Techno-pagans At The End Of History

There are more people than the people whose names I called, but nevertheless, we're going to try and get a sense tonight just of people's interests and motivations and what brings you to this particular watering hole this evening.

And we'll do that in the simple function of going around in a circle. This is a little different from most of the many, many workshops I've done at Esalen because Mark is here. He is the gentle giant of virtual reality, the man who hacked vermal.

Take a good look, your grandchildren will ask. And so it's an honor to entice him into this arena of discourse. And as you'll quickly find, he's very good at what we do here.

So tonight will be strictly introductory and we'll go around, meet you. You'll meet Mark. You'll meet me. We'll talk a little and we'll pack you off to bed by 10 a.m.

Because a lot of people have come hundreds of miles today. Before we go around, just let me say the motivation for this became in my mind, Mark didn't remember ever meeting me.

And so now in my own mind, I'm not sure we ever met at all. But you can take your choice of two stories. Either I met Mark in 1994 at the Seagraph conference where we rode together from a hotel to an exhibition hall and talked about how he might come to Esalen.

Or I met a friend of Mark's who seemed much shorter, much lighter and an entirely different person. But we talked about Mark so much that I recollected it as actually meeting him to the point where I felt no trepidation at all about sending him email and saying,

how would you like to come to Esalen as per our discussion and fantasy of many years ago.

So that's how all that happened. My interest in virtual reality and well in virtual reality springs from the naive faith that whatever else it may be, it's a technology that will allow us to show each other the inside of our own heads.

And that it's primarily a tool for art and hence communication and hence very important in synergizing whatever community the future holds.

I think these things are pretty self-explanatory and clear. Other aspects of virtual reality touch on metaphysics and media and human psychology and the mysteries of code and mathematics and the ontology of reality itself.

I mean, virtual reality permits thinking about reality in ways that you never could before because you had no platform outside of it from which to view it.

Well, it's amazing how fast time moves in these things. So I want to begin and just go around and get a feeling for who's here and what their priorities are.

These things are most fruitful when pushed by the agendas of the people involved. I know what I think. In this case, I don't know what Mark thinks, so I have something to look forward to as well.

But if you don't get what you want, it's probably because you didn't ask for it because we're incredibly compliant folk around here.

What's your angle on all this?

I'm Brian Duffy. I was introduced to you four months ago at a hiking seminar here. Not personally, but through a tape and listened to it. Read one of your books, visited your website, saw that you were going to be here now and let me know more.

Good. Follow this man's model. Not all about me, but just who you are, why you're here, and like that. And remember, in a social situation like this, under time constraints, absence of brevity is proof of psychosis. Do recall that. We're looking. Yeah.

So, bang. I've been involved with computers for a long time, and a lot of it's all the time. No way, just curiosity.

Fine. Let's go along the wall, come for me.

I'm Lawrence Kincholo. I'm a Monterey resident for many years. I do three workshops. One in September, if anyone's interested, about dream recovery. Just recently getting involved with the internet and studied and taken a lot of psychedelics and studied inner space for so few years.

Thank you all.

I'm Rajni, and I'm interested in Terence's work, and I've read some of your books.

Last summer I had experience of an ayahuasca journey in my life, and I know that you've

written about that, and that's why I'm here.

And as far as virtual reality, that's totally like I'm not a computer person, so mixing it

into two together, web medicine and technology is like, no, I'm more resistant about that.

I'm interested in it.

It's good.

I think it will be good.

No, we will show that it's a seamless web.

I'm infatuated now with moving along the back wall.

Hi, I'm Ronan Hallowell, and Mark invited me to come down here to participate in this,

and contribute some of my ideas, as well as music.

I'm a DJ.

I've been working with Mark for about five years, and I'm also a researcher in the psychedelic

field within the world of wisdom traditions, and so I'm here to groove with everybody.

My name is Nathan.

I'm very interested in kind of the trends in the evolution of society and consciousness.

I used to be really into computers and social reality for a while, so it's going to be interesting

to kind of leave some layers together here.

Let's go back up here and come around.

I'm Steve.

I was here with my wife a few months ago.

I wanted to come back, and she looked through the book, and I did find something you think

I might not.

So I think with the psychedelics and the internet, and I have no idea who you are.

I don't either.

Some of our best people are working on this.

No, some of the most fun people in these things are the people who say,

well, we could only come at this time, so then we checked in this afternoon and looked

in the catalog, and it was between you and moving on and letting go.

Anyway, we aim to please.

Yeah.

Maybe I'm one of these guys.

I'm a work scholar here, and I didn't know anything about you guys.

But some people told me they had been to the visiting teacher program,

and they were very enthusiastic.

So I bought a book and was reading, and I was very interested.

I had psychedelic experience a long time before.

I didn't take them for a long time because I'm afraid.

So this is also an approach for me to come closer again.

And also I'm very new, and I just bought a computer like half a year ago,

and I've come to this field.

I'm very interested.

Yeah, I'm open.

This is my last weekend here, so I'm not standing.

My name's Raphael Barker.

I met someone while I was living in Italy a few weeks ago who raved about you,

and who was surprised that I didn't hear about you.

So I basically took over from Delirious Throne and whatnot.

So I looked up, looked you up, found the website, and started exploring it,

and got freaked out that I couldn't understand the novelty theory,

and decided, you know, decided to come take the workshop because you mentioned Esalen,

which I hadn't heard of either.

So I decided to leave my family and leave everything behind

and take both this workshop and workshop I just finished a month long on Ericksonian hypnosis.

So, you know, I'm just kind of bombarded with information, you know,

left my family behind and hoping this will be kind of a stepping stone for me,

in a sense, as I go back to New York and try to carve a niche.

My interests are in film and cyberpunk.

I have a very strong relationship with technology,

and of late I've been approaching it with a little more interest in more of the tools

instead of kind of controlling 1984.

It's just the mentality I had before.

So things are changing for me, and I'd like to...

I'm interested in you guys' perspective.

I have a lot more things put on when you're getting ready and stuff.

No, that's... that's good.

Yeah.

My name is Owen Rowley.

I have a moderate history of working in virtual reality,

starting with Autodesk and a couple of other things,

and working with Mark in the early days of Vermal.

I'm a witch and practitioner of magical arts.

And, um, I don't know a damn thing.

My name is Gary, and I'm very interested in all the ideas I've heard and read from you in the past.

I'm definitely interested in new ways to look at the future now or experience it as much as possible.

I'm Ben Shem Shlan, and I've seen Terence before, and I've read one of your books.

I've often forgotten it, but I enjoyed it.

And, um, I just thought that it would be cool to see you again,

and see if you have any good examples of the novelty you would expect to see soon,

and how you might combine with another person while you're talking.

And I never knew a reason to come here this time of year with all those shooting stars.

And it's just, and you just want to get away from the kids.

And, um, to be around somebody like you, who travels all around the world,

and be around some of the greatest minds ever,

that's just, maybe it'll be catchy.

My God, you remind me that tonight, is tonight the peak of the land of Perseids?

Perseids, yeah.

Perseids?

Yeah.

Is it tonight, the peak?

I don't know if it's tonight.

This almost slipped by me, and it's supposed to be major this year, isn't it?

That's right.

Well, so that's a reason to go to the tubs late tonight, folks, if that's happening.

Thank you for mentioning that.

I meant, I made a mental note to be on it, but then I'm on the road and I forget.

Yeah.

My name is Sharon, and up until about this time last year, I didn't have a clue that so

many computer artists and people that were developing their tools were actually using

it by developing it as an important part of their work.

And then I read a book by Douglas Rushkoff called Calveria, reading about designer drugs,

and how people that were taking those, the ones that were pushing themselves a furthest,

were actually designing consciousness.

And then I've heard about virtual reality projects like Osmos that have a very positive

perception.

So my question is, if you think there is some kind of a convergence on some level of computers,

virtual reality, and consciousness, and if so, what is the responsibility of those that

are in the world designing it, and what is the responsibility of those of us that are

witnessing it?

Well, I'm sure this will be rolled over and dealt with.

Yeah.

Hi.

My name is James, and I have a background in psychology, psychobiology, holistic health,

yoga, and I'm a computer professional.

I have been following both Terence and Lawrence's work for some time now.

And I am here because I seem to be, I find that certain things form as attractors.

And I get told where I need to be at that particular time.

And I'm here today.

And I'm not sure what's going on.

The combined force of two black holes.

I'm here, and I saw you talk about three years ago.

I never let go of time wave zero.

And I also have a computer experience, computer background, whatever you want to call it.

I once saw an iMac commercial.

And you post frequently to novelty.

Yeah, I used to.

Yeah.

How many people here are on the novelty list?

Not that you've ever seen me post.

Yeah.

Cool.

How many people have ever posted to them?

I've posted.

No.

That's about it.

Yeah.

Well, lurkers outnumber posters by 10 to 1, I think.

Yeah.

Which probably isn't a bad thing.

Yeah.

Given what is posted.

All right.

Let's go to the back wall.

My name is Harvey.

It's kind of a stretch for me,

but I've always been interested in ideas of creation,

and recently kind of stuck into the virtual reality.

I'm fascinated with the ideas for avatars,

and always kind of poked my own psychoactive drugs.

So the course description was just very intriguing to me.

Yeah.

Good.

Yeah.

My name's Andrew Jones.

I read half of one of your books, quite by chance, and further.

Try and get the other half from the horse's mouth.

I'm interested very much in traditional cultures,

and explore Greek mythology,

and very interested in Henry Crawford's descriptions of creative imagination,

interested in those relationships,

and those relationships.

And I wanted to see how you put it all together.

I don't know about computers,

and nothing about relationships.

Both of you.

So I'm interested to see how many followers.

Henri Corban,

so you're familiar with his stuff on Ismailian Mazdaism,

and I'm very interested in that.

Yeah.

Very good.

Paul, why don't you introduce yourself?

I'm Paul.

I have a last name.

I don't like you.

I'm part of Ismailian.

That's why I'm here.

Paul's the guy who gave me a career.

He found me in a bar in New Jersey years ago.

People will pay to listen to that.

That isn't quite how it happened,

but something like that.

Okay.

Let's come forward.

Yeah.

I'm Paul.

Also, I have a last name.

It's Godwin.

I grew up in that bar in New Jersey.

I'm chiefly a composer of music,

and with that rather computer-oriented,

both as tools and the music I compose

is often for computer applications or internet.

Let's see.

I think I probably first read Terence somewhere in the range of 20 years ago, I guess,

and I have been exploring for research purposes only.

You know, I'm psyched in Delia for 25 years.

Well, we figured I was only 25 anyway.

I just got really old and stayed with Delia.

Sorry.

Back to Paul.

Sorry.

No.

Four years ago, I moved to San Francisco,

and I saw Mark Pesci talk at the Exploratorium.

And he was talking a lot about this thing called the World Wide Web.

And I, along with most of the world, had never heard of the World Wide Web four years ago,

which is kind of hard to believe today.

He also said the phrase world song.

And though I didn't know what he meant by world song,

and he didn't actually describe it very accurately during that talk,

I knew somehow inherently what I thought world song ought to be.

And so as a thinker about sound and the world,

I pictured the entire internet being used as some sort of musical instrument

or people singing together using the internet as a transmission source.

And so then Mark and I went on to try to sort of structure or build that thing

that would allow people to, say, tone together over the internet.

And we did that first at SIGGRAPH in 1996.

Six?

Mark Tills.

I thought it was five, actually.

But I think it was.

All right.

He says six.

So anyway.

And we did a singing experiment using the internet.

We had people in Norway and Vancouver,

Montreal, Kansas, New York, and...

New Orleans.

New Orleans, where we were at SIGGRAPH.

And we all actually sang together and saw each other with, you know, avatars.

One avatar would represent the whole group in that city at that point.

So there's five avatars.

And it worked.

It was actually terribly fun.

It was quite fun.

And we went on to do two other major experiments of that sort.

One is a digital BN in San Francisco.

And mostly to me, those were just proof of concepts.

They were in order to turn people that were working in the computer industry

onto the concept that audio being used in the internet was a conduit

for the transmission and transmutation of human consciousness.

And that's kind of a wordy way to say that audio had a strong power in terms of the internet.

And so we did that.

And now I'm waiting for the next step.

I'm really here.

I'm not...

I'm really...

I saw Terence once.

And I love Time Wave Zero.

It makes a lot of sense.

But I can't quite believe that everything's going to end in 2012.

However, as a researcher and as a musician, I'm interested kind of in the sound of what that would be.

