital velocity, are in the presence of, uh, of the thing.

And I, I cannot believe that that is not a solitary experience.

And you've heard me say many times that how itchy it makes me feel to think that somebody could go from birth to the grave without having, uh, that experience.

They can make of it what they want.

They can denounce it.

They can deify it.

But, uh, one should have it because it's, it's one of the compasses, the primary compasses of, uh, of being.

And it's larger than the historical context.

I mean, the point of this talk tonight was to talk about, uh, linearity and idea systems and the non-linear impact of, uh, of these drugs and the way they break down media bias.

But the, the, the, all these intellectual ideas exist in the light of the sun of this unspeakable primary experience.

And we can, uh, we can draw it, paint it, sculpt it, act it, dance it, drum it, and never take anything away from it.

Never define it, never occlude it.

Uh, it's like, it is a miracle.

It's like, uh, having the presence of a deity.

It's, I think, very hard for me to open myself up at any given moment to the full implications of how fortunate I am

and how good life is in, uh, in the shadow of this particular tree.

Anyway, that's the formal talk for tonight. Thank you very much.