So then, finally, Mark asked me to come down and we're maybe going to do one of these vocal exercises that we do.

Tomorrow.

We won't do it over the internet.

Real life is actually tomorrow.

Thanks.

Tomorrow.

Cool.

And you.

Hi.

My name is Susan Mazur and I'm a publicist, but I like to think of it more like a media manipulator

because I do it really different than a lot of other people and it works.

And because of this, I guess I know a lot of people who write and Mark is one of those

people.

The last time I saw Terence was with Richard Metzger.

He's another person who writes.

And so that's one reason I'm here.

I'm not here because I'm really deeply involved in electronic music and the rave culture where

the ideas that we're going to talk about this weekend are almost treated as like the accepted

spirituality, which is amazing.

And they're all like 17 year olds and there's thousands of them.

And it's amazing.

And I just, and I'm working on some theories about bass frequencies and how they interact

with brains on psychedelic drugs and people together and the messages in the bass.

And so I just, and I love Mark and oh, and I gave myself a birthday present and a first year anniversary

of my business present this weekend.

My name is Steve Price.

I'm an artist and I work primarily visually in the digital medium.

I've done 2D and 3D design.

I've done some virtual reality design.

Um, the first time I ever saw anything on the internet I knew that it was going to be

the next thing in communications and in art.

And, um, I've been pursuing that ever since.

And, um, I'm very interested in Terence's theories.

And, um, I see many parallels between the things that you talked about with prehistoric

man turning into civilized man growing and evolving through the centuries as to what's

happening on the internet currently.

So, that's, um, you know, that's why I'm here.

Good night.

John France, um, a middle age roomer.

Showed up at Terence about 6 years ago.

Showed up every year.

Um, resisted the computer and the whim and all that.

And now it's like, it's coming.

It's got me.

And, um, here I am.

I feel about you too.

It's, it's here to stay, David.

Yeah, I know.

It's definitely here to stay.

Hi, I'm Gerard Hall and I live down south in Jacuna Beach.

I'm a gardener and a sculptor.

And I had no idea this was going to have anything to do with computers.

And last week I got my first Mac.

And I'm signing up for the World Wide Web.

My little disc is supposed to come.

And, um, you know, when you put it in and you're connected with AT&T and they started on

that.

Doors open.

Yes.

And, um, well, the phrase neo-paganism just like electrified me because I feel very comfortable

with, with ancient religions.

And, um, also the mushroom thing.

I'd like to, uh, well actually I'd like to be able to find a shortcut to that door to

that incredible beauty, that overwhelming beauty of nature.

It's almost spiritual.

And, um, I don't know, maybe pass it on or somehow share it or, it's so overwhelming.

And I heard some of your tapes and I liked what you had to, I liked your wordage.

It expanded my, uh, my thinking.

So I can't, my clue.

This is my summer vacation.

Welcome.

Cheryl.

My name is Cheryl.

And, um, I've been listening to Terence for many years now.

And I've always greatly admired and appreciated the artistry between which you use language.

And also the creative way that you put ideas together.

And I'm always interested in anything that stretches my scope of understanding and awareness,

like you were saying.

And, Mark, I haven't met you, but I've read about you.

And I'm very curious to be privy to the inner workings of your mind and to watch the two

of you interact with one another.

It'll be different than when I did the thing with Michael Murphy, I think.

I'm sure.

Jim.

My name's Jim.

Um, spending two weeks with you just now, Terence, has really expanded my thinking.

And I'm looking forward to seeing you all.

Great.

Jim hears all this stuff and tapes it all.

And so he's a well-worn pebble.

Hi.

on our porches and in our salads and so there are lists of plants that have a history of

healing or shamanic visionary use and some of the catalogs that just implore, they wax

very poetic about it, but the catalogs are almost as much fun as the plants.

That's fantastic, Kathleen. You're on the ball. Thank you.

Let's go, let's continue along the wall for a bit here.

My name is Lee. I'm a composer and musician. I've been up here several times. My main interests are novelty theory,

but increasingly throughout the grade of change, there's some possibilities and sort of

variants of all sorts of things. I have some interesting psychedelics and also

very interesting internet in regards to artificial intelligence.

Yes, we'll talk about that. We'll talk about artificial life as well, which is, I think you're interested in that. I'm interested in that. That's a coming thing for sure.

I'm Brian Holloway. I'm a sculptor. There are basically two reasons I'm here.

One, I always enjoy the crowd that just always thrill us. To hearing parents speak like the curio shop on the side of the road in your life,

that you don't know why you have to stop there, but you stop there and you get something that you expect it to find.

Kitsch.

The snake farm.

My name is Catherine Robinson and I'm a costume designer.

We're doing movies and I mostly.

This is my seventh workshop with parents and I always come for a plain tingle.

i always get one and uh also i've just made some really great friends with these things

and there's not a lot of times you have to work quickly so i'm unavailable

and i would just invite you we started a tradition of of uh reveling around the fire on saturday

night so after the festivities on saturday night if anyone wants to mosey down to the fire

after the tubs or something like that we we tend to stay up rather late and have a really good time

it goes till dawn yeah let me just say on that point that you know regardless of what you're

looking for odds are someone in this room has that

and in the nature of the game it can't it is not mark or i ultimately so you know we look like the rest

of the population but self-select to be here so it's a wonderful opportunity to hone social skills

make new friends and connections

well put

my name is

being a philosopher from a little kid

all the way through my life i

i like to hear the new ideas and be involved like you said all the people who show up with these

things and all the terry's kids

and i quote you frequently so i need new material

so the pressure's on so let's come back here and then my name is richard melner

and i guess this is the third workshop i've done with this year and uh they're always a trip

i've been trying to reconcile perception reality for some time and i i finally concluded there's no

such thing as reality and i work in the financial business i'm an investment advisor i've been trading

in the markets for years and i've seen these incredible flows of money changing as technology

changes and the applications of virtual reality to money management and all this stuff which is which

is part of but finally we're looking at economics as a complex adaptive system just as it's happening

in all the physical and biological sciences and i'm trying to reconcile the stuff you're talking

about as far as novelty and discontinuous events and so much of what happens in our markets are

discontinuous by the very nature and reconcile in terms of technology and computers and how the

world is changing and we're changing as we're all linking together and where that goes you know

and at the back of my mind that is always that wonderful uh book by arthur c clark called childhood's

end great book which there's a a major major shift an eschaton on epiphany an eschaton exactly so

i'm here for part of the ride i want to see what's going on

yeah in uh in george dyson's book darwin among the machines he says there is nothing as much like

thought as money and then gives examples of of how money works like thought and in a sense then is the

precursor of the global nervous system of the internet which is built as an architecture of mind slash money

interesting yeah um my name is neil and um i came at first because uh i've seen

seen you speak on your tour for truth hallucinations and that was like uh hearing hearing

terms speak for the first time tripping in itself and i've never covered and um i just wanted to uh

continue um and then and then when i found that out there that you were part of it um i looked up his

net page and um some other things like your article in salon and so it was like i had to come

you had an article in salon recently recently that's fun about virtual art do you all know do you all

read salon online oh it's had the best coverage of the president's situation and it doesn't see it

like the right-wing slow-moving coup crypto fascist witch hunt it sees it very very differently and

reports it very intelligently and has broken story after story about corruption in the special

prosecutor's office and leaked grand jury material and paid off witnesses and off the record meetings and

uh salon.com it's the best political writing salonmagazine.com sorry yeah salon magazine the cognoscenting now

salon yeah

i'm michael and uh i'm on a novelty kick i've been a computer programmer for 15 years and i've stopped that

and i wondered what technology was about and so now i'm hiking into wilderness areas with a digital camera

and finding patterns in nature i'm not sure why

and for me it's reconnecting

myself with my god which i call the great outdoors g-o-d

you know it's not only great outdoors as far as nature but great outdoors as in moving through the door

the great outdoors

so i'm walking around the great outdoors with a digital camera filming patterns

cool and i'd actually why do you not videotape your sessions

uh oh i don't know i have no idea why

is the question can you i guess i can

no well we can arrange it i just never bother because i

smoke too much dope frankly

worry about stuff like that i mean it sounds like a splendid idea like so much that would happen if i

buy stuff smoking can

one thing i would like to add is that is i have been a photographer to the film

and film sees the world one way and i have noticed now with the digital camera and with psychoactive

tools there's a relationship formed through the digital camera to

the source and the digital camera sees that differently in the film

very good

actually i have an fyi in the um eslin library video library that you can actually check out

you have the most listing by two and a half pages of video the conferences here

we used to shoot stuff years ago but once they caught on to the fact that i endlessly repeat myself

they sort of folded that

but yeah there's plenty don't worry i'm not about to be erased from the historical record

yeah my name is frank uh i've been here many times i've been even interested in just the relationship

between mind body and mind spirit since i was uh

experience experimented with um several different substances that i found that have opened doors to

and then facilitators toward higher consciousness so i've been interested in terms of work for

uh for um for well for about a year actually when i first found out which is through uh uh from the

uh town box and hill yeah

yeah sure and uh my work and the board of finance

causes me to travel all the time sort of trying to rely on technology to help facilitate my work life

um trying to find smaller and smaller and brighter and brighter computers to help and all men you know

come together so i thought this would be an appropriate workshop to sort of see how

i can take technology and uh you know like you know quest for uh you know inter-searching and sort of

uh smaller and brighter yeah yeah i turned up for healing letting go i mean moving on and letting

go i'm going to stay here i'm peter i'm a painter and i'm interested in mysticism and i'm interested in

uh people left about consciousness and interested in how the internet is manifesting that i work as well

this is my birthday present to myself

my name is tom i'm interested in the concept of boundaries and barriers

which i think he's mentioned in my life and both psychedelics and the internet are

greatly understandably and i had an opportunity to to be in the family east

journalist some time ago and he had a phrase the wall of the mind and i found that a very powerful

phrase the wall itself is gone but the wall of the mind has persisted and

i think we all have and we certainly have them in this country also it's a great metaphor for me

and this workshop kind of spoke to that metaphor um i've also had a long interest in cultural

anthropology in the world that psychoactive drugs or plants play in traditional cultures

cultures you know and that kind of thing um and we'll be teaching a course on sociology but want to look at

the impact of the internet on our culture today and we thought i'd get some truth from that

my name is jessica and i'm in the middle of a big nasty storm of really remarkable promotion

um terence's name keeps coming up ai here stuff collective conscious going array and suddenly

getting invited here for peace seems to be a part of it so my name is todd and uh my first was made

aware of esalen uh through sitting tables with joseph camel sounded like a particularly interesting

place so i recruited the website and recently i wanted to come here and i was thinking wow gosh

you know you know about a month away and i looked and i saw computers and psychoactive plants and the

two main passions of my life coming together again i was overjoyed and i'm here

my name is chris i'm a librarian i live in oakland uh i took a class from mark of a year and some ago

and uh i re-shadowed one of terence's books in january and i just haven't looked back

that was the archaic revival up in the bees history of religion and so forth and i have been

interested in the processional astronomy for a while since i read peter tompkins mysteries of the great

pyramid and then hammer's mill blew my mind and um let's see now philip k dick i thought uh i thought

that he was going to be here he is here he is here no i thought that our camp revival's first uh

of parents's writings that i have and he was actually uh wrote the afterward of the forward to uh

what was it uh selections from the exegesis i wrote that yeah it was supposed to be a forward

and after they read it they announced it would be an afterward so uh i um i'm looking to make friends

and connections here ever since i read about the dmt flash i said i have to experience that so uh

uh um computers the psychedelics the internet and me all right i'm here

you mentioned your interest in processional astronomy any of you who are into all of that

and hamlet's mill and so forth and so on there's a new book by john major jenkins called maya

cosmogenesis 2012 and it's very well written it's very scholarly it's there it is it may be in the

bookstore here i don't know but if you care about all that that it's the latest greatest thing to read

yeah i'm eric newdard i'm a grad student in transpersonal psychology

mushrooms have done a lot for my life made me look at how to change others lives that's how i got

terence's writing i'm interested in mythicism too and particularly like you mentioned in the archaic

revival there is a big difference between the mushroom experience and uh following a path

you know vedanta or yoga or something and uh i've always sensed that but i've never been able to

figure out exactly what the difference is it's a free lunch way with a mushroom where you don't have

to work for it you know our western culture at least we have the protestant work ethic and we frown

that sort of thing i've always been curious kind of why it's not exactly a free lunch it's it's simply

that instead of searching for the spiritual gas pedal you suddenly become very interested in finding the

braids go for it my cosmic trigger probably on the influence of some psychedelic drugs but we'll come

to that and in it he summarizes yours and your brother's work on the time wave and he in fact

charts out history into three major sections the 67 year section which will comprise the bulk of my life

an interesting 13-month section which will happen in 2011 and then an interesting six-day section which

will happen immediately preceding the winter solstice in 2012 in which i believe during the last six-day

session a little bit more novelty than has existed on the planet since ever since ever and i looked at

this and i had been reading i'd started off easy so i'd read alvin toffler and then i could take a

little bit more so i worked myself up into pierre thayer de chardon and then i came across that and i said

well this appears to be the case it was confirmed to me internally in a way that i could not particularly

argue with i could not argue out of it was simply a foundational fact and all of my work thereafter

was based on a premise that the universe is seeking a type of closure that in fact things are converging

and so my own life study had been perhaps an exploration of what those avenues of convergence were

and it ended up over a period of years that my own life story became a search to create the forms of

that convergence so we'll now flash forward to my first experience of virtual reality which happened

in 1990 and required absolutely no technology except about 500 micrograms of lsd25 i've been thinking i've

been reading and all of a sudden i drop acid after several years and of course if you've taken several

years break and all of a sudden thrust yourself back into that realm you can find that things really pop

up and i found myself in a virtual world and what i found in this virtual world the thing that i i must

have suspected that i would find in this virtual world wasn't an artificial tron like environment

it wasn't something that was entirely artificial what i beheld in that environment

was an image of the planet as if i was cruising above it in a spaceship and i knew that part of

my own destiny as connected with virtual reality wasn't to escape into another dimension but to find

a way to make real to us the things that we can't always see because we exist at a level of scale of

experience that hides them from us and at that point in my life i decided i needed to leave new

england had come to california where everything was really going on this was 1990 and vr was the hot new

thing and we forget now that vr was the hot new thing before the internet became the hot new thing

but for a while it was the cheese and i moved to san francisco which made it much easier to get good drugs

and i started to explore by working by building systems what virtual reality was and this started to

have a profound change on my own understanding of how reality was constructed because my psychedelic

description of reality which is that mind forms reality began to conflate or become identical with

my physical or scientific description of reality which is that mind forms reality and all of a sudden

i understood that everything i used to understand about the way the universe works wasn't as true

as i had thought and so this began to inspire in me a search a search to get to some basic level

of being that would allow me to work in a world that was manifest because of my own will and just as

much as manifest because of your own will because where we're going the simulated and the real are going to

get really blurry and we don't have any tools we don't have any tools of mind western culture which is

based on this idea of this objective external reality it's not hard it's all become very soft and it's

all flowing together so we need to now start to find ways of describing what's going on and so what we

need to do i found in my own investigations is to take a look at cultures that describe the world magically

that understand that perception shapes what you are and you shape what you see and that they're they're

not separate areas they're not separate domains but you have to consider them as a whole

so the the four sort of prongs that got talked about in the uh blurb that was written for this piece

are techno-paganism and techno-paganism is maybe you could describe it a bunch of different ways and i

certainly didn't make the word up and i certainly didn't apply the word to myself but it stuck

because wired magazine published an article two years ago with my face blazoned on it photoshop

reversed in color and said this is a techno-pagan and really what it was trying to do was trying

to articulate my own experience of being thrust into this world where everything was melting and

nothing was solid and trying to come to grips with it philosophically trying to come to grips with

it ontologically and my own explorations had led me to understand that in fact in a world where anything

you want is true the only way you can deal with this is by learning how to deal with your will

dealing with your will is what magic has always in all cultures always been about this is why the

shaman doesn't go insane when the world just disappears he's ready for it they're ready because

they understand that where they are isn't bound up in their view of the world the internet is a connective

layer and you were talking about this last night it's beautiful if you took a picture of this room in

1990 and you took a picture of it today everything would look exactly the same and yet everything is

completely different because in 1990 we didn't have this layer of bits that's flowing seamlessly among

all of us and it's changed us it's radically sped up the way we deal with information in society and

every bit of information that passes through you changes you you cannot be unaffected in any way by

any bit of information so the internet is acting as this enormous accelerator it's acting as something

that's passing through all of us and radically transforming us and part of what it's doing is ripping

us apart and that's dangerous if we don't approach that carefully and if we don't approach that with

a lot of heart we're going to find ourselves and what we think of as ourselves ripped away in that

process one of the reasons why i think it's very important that this is happening at esalen is because

if esalen were running a political campaign their slogan would be it's the body stupid

because it begins here and it ends here and if we can stay in our bodies even while we're projected

into cyberspace we have some zone for sanity we have some zone for being and psychedelics can produce

these boundary dissolutions where you flow into another thing what we're going to see and it's actually

quite true that certain types of vr can produce precisely the same affect there are zones where

virtual reality can be very dangerous for that reason or incredibly powerful and meaningful for that

reason so where i i would like to work from this weekend is i really want to work from the heart i

personally think in my own philosophy that to work in technology you have to work from the heart center

because otherwise you'll create golems you'll create frankensteins your creations

will run away from you and this is that's the essence of the story of the golem is that this

is a creature that was created with the breath of life but without the light of knowledge or the heart

the heart of god so we really have to work from that and one of the things that we'll be doing this

weekend for that and we're inviting you i don't think we're requiring you because that would just not

be in the tenor of this place but we're inviting you at 7 30 in the morning both tomorrow and

sunday to come practice kundalini yoga and kundalini yoga works very much on the heart center

it's not strenuous i guarantee it will be fun uh we have a very good teacher james will be teaching

this and the idea is that with these exercises we can help to open up our heart center so that when we

talk tomorrow when we meet tomorrow we can really be working from that even when we're talking about

these ideas that may be very technologically relevant they won't be isolated in our minds

that all said i also want to explore the joyous nature of what we can do and a lot of my work has

been around exploring the joyous nature of what we can do we have to if we if we're working from our

hearts in these environments then a part of what we want to do is be joyous in these environments one

of my biggest gripes about the internet is that it can't as yet contain the tenor of human emotion which

is so important if we're building this edifice to be the global mind and it can't laugh we've got a

big problem if it can't sing we have a big problem and so one of the things we'll be doing probably in

the evening on saturday is doing something we call voce which paul and i have been working on we call it

world song or voce which is a singing or toning technique and it can produce a quality of connection

in a group of people which is the closest i've heard it described as it's almost like instant

ecstasy in the sense of the drug and it's it's it's a temporary sort of lowering of interpersonal

barriers and in a really really wonderful way and hopefully at the end of all of this i will have

been inspired and terence will have been inspired by what you had to say and we'll be able to bring

that about heart-centeredness which has to i believe for me that the heart of how we work when we're

working in the world and with technology in the world isn't he a great guy if i had the timothy leary

laurels with me i'd hand them on the bad penny could pass

well that's it's i love listening to mark wrap this stuff and he really knows where he's coming from

and uh it's it's exciting stuff i've been into this psychedelic thing since the late 60s and it's

transformed in different ways and there's been a strange sort of literary parallelism or cloud over my

life so that as my obsessions evolved society obligingly evolved in the same directions and when i got started

with psychedelics it was because i was uh interested in the mystical experience a la uh yakub burma and thomas

to hearne and all that sort of thing and i had read aldous huxley's book the doors of perception so it was a

spiritual intentionality and as time passed i i was completely satisfied in that but i also became

interested then in what were psychedelics in terms of their impacts on large numbers of people and on

human social and cultural evolution because to me it was just this incredible power this dimension which

my own culture completely denied and overlooked but that obviously from the first time i had a major trip

on it was clear to me that this had to have evolutionary implications and it seemed to me as i read my darwin

and and uh and uh freud that there had to be some kind of quickening influence in human emergence that

if not outright transcendental was certainly unique and out of the ordinary order of nature and so

that i spent years thinking about psychedelics implications for human evolution and most of you

if you're interested know my theories about all this well then the engagement with it extended further

and i began to see it as a lens for coordinating large amounts of data in order to essentially prophesize

the future that the the future somehow i had the notion that history and the individual life built around

the psychedelic experience were fractal reflections of each other and that led to the conclusion that

history is

trip and that led to the conclusion that the best was yet to come or the

yest was bet to come, I'm not sure. So it had this socio-political and historical

implication and it wasn't as simple as just imagining what would happen if

societies would permit these things but I could also see that it was a catalyst

on imagination that you know whatever it was that psychedelics were doing it was

taking anybody's notion of reality anybody's mindset and radically extending

it and if they found that comfortable they were ecstatic and if they found it

horrifying they were traumatized but the common thread was takes ordinary minds

makes them bigger stranger more grotesque less predictable more bizarre so then that

was not yet the outer parameter of the issues that this phenomenon the

psychedelic experience seemed to engage it seemed to me that at the personal

and experiential level the thing that was so astonishing about it was not that it

led at least for me directly to God what it led to was more art than I conceived of

existing how was it that you know in a five-hour psilocybin trip an ordinary person lying in

darkness sees more art than is stored and catalogued in all the museums of Europe I

mean this was confounding to me and I had a Jungian bias too so I was full of the

notion of the commonality of the unconscious and all that and so I was puzzled

why don't I see these motifs in Tibetan painting shipibo carving what why how can

something which is so near over a very slight energy threshold involved in taking these

substances be so distant from our cultural values in our store of images and it was

around this time roughly 1990 that I began to hear the first buzz about virtual reality and I knew the

minute I understood the concept I knew in the same way that I knew when I heard

about the first Mac and LSD and potassium sugar per chlorate rocket fuels that this was going to be the next great thing and as a tool of art as the tool for leading us beyond the notion that we are a hive society of advanced primates

because that's how we visually appear to the empirical point of view that that's the

appear to the empirical point of view. That's an out-of-context description of what we are.

It's like a schematic or an aerial map. What we really are is a community of mind knitted

together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes, the invisible

world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little

more than a kind of screen or stage upon which we move. So this thing Mark said, I heard it for

the first time and got it, that the purpose of VR is to show us aspects of reality that are not

artificial, but that are fields of data not ordinarily coordinated by ordinary perception.

You know, Ralph Abraham, who's a favorite around here, has talked about how mathematics, which

has been a high priesthood of arcane formulae and special signifying languages, is giving

way to visual understanding. If you talk to someone about a seven or eight dimensional process,

most people completely blur out. If you show them an animation of an ongoing eight dimensional

process, everybody understands without a word being said exactly what is happening. So I see

virtual reality as a way not of escaping any notion of empirical reality, but as a way of

re-portraying invisible levels of the given world that are very vital and important to us. How we see

flows of energy, how we understand complex economies, how we understand the fractal hierarchies of

nature. Everything is about to get very much more complicated, much larger, the number of choices are

about to exponentially explode. In a sense, these technologies point us toward if not literal godhood,

then a kind of fictional godhood. We are all going to become the masters of the narrative in which we are

embedded. Our separate stories are going to take on dimensions so multifarious that for all practical purposes, we will each move into a cosmos of our own creation and control. In a way, all that is happening is that what is already co-present with three dimensional reality is being literalized.

But literalized in timescales that make the nature of the game apparent to all but the dullest among us. I mean, after all, we have always lived in virtual realities ever since we abandoned nomadism and defined a polis and a wilderness. And, you know, when Hammurubi set up the first codes,

codes in Babylon, these were operating codes. These were constraints on the human system that did not fully implement its capabilities, but rather defined and limited it for purposes of implementing certain design goals.

Well, now we have been in the birth canal of the design process for about 8,000 years now. And we can see light at the end of the tunnel. The French have a notion of forward escape.

That means when the situation gets so crazy, then you just hit the accelerator and drive straight up the middle. And that's the forward escape. And technology represents this for us. Our ideologies are probably lethal, obviously lethal, I would say.

But they are fortunately a kind of chrysalis of ideological constraint that technology is in the process of dissolving. And, you know, William Butler saw this in the 19th century.

Tellard de Chardin reached it in the 40s and the 50s.

McLuhan expressly articulated this vision in the 50s and the 60s. This is really, you know, as Ahab tells the crew in Moby Dick, this is what you've shipped for, mate.

This was the plan. You know, Plato said, if God does not exist, man will create such a thing. And we are creating a simulacrum of our highest hopes. And the effort to define the actual delimiting architecture of our hope is an intellectual exercise that we have never previously submitted to.

And what I mean by that is when you can do anything, what do you do?

We've always worked within the constraints of mortar, glass, steel, our economic scales, our physical scales. VR eliminates all of this.

You know, the difference between a ten-story building and a hundred-story building in virtual reality is one zero in a line of code.

Well, with that kind of freedom, the human imagination, which has been defined by limitation, the planet's surface, the needs and wishes of others, is going to unfold in these super spaces.

And, you know, it's a Gnostic epiphany. What it really comes down to in terms of the politics and psychology of it is a final resolution, to my mind, of the question, is man good?

In other words, with all constraints removed, do we descend into a world of, you know, Freudian nightmare and simulated sadomasochism?

Or do we express something which matter always mitigated against?

So that's what I think is, I'm sure we will do both.

I'm sure we will do both. I mean, the essence of choice means not only will we collectively do both, probably each and every one of us will do both, you know?

Occasionally you flop on the seamy side. It gives a literary quality to life that's lacking among the tight ass.

So, well, I don't know. It's a quarter of ten. Do you want to riff off that for a bit? And then we'll send these folks packing.

I've been piecing together an essay while I've been here, which I'm calling West of Esalen, which is interesting because if you take a look at what's west of Esalen, you see a gaping cliff which has been growing of late.

And Esalen, as is all of California, is breaking off and falling into the sea. And there is no safe land anywhere.

And that's more than a metaphor for where we are now. And it's interesting because there's talk about what Esalen has to do with the modern age.

And yet so much of what we think of as modern language has been shaped by what's come out of this place.

Talking about, you know, somebody's vibes or being touchy-feely or even doing yoga, which is now, of course, all the rage in late millennial culture.

These are all impulses that came out of this place. So there's something about this space and about the body which is incredibly right.

And even if Esalen vanished tomorrow, God has forbid, even if it did, the impact of it as an institution has been profound.

And I think perhaps what we're trying to do here this weekend and tonight is to extend the franchise of Esalen into another realm.

To say that the values that make us human, the values that make us good, are the values that come out of what's done here.

And maybe they're values that rely on the body in some way.

That even as we talk about this Gnostic release, this uploading of the soul into some sort of silicon, which we will talk about.

That there's this body that's behind sort of bitching, saying, excuse me, I'm real.

And I am the potential. I am the ground in which you work.

Because of that, I hope that we will spend some of the weekend not just speculating,

but constantly looping and bringing it back into the body and where the body is.

The question of the body is one of the largest questions in virtual reality.

That's a curious contradiction and yet it's true.

Where is the body in cyberspace?

Where are you when your email is flashing across the net, when your agents are doing your bidding?

Where are you and how do you maintain yourself?

And it was interesting because there was a comment that was made earlier about psychedelics as a shortcut versus yoga or one of the other traditions.

And I know that in my own life I need both of them because I need the psychedelics in order to be able to have the vision.

But I need the yoga in order to maintain the stability to express the vision.

And so there's both dials there.

It's as if the internet is some sort of collective psychedelic.

We're going to need the body as we pass through it so that we can explore the zones within ourselves that are the good.

Yeah, it's great what you say about that we're trying to push the definitions of Esalen's relevance because, you know, the entire intellectual and spiritual effort here over the past 30 years flies under the flag of the human potential movement.

I mean, that's what it's called.

And certainly what we're talking about here and trying to bring gently onto the stage is an enormous frontier of human potential.

We are, to some degree, beginning to design ourselves or beginning to design our potential in the service of the idea of a perfected humanity of some sort.

And what we're talking about here is not genetic manipulation or eugenics or any of these somewhat dubious enterprises with a clouded history, but using technological prosthesis to extend and enrich humanness, to enrich communication.

And it is, believe me, the want of good communication that is the thing probably, if anything undoes us, this will be it.

That our language has failed, that we misread each other's intent, that we could not understand each other.

So the project of refining language is the same project as the ending of history.

I mean, history is the story of languages that failed.

And when language grows perfect, history will end.

And language may not look like it looks today or sound like it sounds today.

The realization that's flowered in the wake of the internet and the rise of cybernetics is that everything is made of information.

Information is the primary datum of being.

Concepts like time and space and energy are orders of magnitude removed from the present at hand when compared with a concept like information.

And as Mark said, every iota, every bit of information that passes through us, that we generate, that we transmit, changes us.

So I'm seeing here almost a theosophical epiphany of language trying to bootstrap itself toward realms of platonic perfection, which as organic beings, we experience as love.

Love, beauty, truth.

Truth.

These are the vectors of human becoming.

They always have been.

They always will be.

And the technologies that open these paths for us are no more and no less powerful than the human beings that wield them.

So, you know, this is an enterprise of integrity and millennial implication.

And what lies as the goal is true humanness in sympathetic symbiosis with the planet and with these strange children that we have brought into the world, our machines.

I mean, that is the challenge at the end of history.

And that's what we'll be talking about this weekend.

Thanks for coming and to get some sleep.

Mark, I wanted to ask you, where is the yoga?

Yoga is 7, no, 7.30 tomorrow morning.

They have movements here.

In the big room, in the meeting room, in the big house?

In the big house living room at 7.30.

Everyone familiar where the big house is?

It's across the bridge and it's the big house.

Okay.

The big house.

Okay.

As opposed to the little house, which it sits opposite from.

And it's the big house.

7.30, please.

You'll enjoy it.

If you have a blanket or something, bring it.

It'll be comfy.

But if not, don't worry about it.

We have some housekeeping business here.

This morning is a session that lasts till noon.

Mark and I worked these things out very roughly.

And he'll talk to you this morning about body and boundary.

And then that will lead to discussion and so on.

And that's it.

Mark, there you have it.

Good morning, everyone.

Those of you who have joined us for yoga, hopefully right now you're glowing at least a little bit inside.

I actually found the amount of energy in the room, particularly when we were meditating at the end, to be outstanding.

I do that meditation a lot.

And I was almost blown over a couple of times by the amount of energy that was in the room.

I'm going to spin a myth, a story.

And it's a scientific story, maybe.

And it has scientific verifiability.

Verifiability?

Maybe.

Verisimility.

Veracity.

Maybe.

You can put it to the test by yourself.

You can put it to the test in large populations.

And it might be the foundation for an understanding of where we are right now.

So I want to flash back to 1992, and I've gone to San Francisco, and I've turned my basement into a laboratory.

And I'm building head-mounted displays with ocular components so poor that I can focus on almost any source now.

And we're sticking our head into virtual worlds, and we're building very simple things.

And we're just exploring, which is really all anyone is doing at this point in time.

And at the same time, I'm starting to get this rising sense of ontological uncertainty about what the real is.

That my psychedelic experience is starting to conflate with my experience about reality as it is in a non-psychedelic state.

And I don't really think I know what's going on.

Fortunately, serendipitously at this point in my life, in walks a bonafide mad scientist.

And his name is Dr. David Warner.

And David Warner, at that time, was at the Loma Linda Medical Research Center in Riverside.

And these days, he runs the center for really neat research.

No kidding.

At Syracuse University.

Really neat.

Center for really neat research.

At Syracuse University.

And Dave's trip, in particular, although he has a degree in philosophy and a degree in neuroscience,

his trip used to take really cheap little electronic pieces and work them so that they can enable children who've had severe cerebral or neurological injuries.

So say a child who had an accident coming out of the womb and has a break at their second vertebra, which means they can't even breathe without a respirator.

Well, what kind of life can that child have?

Well, that child whom they got when she had barely been born is now planning actually on becoming, I guess, a rocket scientist.

Because she's been outfitted even in her wheelchair with very simple sensors that can read her eyes.

And things like this that can enable her.

And all of this used to cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But in fact, there's so much technology, so much detritus lying around that if you think about it creatively and you think about it from your heart,

how can I help this person?

You can slap things together in any particular order and come up with things that are completely amazing.

And we don't normally think about it like that.

We think about it like big science, like you have to really go work and engineer the problem.

Don't think of it as something you can simply hack together to enable a person to become whole or at least to be able to effectively allow them to communicate with you in the outside world.

Because that's what we're talking about is the spinal cord, in that sense, is our facility for communication.

So when I say that the sun rises and sets on Dr. Dave, this is what I believe.

And most of the people who've ever met him tend to think the same thing.

He's a bona fide math scientist.

He'll never be rich.

He might someday be famous for being a math scientist.

But he has an awful lot to say about why we do things.

He's definitely, he used to, he started off his career as a Marine Corps drill instructor.

So he could be very, very persuasive.

And over the course of 1992, I got a horse doctor's dose of his persuasion.

So you can picture this evening in a sort of musty San Francisco basement in front of a great big chalkboard.

And I got a spiel, which he at that time was calling perceptual cybernetics, which is something I'm still using as a word.

It's a great big double word.

He also calls it neurocosmology now.

And it's to deal with the way that media or information in the universe interact with us.

Now that said, what I'm presenting to you is a model.

It's not the God's honest truth.

You can probably poke holes in it.

But it's useful to understand certain things.

So we're going to take the entire universe right now and we're going to trisect it.

And I'm going to say, okay, everything that's outside of me, the physical reality, objective or subjective, we're going to call that by.

So physical, you can think of it that way.

Then we're going to take the universe of the interior, everything you're thinking or feeling, the things that you have to struggle to communicate because they're innate inside of you, but they don't always get out.

We're going to call that psi for the psychic realm.

And then we're going to take the body, the physical being, this thing that sits between, and that's the very important point here.

And we're going to call that fex.

I think he has another name for it now, which is slightly more romantic.

Or we could go to the William Gibson term and call it the meat.

And we'll come back to that.

And it's not important what's in island one or island two or island three.

What's important is that there are boundaries between them.

And I will give you two examples to illustrate these boundaries.

Exhibit A, our remote control.

Now note, it'll turn the VCR on and off.

Did you see anything?

Now, it's infrared light coming out of here.

You can't see infrared light.

You can't parse the information.

So this is information that's freely available in the physical world,

but it's being stopped at the boundary to your body,

that boundary between the physical and the body,

because you aren't equipped.

You don't have the sensors to actually be able to see it.

So that's one layer.

There's a very natural layer that's there,

that's actually separating us from the world at large.

Second example.

I just said, I'm a little green man.

In Japanese.

For those of you who can speak Japanese

and can understand my decidedly poor pronunciation of it,

you have an internal interface between your ears and the parts of your brain that process sound,

and your understanding, your higher functions.

But if you don't, then that information is simple noise.

It gets stopped at the interior boundary between the meat and your understanding.

So we have at least two basic types of barriers to information.

So that's the theory as Dave taught it to me.

What I became aware of over the period of time that I continued to work in virtual reality,

and in fact this became, I guess it sort of burst on me in a very clear sense after a psychedelic experience,

that in fact what I was working on in virtual reality,

what virtual reality, what interactive media, what media themselves are all about,

are about retuning or changing the qualities of these interfaces that we innately possess,

either by our physical or by our learned and acquired characteristics.

So for example, you could go get a set of those cheapy Soviet infrared night vision goggles

that are on the market now because the company's gone out of business,

and you could see the information coming out of this.

You can equip yourselves.

You can augment yourself in such a way that this becomes a visible reality.

Or you could go take a short course in Japanese.

And believe me, you wouldn't need to know much Japanese to understand what I said.

And you could equip yourself internally with this interface.

And we normally call that interface learning.

But in some sense, what we're doing is we're equipping ourselves internally with a tool,

with a mechanism, with an augmentation that allows us to understand it.

So the goal, in some sense, with VR, and certainly Jaron Lanier,

who's considered to be the father of virtual reality,

evoked a word or a phrase which he said was post-symbolic communication.

I read that phrase, I don't get much information out of it except I get an intuition

that this means that we can go directly from one mind, one psi, to another psi,

without any intervening.

So that the job, the grand project of virtual reality,

is to mediate away the functioning of the interface between the outside world and your body,

and your body and the interior world.

That said...

If this is the direction, if that's the vector of our approach,

the closer we get to it,

the closer we get to a condition of more or less perfect fidelity

between one psychic state and another, transmitter and receiver.

In the condition where that transmission is perfect or near perfect,

I took a look at that and realized we already had a name for that state in English.

And this is what frightened me,

because the word for that state in English is a cyborg.

If you think about, it's very interesting because science fiction,

particularly pop science fiction, and in specific Star Trek,

has been popularizing the notion of the Borg,

where the individual has been sublimated to a collective will

which can forcibly insert its own norms, its own means, into a body,

and thus make that body a slave agent.

Let's go back and talk about boundaries.

The boundaries of your body,

the boundaries where you exist,

both internal and external,

are there for a reason.

They keep you alive.

The absence of boundary is not a condition

that is normally associated with living systems.

When you lose your boundaries,

or when you bridge them

without thinking about what you're doing,

you can die very quickly.

So the boundaries that exist in us

to biology, to information,

exist in order to preserve the integrity of yourself.

So any attempt to move across those boundaries

has to be considered very carefully

because the kinds of things

that flow across those boundaries

change the qualities of those boundaries.

This is what I meant when I said last night

that every word you hear,

every bit of information that you encounter,

changes you.

But this is the human condition.

That's the other side of the coin.

The human condition,

ever since the first woman

uttered the first word

and sent something across the void,

actually gapped,

bridged the gap of perception

from one mind into another mind,

this has been going on.

So there might have been

some point in the past

where a human being

was a self-contained unity,

but that also might have been

a pre-human state.

It may be that the nature

of what it means to be human

is that we are in fact

constantly in a state

where that human gulf

is being bridged,

where other people

are putting parts of themselves

into you

and you are responding

by putting parts of yourself

into them.

So we have to accept this

as a condition of being alive,

of being communicating beings

in a culture.

So there's this fundamental tension

because there's this drive

to connect

and then there's this drive

to be separate.

So we have two sorts of outcomes

that could happen

from any possible flow like this.

You could have, for instance,

the rape of the Borg

or you could have

the consummation of seduction,

of the joining, of the merging.

And these forces

are constantly at odds.

And every piece of media

that we create

and as we get better

and better at evoking

a particular psychic state,

we're getting further

and further along that line,

each one of these artifacts

contains both the potential

to rape or to dominate.

And so this is why

to come back to it,

it's important to work with heart

because when you work with heart,

the drive or the innate desire

within you

is to consummate

the relationship of communication

and not use it

as a vector

for contamination and rape.

Let's take, for example,

and I want to use this

as a general example,

the cellular phone.

I'm one of the few people

I know in Los Angeles

who still does not have

a cellular phone.

I don't know how it's happened,

it's just happened.

But I've seen something happen

time and time again

with all of my friends

as they get the cell phones.

The first thing you hear is,

oh, well, I just need it for work

or I just need it for a few calls.

That's day one.

By day 14,

give or take,

it's been thoroughly incorporated

into their ontology.

It's a form and a mechanism

of communication

that they have adapted to.

It's a mere form of telepathy.

It's immediate.

It's present.

It's attached.

It goes with you everywhere.

And it's suddenly indispensable.

Day one,

you didn't need it at all.

Day 14,

you can't live without it.

And so what we do is,

as the information flows

between ourselves

and the device,

we adapt to the device.

And the device is incorporated

into our understanding

of the world

and how the world works.

And you can say the same thing

about the television

or the radio

or virtual reality.

I'll stop there.

I like the idea

about how we are

almost like social insects,

that we're generating

the equivalent

of informational pheromones

and that these means

and linguistic structures

that we generate

are designed usually

to impact other people's behavior,

which is what pheromones do

in insect societies.

And I also was interested

in what you said earlier

about the interfaces

between the boundaries.

It seems to me

that one of the things

we're going to have

to get used to

is states of being

that are very non-referential

to meat.

And that it's very hard to,

that essentially

what the body is

is a kind of metabolic knot

in time.

And so everything

is perceived

through the energetic

unraveling of metabolism.

It's what makes life possible.

But on the other hand,

you can build

from that platform

into areas

that are not so clouded

by the fact

of an animal body.

I think I,

well,

psychedelics,

especially the high-dose ones,

seem to show this.

So I'm imagining

one of the things

that we're going to have

to get used to

is points of view

that are not human at all,

but that will be ours,

you know,

to put up

and take down

as we want.

There's the idea also

of looking out

at nature,

making that,

you know,

maybe what the program

of consciousness

is about

is a re-infusing

of all of nature

with self-reflection

so that every eye

that looks out

at the world

leads back

to the global mind,

whether cybernetically maintained

or maintained

in some other way.

In other words,

we're like

causing nature,

well,

not causing,

I mean,

cause and effect

is tricky here,

but we are part

of an emergent phenomenon

of nature's self-awareness.

Nature as information

is somehow

in an embryonic state

and human societies

as purveyors

and generators

of information

have become

the medium

of this

dynamic

which infuses us

as animals

with the presence

of,

I don't know,

spirit,

the divine,

an awareness

of hyperspace,

something like that.

everybody who's heard me

more than once

knows that I think

of psychedelics

as essentially

boundary-dissolving agents,

that that's

what they do.

Culture

is the antithesis

of this.

Culture is

a limited game,

a limited piece

of software run

run on a machine

much more powerful

than it is

and it defines

behavior.

Well,

Mark is right.

If you breach

really deep boundaries,

you die very quickly.

If you insist

on stepping into

high vacuum

or walking

on the bottom

of the lake

without the benefit

of scuba equipment,

you quickly

cease to be

a functioning

being.

On the other hand,

there's some kind

of

tension.

Culture

is a compromise.

You know,

Freud

titled one of his books

Civilization

and its Discontents,

meaning that

civilization

was a kind

of fallen

state

that we

had put upon

us

or took

upon

ourselves

as an act

of self-limiting.

And in a way,

you know,

I seem to

gravitate

toward these

tunnel images

when I think

about virtual reality

and psychedelics

because what I

see them as

is some kind

of

redemptive

possibility

that will

make

the historical

experience

make sense

in the sense

of

it will somehow

make history

worth the trip.

You know?

I think

one of the most

horrifying

visions

in all of

20th century

political dialogue

is the discourse

between

the interrogator

and Winston

Smith

in 1984

where

the interrogator

says to him,

do you know

what history

is?

And he says,

no,

what is history?

And he says,

history is a

human boot

smashing into

a human face

forever.

Well,

this is,

you know,

this is

unacceptable.

This is

inconceivable.

and the

overcoming of

it is

by turning

the tools

that these

pathological

behaviors

created

out of

science

and positivism

and so forth

into

actual

elevators

of human

potential

and intent.

And

the boundary

issue is

critical

in a way

I think

what's

happening

is we

are becoming

many

species.

You know,

in H.G.

Wells'

time machine

in the

distant future

there were

subterranean

machine

and hive

people

and then

there were

the free

spirited

witless

surface

people.

It's a

more serious

fragmentation

than that.

Greg Egan

in his

science

fiction

says

the real

ethical

challenge

of the

future

is to

preserve

the very

notion

of

a

human

species.

You know,

some of us

may choose

to

leave the

body

entirely

if that

is possible

and migrate

into

digital

castles

in the

imagination

that can

exist

in some

kind of

synthetic

eternity

of some

sort.

other people

might choose

to be

welded

into

machines

that could

approach

the

velocity

of

light

and

become

in a

sense

immortal

through

downloading

into

robotic

machinery.

Other people

for sure

will try

to return

to the

rainforest

and sing

their songs

and sharpen

their wooden

implements

with fire

and all

of this.

Does that

mean then

that the

idea of

humanness

is

so linked

to the

body

that it's

now up

for grabs

or in

question

because of

the possibilities

that loom

immediately

ahead?

I don't

know.

I agree

with what

Mark said

last night

that the

anchoring

point

has to

be the

body.

It's a

strategy

we've talked

about in

other contexts

that when

you don't

know what's

going on

when you

lose your

way

a very

reasonable

thing to

do

is to

try to

reason

backward

to the

last

sane

moment

you

knew

and

then

act

from

those

principles

and

you know

history

is

the

whole

of

history

is

a

fall

away

from

authentic

being

in the

felt

presence

of the

moment

and

what

virtual

reality

and the

acceleration

of

technology

does

is the

favor

of

essentially

tipping

the

game

showing

us

what

is

happening

the

kind

of

analysis

of

media

and

cultural

artifacts

that

has

been

possible

since

McLuhan

and so

forth

and so

on

was

literally

those

thoughts

were

unthinkable

before

that

because

the

reign

of

print

created

linearity

and

positivistic

understanding

was so

unquestioned

that no

one could

lift their

nose

back

from it

to even

inquire

what

it

was

the

whole

last

half

of the

20th

century

is

the

dawning

realization

the

same

personal

journey

that

Mark

made

we

all

made

in

some

way

which

was

the

realization

that

reality

is not

only not

what it

appears

but what

it

seems to

be

is

something

barely

imaginable

Englishable

and

discussable

that

you know

the cheerful

assumptions

of

three-dimensional

space

and the

virtue of

hard work

and chastity

just

you know

it hasn't

flung itself

apart

for you

yet

it soon

will

before we

leave one of

the things

you were just

talking about

it was

something that

occurred to me

and I'm

wondering

when we talk

about uploading

and downloading

from one form

to another

and you know

if we look at

the body

as a machine

are we not

downloading

information

from those

living items

that we

ingest into

our body

and digest

if we're

talking about

DNA as

information

well we're

taking that

into our

body

somehow

we're processing

it

where there's

nothing else

but nutritional

purposes

whatever

and when

our body

itself

incorporates

and it

goes into

the ground

are we not

then uploading

back into

the larger

living system

that we have

the commonality

of the water

of water

H2O

as a carrier

system

you know

it just

seems to me

that a lot

of times

we see these

science fiction

scenarios

as something

separate from

our existence

that we know

and I think

it's an existence

that we know

already

it's a similar

type of process

reprocessing

that we're

quite familiar

with

we just don't

remember it

well I think

all of

you know

there's a view

of nature

that is certainly

in the ascendant

that it is all

chemically mediated

information flows

that everything

is essentially

in communication

with everything

else

and that

in fact

when you step

further back

it is just

a seamless

chemical mind

the distribution

of DNA

in the environment

the way

acidity

is regulated

by breakup

of leaf material

and I recall

memorizing when

I was studying

jungle ecosystems

the factoid

that organic

material born

in rainwater

in the Amazon

flows on

average no more

than half a

millimeter

before being

reabsorbed into

an organic system

so you know

there is

not a lot

of unused

disk space

in that system

very pretty

yes

it's definitely

maxing out

I

you know

one of my hopes

for all of this

is

that

nanotechnology

will lead

and

so will

propagating

the frontier

of molecular

biology

to the

understanding

that

at the

level where

nature is

computing

single

atomic

systems

and molecular

lattice work

is what's

utilized

if we

are serious

about perfecting

our design

process

then

what

we

today

think of

as

infrastructure

should

simply

gently

fade

away

as

we

learn

how to

piggyback

and

timeshare

with the

already

extant

sub-molecular

computational

machinery

that binds

the planet

together

anyway

I mean

yeah

well

mycelial

networks

you know

my

when you

grow

mushrooms

and you

see how

it

ramifies

through

the soil

and you

realize

that these

the clamping

junctions

that it

makes

are

very

complicated

chemical

environments

not

dissimilar to

what's going

on in a

synapse

and then you

read that they

find these

mycelial maps

on a scale

of acres

and the

age

and the age

of the

things

can't

even

be

calculated

well

nature

is

very

efficient

a

system

that works

on one

level

efficiently

will

reoccur

in other

levels

and in

other

applications

and

I

think

the

part of

the end

of the

print created

linear

Christian

positivist

dispensation

et cetera

is the

recognition

that

mind

extends

infinitely

in all

directions

it isn't

all

rationally

apprehendable

to the

primate

neural

architecture

but

the ocean

thinks

the

continents

think

the solar

system

thinks

the sun

thinks

can we

think

what they

think

probably

not

but

then

an

infinite

frontier

of

potential

intellectual

evolution

opens up

through

the

concept

of

an

unlimited

project

of

understanding

you know

Whitehead

once

pushed

on the

subject

of

understanding

said

understanding

is the

apperception

of

pattern

as

such

that's

all

it is

pattern

as

such

well

any

given

context

a room

full

of

people

a

coral

reef

a

planetary

system

will

display

if you

observe

it

carefully

enough

an

infinite

number

of

patterns

as

such

and

as

you

discover

one

and

then

another

and

then

another

you

that

a

human

being

can

experience

so

this

is

why

what

Mark

said

last

night

about

virtual

reality

being

a

tool

for

seeing

nature

at

different

scales

is

so

that

gets

my

wheels

turning

because

I

want

to

see

planetary

processes

I

want

to

see

the

heat

flow

from

the

polar

ice

caps

to

the

equator

I

want

to

grasp

the

speed

at

which

volcanism

is

altering

the

seafloor

and the

atmosphere

well

these

are

God

this

is

what

God

does

you

know

it

sits

around

and

watches

creation

on

the

interesting

scale

and

it

not only

can

be

done

it

is

being

done

and

it

will

be

done

better

and

better

and

you

of

the

space

age

as

guys

went

into

orbit

for

the

first

time

and

out

to

the

moon

the

epiphany

of

seeing

the

whole

earth

at

once

and

said

well

we

can't

explain

it

to

you

but

when

you

see

it

you

know

a

blue

green

pea

spinning

in

the

darkness

you

can

you're

never

the

same

well

we

all

can

see

that

and

much

more

you

can

see

to

the

mantle

you

can

pull

out

to

the

orc

cloud

and

see

the

entire

solar

system

shrink

down

to

a

spinning

dot

you

can

lose

that

in

the

vastness

and

all

of

this

stuff

is

not

without

consequence

people

the

virtual

reality

in

some

people's

mouths

becomes

almost

a

dismissive

term

but

that's

because

they're

objectification

freaks

and don't

understand

that the

power

is in

the

information

you know

I mean

I feel

that I've

been on

the surface

of Titan

that I

understand

the lava

fields

of Eo

that I've

walked

the valleys

of Mars

because I've

been to

all those

places

information

but you

prefer

Hawaii

the

air is

better

well I

haven't

spent

logged

thousands

of hours

in

virtual

reality

I'm

sure

Mark

has

but I

consider

the

internet

of

virtual

reality

you know

every

web

page

every

jpeg

every

download

that you're

in

some

kind

of

multimedia

information

space

for instance

when I

said I

had walked

the valleys

of Mars

what I

meant was

there's one

site that

has what's

called a

self-scaling

map of

Mars

you go

to this

web page

you see

the entire

entirety of

Mars

you set

your cursor

you start

clicking

and it

just keeps

opening

and it

can go

down to

30 meters

anywhere

on the

planet

and you

feel it

I mean

if you've

ever flown

from LA

to Phoenix

on an

airliner

it's

you get

a better

view of

the Martian

desert

than you

do of

the

Anza

Borrego

desert

when you

make that

air fly

I mean

you can

if there

were ant

hills

down there

you could

count

them

I did

see

Madonna's

face

but

I'll be

issuing

a coffee

table

book

on that

so let's

take some

of the

themes

that Terence

was working

with

particularly

where it

comes to

inhuman

points of

view

and I

want to

talk about

points of

view

for a

little

while

because we

have to

start asking

as the

media

as the

information

flow that

we're

embedded in

is

in some

ways

it's

pulling

us

apart

the

ego

as we

experience

it

and the

ego

sort of

sits on

top of

awareness

somewhere

and you

can't

touch it

you can't

feel it

when you

look for

it

it's

not

there

but

somehow

there's

a

coherent

unity

that we

believe

that we

experience

but it's

being modified

by these

information

flows

the

but it

was probably

never there

and let me

illustrate

let's say

that you

came to

the session

last night

and you

heard about

the yoga

session

you said

excellent

I'm gonna

be up

I'm gonna

be at the

house

I'm gonna

be there

at 730

in the

morning

and you're

firm about

it

and you've

made the

decision

and you're

going to

do it

and you go

to the

hot tubs

and you sit

in the hot

tub for a

while

and you maybe

go and smoke

some dope

and you go

back to the

hot tubs

and you relax

and all of a

sudden it's

2am

and the

alarm goes

off at

and the

first thing

you think

is

I'm not

doing yoga

now this

this is an

example

I'm quoting

an example

almost in

toto

as was

given by

George

Gurdjieff

to P.D.

Espensky

when Espensky

was a student

of his

in the

20s

that in

fact

this I

that we

claim to

have

this unity

that we

claim to

be operating

us at

all times

it doesn't

exist at

all

there's a

whole set

of them

and they

come and

they go

as they

please

they can

be based

on whether

you're dyspeptic

from the

oatmeal you

had for

breakfast

or whether

you're

mellow

because you've

just finished

a set

of yoga

or if

you're

deeply

in love

and it's

evoking

certain things

so in fact

what we're

doing is

we're always

taking strands

and pulling

them together

into some

sort of

unity

which is

for the

moment

who you

are

well

this

information

flow

that we're

experiencing

particularly

with respect

to the

internet

and with

respect

to virtual

reality

appears to

be amplifying

and intensifying

this drive

to multiple

personality

it appears to

be making it

more visible

to us

and I'll give

you a case

in point

Sherry Turkle

is a

psychologist

child

psychologist

developmental

psychologist

and researcher

who recently

was at

MIT

I believe

in the

media lab

and she'd

done a lot

of research

on people

who use

in spaces

that are

called

multi-user

dimensions

or multi-user

dungeons

or shorthand

muds

you enter

into a mud

and a mud

is generally

a text-based

virtual world

and really

we were talking

about

I would think

the internet

is just as

much VR

we have

different levels

of fidelity

on the

experience

is it a

visual experience

is it

an oral

experience

is it

a typed

experience

a textual

experience

it doesn't

seem to

matter

because of

the virtual

reality

machinery

we're always

using at

all times

is up here

it's not

something that's

out there

we can

maybe do

better

tricking

ourselves

from moment

to moment

if we have

pretty pictures

to look at

but really

that's just

a form

of hypnosis

so

we have

people who

are participating

in these

multi-user

worlds

and part

of what

you do

in this

multi-user

world

is you

create a

character

for yourself

and you

live in

that character

while you're

participating

in that

virtual world

and there

are thousands

of these

moves and

machines

in colleges

all across

the country

and at

various

research

facilities

and people

set them

up in

their homes

and they

have themes

there's a

Star Trek

world

there's a

Dune

world

there's a

world

I think

it's called

fuzzies

where people

run around

and have

sex

with each

other

all the

time

in very

interesting

configurations

that are

not necessarily

associated

with human biology.

And so you find these characters

and your character developing out of this.

And you might have a very specific form of a character.

I might be Xena or a big warrior princess

in one of these worlds.

And when I'm interacting in this mud,

I'll take on all of the characteristics of this person.

I'll functionally be this person.

I'll draw the lines of my being together

in a configuration that creates that person.

So Turkel looked at this and said,

OK, what's the fundamental difference

between this and the individual

who is diagnosed with a multiple personality disorder,

which has now been rephrased, I think, in DSM-IV,

a disassociative identity disorder.

But we're familiar with the concept, right?

People who have personalities that become dominant,

but they have an entire sea of them.

It's almost as if that normalcy

that's in each of us in these particular individuals

has been amplified to the point

where the ego doesn't note

the personalities coming and going.

The personalities simply shove out,

and they are the person.

And then it submerges,

and another one comes out.

Well, of course, there's a contextual difference,

because at some level you know you're switching

between your warrior princess self

and your software engineer self at any moment in time.

And you can make these contextual switches quickly.

Right?

I could have one window on the screen,

which is me typing into the mud,

and I can have another window,

which is me typing a program.

And if I'm really facile

with the manipulation of my personality,

I can go back and forth between these very quickly.

I actually find that very difficult,

because when I'm invested in a character,

there's a lot of energy there,

and so I don't want to make the transition too quickly.

What we see, particularly in cyberpunk science fiction,

is that this quality of disassociative identity

is identified as a positive aspect.

In William Gibson,

repetitively you see the image of characters

who are written by the Loa of Uden,

that they literally disassociate themselves

and become a God form.

And the God speaks through them.

So this is one set of identities

that are being drawn up

because of information that they're drawing through the net,

which is producing a new personality in them.

I think, and I want to assert for testing,

that our children particularly are becoming facile at this.

Because our children are growing up

in this web of connectivity.

A child who's six years old

will never have known a world without the web

or without communications on a massive scale

that can individuate particular parts of their personality

in specific directions.

One of my friends actually pointed out

that this is all happening

before their brains are fully formed,

before their corpus callosum

sort of shuts down their possibilities

in a biochemical level for change.

And that our children may in fact be very, very nimble

at manipulating personalities,

and they may not, as they grow up,

see personality as the singular, coherent ego,

which is an artifact of probably sort of

Renaissance Western culture

when the artistic ego was born.

And may in fact see themselves

as an identity that is shifting

from moment to moment and contextualized

and can really be highly individuated.

And it can still be them.

It's almost as if we're all coming out of the closet

with different clothing on

and we can go back in

and change the suit of clothing

and come out.

Now, that personality,

those personalities can conflate

not just in terms of game playing

or interesting forms like that,

but one of the things that I believe will happen

is that we'll be able to take, again,

these inhuman points of view

so that it might be able to be possible

to come up with a personality

that can conflate its identity

with the guy in Logos.

Case in point,

we haven't actually been up in a space shuttle

to see the planet floating around.

But, I did see something pretty close in 1995.

What I think of as the finest,

the most seminal work of early virtual reality

is a system that's known as T-Vision.

And T-Vision is a supercomputer

that uses a very large database

to create a view of the planet

as it is right now,

and it's networked.

So it's talking to other satellites.

It's talking to geographical data,

and it's got an intense,

huge, multi-gigabyte database

of the Earth's surface.

It runs on a supercomputer,

and you sit with a beach ball-sized trackball,

and you're live,

because we don't have the satellites

in orbit for that yet,

but we will.

And the other data that's coming in, though,

the geological data,

the meteorological data,

and so on and so forth,

that is live.

So what you're getting at some level

is a static view of the planet

as it was photographed at some point,

the geological view,

which is gathered from terrain data,

and this meteorological view,

which is live.

And I saw this,

and something inside me simply snapped.

I said,

this was the vision that I'd had in 1990.

This is the beginning of a type of thing

that will be so commonplace

that the globe that sits on every teacher's desk

in every schoolroom in the world

will be gone and replaced with this thing

that will become conflated

with our understanding of the planet.

That, in fact,

the planet is not this static ball

that you can roll around

that shows political divisions,

because the first thing that goes away

when you use a system like this

is political division.

There's no room for it in that model.

What you see is the organic unity

of the Gaian logos.

And as time goes on,

the better this model gets,

the more identified we become with it.

Like the cell phone,

it becomes a technology

that we incorporate

so that one of the personalities

that we can identify with

will be the personality

that is identical to this Gaian entity.

Don't you think it would be proven

to, instead of jumping directly

to the Gaian logos,

rather to see the Gaian anus,

see the economic and resource flows?

Oh, that's...

I entirely...

I didn't mean to say

that you'd only have one view.

The idea behind any system like this

is that it can show you

all of the loops of human ecology

and deep ecology

so that it's very possible

to understand the correlations

that take place

between human effect on the planet

and the result in the system.

The idea behind it,

in my eyes,

is that if we can make these tangible,

we can affect behavior.

And in fact,

that's probably the only way

we can affect behavior.

We might recycle

because we've been told over and again

it's the right thing to do.

It's been ingrained in that level.

But when it becomes a tangible entity,

the behavior change happens of itself

because it's part of you.

It's become incorporated

into your own understanding

of how the world works.

So I think that, in fact,

this database,

as I say as it grows,

needs to become as deep as possible.

And because people will argue

about the content of that database,

it needs to become as wide as possible.

And the web is the beginning of that

because you could have

several different points of view.

You could have the

millennialist Christian point of view,

which is to simply poison the planet

because we're leaving anyway,

and have that be one set of them

and we can sort of chart

Amazonian deforestation

and say, oh, look,

the number of days

till the rapture

because that's how much

rainforest is left.

Theoretically,

you should be able to see

anything you want to see

to the exclusion of everything else.

So if you wanted to see

oil pipelines,

electrical grids,

the distribution of leukemia genes,

the number of people

bearing South African passports

and where they were

at any given moment,

you should be able to,

essentially,

it's a boil down

of all the data,

which is...

When I sort of recognized

that ability,

I thought of it

as a really great game idea

kind of a la

Send a Sim series.

It's really a Sim guide,

but it would not be simulated,

really.

You could have

every participant in the web

utilizing all the resources

and the whole planet

focused on any particular area

they were interested in healing of

and make sort of suggestions

to large corporations

how to redistribute their resources.

In which case,

it starts to harness

the power of the web

and we really haven't talked about this

as an intelligence amplifier,

which it can,

in theory, do,

and that's one of the biggest

parts of it.

In fact,

one of the reasons

things do move faster now

is because there's this common

sort of...

It's almost like

a hummus of knowledge.

It's this layer of knowledge

that we can all refer to.

It's not all true,

but it is all in common.

I want to say something

about what you were talking about,

multiple personality

and all that.

I hadn't quite thought of it

that way.

One of the puzzles

of the DMT flash

is that there are these entities

that seem weird,

very strange

and machine-like

and alien,

but that are also permeated

by a kind of

eerie familiarity,

like you remember them

from somewhere

or it's this thing.

And it's occurred to me

in trying to propagate

all possible explanations

of what these things

might be,

that they are...

That, as Mark said,

the self is not ruled

by the ego.

The self is actually

a kind of elfin swarm

of these...

And this peculiar

elf quality,

which I've described

as elf machine-like

and somehow based

on language,

is that these things are,

and don't ask me

to explain too deeply

what this means,

they are fractal refractions

of one's own personality.

I've mentioned at times

the metaphor of

if you hold up a mirror,

you see yourself.

But if you bring the mirror

down sharply

on a concrete surface

so that it shatters,

you don't see

a shattered image

of yourself.

You see hundreds

of perfect images

of yourself,

one in each shard,

little ones,

big ones.

And in a sense,

DMT is like

some kind of an x-ray

of the psyche

revealing this fact

concealed by the ego-based,

print-created,

subjectivist,

positivist plot.

The fact that you are not

who you thought you were,

that you are not

an ego bound to a body,

but that in fact

that is some hideous

convention

that culture

and phonetic alphabet

and all these things

have forced upon you.

And so then,

in thinking about

this new kind of

personality

that's coming to be,

or how will one live

with this sense

of fracturing

and all that,

you said it was

almost as though

everybody was coming

out of the closet.

the image that formed

for me is,

it's like realizing

and embracing

the fact that

you're an actor.

Right.

I grapple with this

all the time

because when I'm

brushing my teeth,

I find myself

humming,

there's no business

like show business.

There's no people

like show people.

and I've,

you know,

started out thinking

that I was a philosopher

and as I,

and when I,

the way I live

in Hawaii

is so entirely

different

from how I am

on what I think

of as the job

that I have just

had to accept

that I'm this

very strange

person

and have

peculiarly

defined relationships

with almost

every single

person

that I deal

with

and I have

a feeling

that the

modern cult

of celebrity

and this

fascination

with vicariously

living

through

the most

recent

spate of

mass murders,

presidential

assistants,

movie stars

over and so on

is a kind

of

practice.

Ordinary people

are practicing

to be actors,

to have this

same kind of view.

To be extraordinary,

to be mutable

and it's,

it seems inevitable.

It's, we're,

it's modeled for us

in the media

so

persuasively

that we can't help

but become

characters.

That's what's

happening to us.

we're becoming

characters,

many characters.

Yeah.

Now, is this

a desirable thing?

I mean,

it's a little...

Is it a,

is it a positive

thing?

Yeah, I mean,

you know...

Well, that's not a

positive thing.

Please,

please don't

frighten me.

There, there are,

I'm sorry.

No, you answer

them all in.

There are,

I think,

in any situation

where there's

a disassociation

like that,

my own understanding

is that there are

attractors for behavior

and some of those

attractors are

pathological

and so if a

personality coheres

around those

pathological attractors

you're going to get

pathological behavior.

It won't be consistent.

That's why the kids

can go home

and watch TV

afterward

because they're

really, I think,

in some sense

disassociated from

those parts of

their being

that produce

that type of

behavior.

If we're going

to accept

disassociation

as a condition

of modernity

then the idea

would be to

in the reverse

sense

build as many

what I would call

vivogenic attractors

present as many

opportunities

for cohesion

around the

personality

in a positive

logos

and I mean

again

that brings us

back to the

body

which led me

into the concept

of techno-paganism

for lack of a

better word

and that's a

placeholder

which is a

positive response

to this

type of fracture

that I can

through ritual

practice

through magical

practice

build areas

in myself

that allow

for that

positive

cohering

of the

personality

which doesn't

have to be

any single

one personality

but can be

a range

of god

forms

because paganism

is a study

of the archaic

god forms

which can

represent the

archetypal

elements of

my psyche

so that I

can bring them

forth in a

particular situation

or toward a

particular task

so that I

trick someone

I can do

kernunos

if I want

to be

the very

primal male

or I can

be the

mother

if I want

to be

very nurturing

so that all

these primal

god forms

can act

as loki

for accretion

of a

personality

around a

particular point

and my

magical

practice

has been

much that

for me

as a point

of stability

in there

I'd like

to draw

just back

to Terrence's

inference

that

or what I

took from

it was that

we were in

the tub

last night

and with

Terry's kids

and I was

grilling Terry's

kids

about this

whole 2012

how much

novelty

can there be

and it

seemed that

at the point

of maximum

novelty

my suggestion

was well

that means

essentially

that it's

one big

burning man

no spectators

so that

everybody in

Utah

is now

putting out

their own

electronic CDs

and stuff

and making

their own

videos

somebody bounced

that back

to the web

of course

the web pages

are like that

there's

the grandmas

in Utah

and there's

these crazy

unbelievable

expressions

of creativity

from your

average person

so

is that

maybe

what that

level of

novelty

would be

moving towards

the Truman

show

waiting for

Guffman

essentially

no I think

we're probably

close to that

now

what with

see you

see me

and people

who sell

the fact

that they

exist

on the

internet

through

24 hour

cam

myfirsttime.com

yes

exactly

but this

this issue

that you

raise

you know

we are

on one

level

carnivorous

monkeys

and part

of what

people have

to realize

I think

is that

culture

is not

your friend

what

techno-paganism

means to

me is

arming

yourself

as a

warrior

to survive

the onslaught

of all

the magic

spells

that are

being

flung

around

in your

environment

and so

you know

what Mark

said

about

we keep

coming back

to this

thing about

every piece

of information

that comes

through you

affects

you

we

certainly

esalen

is a place

where

very strongly

now for

many years

the idea

has been

in place

that there

was such

a thing

as healing

images

that people

by imaging

states of

health

or the

shrinking

of tumors

and so

forth

could actually

affect

their own

state of

being

what

hasn't

been

looked

at

with

sufficient

attention

is the

concomitant

to that

which is

if there

are healing

images

then there

are polluting

images

damaging

images

which make

being a

human being

a more

difficult

proposition

and

we have

been

very

loath

to examine

this

because

we

are

very

deeply

committed

as a

culture

to the

idea

of

freedom

of

expression

but

the

doctrines

of

freedom

of

expression

and

universal

education

and so

forth

that

we're

so

fond

of

were

formulated

before

the

rise

of

modern

mass

psychology

marketing

theory

you know

the

Joseph

Goebbels

contribution

to

the

situation

and

I

think

people

are

responsible

for

their

mental

health

to

assume

that

you

are

born

mentally

healthy

and

will

tend

to

stay

that

way

is

preposterous

all

kinds

of

forces

are

trying

to

turn

you

endlessly

imbibe

mass

media

are

at

high

risk

for

pathology

and

when I

hear

about

these

things

that

go on

not

particularly

this

one

you

mentioned

but

the

ones

where

kids

go to

schools

and

blow

other

kids

away

somewhere

in the

south

and

then

immediately

what

the

media

portrays

is

a

week

of

church

suppers

and

mass

mourning

where

everyone

asks

how

could

this

happen

well

church

suppers

are

what

drive

people

one

of the

things

that

I think

that's

really

important

to

remember

one

of

the

pathological

edges

of our

cutting

edges

of our

time

is

that

as

we

move

into

this

era

of

connectivity

and

massive

amounts

of

information

at

our

fingertips

and

the

fact

that

these

six-year-olds

are going

to grow up

never knowing

anything else

but having

that capability

the adults

who are

raising them

do not

come

from that

world

and

how

can

you

possibly

imagine

raising

a child

to live

in a world

that you've

never even

touched

that you

will be

nothing but

a little

footnote

in

so it's

a very

very

dangerous

time

children

who are

six

to ten

years old

today

are going

to live

their lives

in the

21st century

and they're

going to have

to pick

their way

into what

the 21st

century

the third

millennium

is like

on their

own

personally

I think

that's

part

of

growing

out

of

the

human

condition

into

God

taking

responsibility

to

saying

we're

going

to

move

into

something

new

and it's

going to be

hard

perhaps

though

what we

can do

to

riff off

of

and I

think

you're

dead

on

when

you

say

we

have

to

arm

ourselves

against

the

magic

spells

perhaps

what we

can do

is to

try to

give them

a locus

of at least

one

personality

which

has

the

filters

it's

as if

we need

and we

need

to

be

able

to

try

to

develop

it

and

teach

it

to

our

children

at

the

same

time

they're

acquiring

language

which

is

the

device

by

which

they

acquire

viruses

at least

right

now

so that

they

have

to

coming

into

that

awareness

on

the

math

level

well

I mean

on

one

level

all

I

hear

Mark

saying

is

we've

lost

touch

with

the

ability

to

tell

shit

from

Shinola

saying

we must

arm

our

children

against

the

magic

spells

to

me

that

means

we

and

the

way

to

do

this

is

you

know

you

start

with

it's

easy

like

Occam's

razor

is

a

good

place

to

start

and

cost

benefit

is

another

interesting

filter

too

and

who

does

this

help

is

a

good

question

to

ask

and

who

does

it

hurt

and

you

the

problem

is

that

people

have

become

very

docile

narcoticized

I

wild

gene

and

so

we

continue

to

hold

meetings

and

bitch

about

it

lots

of

people

have

just

moved

into

daytime

tv

and

Olestra

and

the rest

of it

without

a

thought

that

being

so

the

we

who

must

do

that

is

the

mass

culture

so

it's

like

how

does

the

we

that

you're

referring

to

of

what

we

must

do

come

into

being

in

effect

one

thing

that

I

believe

is

you

attack

magic

with

magic

and

I

mean

I

think

that's

really

the

only

effective

level

you

can

do

it

on

now

my

one

of

my

foundational

assumptions

which

we

talked

about

last

night

that

in

fact

the

magical

description

of

reality

is

in

fact

conflating

with

the

actual

description

of

reality

so

that

in

fact

magical

training

I

think

is

going

to

be

a

cottage

growth

do

believe

this

that

in

fact

in

order

to

be

able

to

understand

how

the

language

you

use

and

the

language

other

uses

shapes

your

perception

and

that's

more

than

just

really

advertising

it's

much

deeper

than

that

is

an

important

social

skill

and

that

that's

the

level

where

it

enters

culture

okay

can

we

do

it

I

think

we

have

to

do

it

in

every

one

of

the

works

that

another

little

riff

yeah

the

kids

are

all

right

you

know

what

I mean

they're

much

savvier

media

consumers

than

human

parents

and

even

people

a little

older

I mean

these

kids

have

tremendous

filters

like

they

can

tell

shit

from

shining

all

up

so

are

they

growing

up

with

the

immune

systems

I

authentic

yes

the

authentic

right

that's

you know

keeping

it

real

is

the

buzz

that's

what they

want

to

do

that's

very

encouraging

to

hear

oh

yes

it might

also be

as they

grew up

constantly

switching

perspectives

and

forums

and that's

the trick

to learn

to be able

to see

it from

the outside

as soon

as you

can see

it from

the outside

now it's

happening

you can

stop

being stuck

inside

and you can

see it

so these

kids

grew up

changing

perspectives

the more

new

are the

problem

I think

the problem

is the

momentum

from the

older

generation

that is

still

trying to

hang on

to the

levers

of the

engineering

and design

process

and they

don't know

why

they're

hanging on

because

they have

they

it doesn't

serve them

you know

the future

is inevitable

you can

postpone it

a decade

or two

but that's

about it

well it's

because

they're

risk

reversed

they don't

want to

let go

because

they're

afraid

of

us

they

don't

know

it's

there

it's

like

hanging

on

to

any

losing

position

ultimately

it's

going to

change

and they're

going to

have to

let go

but in

the meantime

they're

allowed

well you

know Max

Planck said

physics

proceeds

funeral by

funeral

there's

a beautiful

anti-spell

to that

notion

which I

think

probably

has to

be

circulated

in

culture

as a bit

of a

meme

which is

it's

not what

you don't

know

that'll

hurt you

it's

what

you know

that ain't

so

that ain't

so

that ain't

so

and in

some cases

we have to

get over

the fear

of not

knowing what

the future

is

because what

we know

or what we

think we

know

about the

present

ain't so

if you

if you go

back and

look at

various

people's

efforts

to

triangulate

the future

the very

best people

got it

wrong

I mean

if you

look at

the history

of efforts

in the

20th century

to predict

the future

probably the

most successful

was brave

new world

which in

pictured a

very realistic

world based

on genetic

engineering

that is still

further out

than anything

we've arrived

at and still

could be

realized

I mean

he understood

the hellish

marriage made

by marketing

genetic

engineering

the wish

for social

standardization

there's not

a barely

a mention of computers in that or in 1984. Well, in 1984 the telescreen surveillance system.

Really there's a grub with chaos going on between Rushkoff's children of chaos sort of scenario

that those kids are perceiving a discontinuous reality through the media and that they're

actually maybe quite more in-depth and think of that kind of deciphering or siphoning off what they

need from it, but also the... I'm sorry I lost my thought just from the last thing you said.

Oh well, I didn't mention chaos and can never recall the last thing I said.

So you have my sympathy but not my help.

No, I'm sorry, I got it. It's really more about the visionaries and the you know,

the Brave New Worlds or what we got out of the influence of computer culture on science fiction,

which was cyberpunk, which was still really steeped in chaos as its premise.

I mean really what makes those, you know, what made cyberpunk different than, you know,

Clark's foundationism or any of this sort of Star Trek approach was the element of chaos,

yeah, that it's a completely chaotic cyber universe. Right, and in part that's because of the

incredible information flow that has really just made everything diffuse in some way and not non-linear.

And it's very multiplistic. It accepts that there are going to be all kinds of social

ecosystems and people working different angles. The street finds its own uses for things.

So I want to ask a question which needs to be asked for two reasons. This multiplicity,

which is both the present and probably in the future, a more prominent condition. Is this a

frightening condition? Is it frightening when you look at it as an individual and you say, you know,

this is happening to me or happening to my children? And is it frightening when you consider

everything as a whole? And the reason I ask this, and does it have a sort of demonic aspect to it,

in a sense of really sort of looking dark? The reason I ask this is because the cultural historian

William Irwin Thompson has noted that repeatedly when there's a transition of age in civilizations,

that in fact the forms of the new civilization are always perceived as demonic

by the civilization that's fading away in face of it. All right, so that when we look at this,

I mean, I look at, and it's funny, just a brief little story. Last week, after years of wearing

glasses, I finally got contacts again, and I decided I didn't want to smoke when I was at Esalen

only. I've been doing a little bit, so I put a derm patch on, and I looked at myself in the mirror and

said, damn, I've become a cyborg. I've become a character out of a Gibson novel.

And I look at this, and the things that make me the most nervous about the future are the changing

role of genetics, that genetics is, as we come to understand the code, as we come to see the pattern

in the code, that our relationship to that code changes, and that that code becomes very mutable,

and that scares the bejesus out of me. And I'm wondering, as I sit here and I look at it,

is that information flow works its way through the cell. Now, not because of nature, nature is God,

but because of us and our will and our destiny, our teleology. That's frightening the daylights out

of me. And I'm looking at this, and I'm saying, well, does that mean that this is then the future,

and I'm an artifact of the past? Yeah, the cybernetic revolution is in all of our faces,

because we all surf the net and experience it daily as a growing and changing environment.

This genetic thing goes on somewhat in the background. But if something happens to you,

then you go to Stanford Medical Center, and then you discover what they've been up to,

and what's on the menu for you, you know. And we were discussing last week, you know,

they are now defining the human genome, and they're defining the 200,000 or so SNP points where

there is variability in the genome, and that's where the hereditary diseases happen, and so forth,

and so on. And it is within the reasonably short term future, all these genes are going to be items

for sale, pieces of nanomolecular machinery off the shelf that will make the difference between whether

you die of leukemia, remain obese, become schizophrenic, experience liver failure, so forth,

and so on. And this will be simply in the pursuit of equilibrium, health, and peace of mind. Once

people begin to look at genes as drugs, the boundaries between self and world and identity,

and one's genetic heritage will be erased. I mean, the very notion of a heritage and a coherent

genealogical tree begins to make no sense if you're swapping out genes that you buy down at the ANP.

Yeah, absolutely. Molecular biology and molecular genetics and molecular pharmacology are really just

different labels on the same door. All of these people are manipulating atomic systems atom by atom,

molecule by molecule, to tailor, make lock and fit mechanisms that impact on biological systems.

First of all, I mean, long before we grow a telephone from a long chain polymer, we will be selling human

genes with no thought at all about it, I'm sure of that. You wanted to say?

I was going to say that just a couple of steps past selling the genes, you get to the point where you

have the nano-molecular assemblers where you can simply define self-design, not just mentally,

not just self-design your software, but your actual add-on some diamond to the meat, you know,

you want some diamond wings. Right. And this is, diamond wings may be a bit downstream,

but all of this is arriving in the next 10 to 15 years. I mean, this is well within reach. If you,

and it's always about cost-benefit curves. I mean, almost anything can be done in genetics now,

if you're willing to spend tens of millions of dollars. But these, you know, recalling that the

world's largest computers cost billions of dollars in 1950 and couldn't do what today's desktop does,

you see that the, the distance in, in terms of, uh, compression cycles of research is very short.

So is this preferable to the Bullworth solution? For genetic, for our genetic future?

And we all fuck each other till we're the same color? Well, that's happening.

No, it's arriving. It will arrive gene by gene. If you're, if you're a diabetic,

it's already arrived because you've been using human insulin for 15 years.

Sure, but the things that we're talking about haven't really gotten here in full force,

and that's probably a huge revolution into a poem. Surely a huge revolution into itself.

Right.

Between now and then, the fear of extinction, the fear of being part of, uh, you know,

what made this planet the way it is, according to dharma, uh, is part of what's driving us all.

And it's probably part of what's driving us when I'm not here to describe it.

You mean of some huge catastrophe?

Well, we're all here, uh, because we're, um, you know, much because we were the chosen sperm,

we're all here because we didn't die along the way. Uh, you know, it's a remarkable phenomenon

that as many people live as they do. Uh, and when you look at all of this in combination with

the way that consciousness is going, it suggests that there's something there.

You know, we all realize that on some very deep level.

You mean that there's an attractor for the historical process in some sense?

Yes.

Yeah, I, I, I can feel it.

And again, it seems to be that the common fabric is,

the understanding of pattern and the, the flow of information,

that as the understanding of pattern and the flow of information passes through

every one of these structures, as it passes through the structure of materials, we get nanotechnology,

as it passes through the structures of knowledge, we get virtual reality,

as it passes through the structure of the cell, we get genetic engineering.

So there's a common river, in a sense, that's running through all of this.

Yeah, I, in my most high-flown moments, think of us not as causing this,

or this, but that the laws of physics themselves are becoming more permissive,

that the emergence of biology was a consequence of certain temperature and pressure and chemical

regimens coming into existence that had never existed before. And then once those regimes were

established, biology was an inevitable follow-through. And I think what we have established uniquely on this

planet is a domain of epigenetic information flow, information that is not coded into genes,

but that is coded into much more ephemeral, culturally created language systems. And that this epigenetic language domain is somehow much more mutable than the genetic language domain.

And so potential emergent properties come appear in the epigenetic domain with greater speed and frequency.

They also have a kind of autocatalytic or synergistic effect on each other.

So the phonetic alphabet makes possible science, which makes possible a new industrialism, which feeds back

through R&D into science. And you get the, and it's that information is more and more expressing its true nature,

and less and less dependent on the medium through which it flows, which was once geological processes,

then genes, now once human languages, now computer languages being iterated at tremendous speed.

And where this leads, we cannot say. But where it points, we can say. It points toward transcendence.

But the important thing is that there is an asymptotic acceleration. It's not simply a ramp into novelty.

It's an ascendant curve, which has now become almost vertical.

Yeah, Mark.

It seems that something that I've been thinking about for a number of years, which brings us back into boundaries.

From what we understand about the beginnings of life on Earth,

it formed at the most important boundary that we know of on Earth at that time,

which was the boundary between the land and the sea.

That, in fact, the stasis of the land and the stasis of the oceans were both insufficient conditions

for the creation of self-organizing systems. That, in fact, the tidal pool represents the locus,

the change, the dynamism, the fact that forces, perhaps self-replicating clays, we don't know,

we're constantly washed and then dried and then washed, forced these systems into some sort of

self-organizing principles, which became the template for what we know of as life.

And this has then been repeated, because then we talk about the epigenetic transmission of information.

And this then, as we've talked about earlier in this session, is the boundary between one person and another person.

Then, in fact, the information, when it crosses the boundary, to transverse the boundary, is to produce

something different in both sides of that boundary.

Yeah, I never thought of that before. But in a prebiotic planet, from the point of view of novelty

theory, the most action happening on the planet would be the intertidal zone. Because every 12 hours,

it's being inundated and dried, inundated and dried. I mean, it's not exactly a party. It

reminds me of the joke in my town, there was so little to do that on Saturday night, we used to

go down to Ben Franklin's and watch the Muncrate Freight. But when that's the only game in town,

that's where you go.

So the intertidal zone, 800 million years ago, was definitely where the action was on this planet. And

today, where the action is, is where all this science, money, human ingenuity, capitalistic frenzy,

all comes together in just an orgy of epigenetic effects.

Do you think the origin has any bearing on the outcome? For instance, does it make any difference

whether it was intertidal zones and self-organizing systems, or whether it was

panspermia coming from God knows where? Does that make any difference with the outcome?

I wouldn't think so. I think probably all paths lead to Rome. I would bet you that even if

panspermia is true, that the intertidal zone of the primitive Earth played a role in it, because

that's where the energy and the free radicals and so forth would have been available.

That's where they were uncarting the freight. Yeah, right.

So that's just a further barrier between the atmosphere and space.

Yeah, it's the three coming together. Yeah, it's where the three are intersecting.

Right. With the biology and with the geology and with the terrestrial

chemistry possible in the atmosphere and the hydrochemistry possible in the sea and, you know,

incipient meteorological contributions, incidental hard radiation from outer space,

radioactive heat from the internal processes of the Earth, on and on and on.

It's when you raise the number of inputting factors, you raise the possibility of an emergent

phenomenon. Which makes the interesting points, and I'll come to you in just a second,

which makes the interesting points, the liminal points, the points where the roads meet,

those are always the places where the action is. Right.

And so if you look in the present culture, where are the roads meeting? Well, the net is,

I mean, that's it. Everything points into it now. That's where all the roads are meeting.

So it's now throwing out this profusion of novelty and of new forms because it exists as an object

specifically to do that. Yes. Although the current theory is that as things get faster and faster,

the danger is not car crashes but parking accidents.

Yes. Of course. You mentioned that a lot of people are acting with heart,

and that's what you're talking about in the future. And Alex, are best at opening the heart,

stimulating the heart center? Well, somebody else might give a different answer, certainly. But I

I think ayahuasca, if I understand opening the heart to mean what I think it means, psilocybin blows your mind. And if you like insects driving spaceships and visions of galactarian hegemony and machines the size of Manitoba busy about their business,

uh, uh, psilocybin is good. Uh, ayahuasca sort of contextualizes you in the cosmos. You know,

you feel yourself as a thing born and to die. And, I don't know, it's very moving. It's also literally moving in the sense that it turns your guts inside out and, uh, and reduces you to, uh, uh, uh,

you recapture the primitive nematodal, uh, antecedent, uh, by just discovering the real power of your gastrointestinal tract.

What about, uh, NVMA and is there, like, an organic substance? I mean, I suppose it's...

Um, I found that it was most interesting the first few times I did it, and then it sort of was a damped oscillation, uh,

uh, for me. But, you know, the greatest, anybody who's marketing a drug who doesn't market it as a love drug just doesn't know anything about market.

Uh, LSD was a love drug, uh, uh, marijuana has been a love drug, psilocybin, 2CB.

What?

What can I say?

I'm sure there are enclaves of records.

The nickname for crack on the street is love.

Is that right?

Yes, yes, absolutely.

What can I say?

Uh, and I think the truth is that all pharmac... you know, that a very large family of alkaloidal and psychoactive agents

stimulate, uh, uh, cause arousal, CNS stimulation, which in primates means erection and hanky-panky.

So, given that you've heard the hype and that the context supports the activity and that you're loaded,

it would be no surprise if many people felt, uh, uh, that eros was well served by psychedelics.

My own feeling on, uh, this, and I don't have the extensive experience in ayahuasca.

I've had an ayahuasca experience, but not, not the one that caused ego death.

It was much more mild.

It was very pleasant and very cleansing.

But I have always associated psilocybin with being very heart-centered.

And when I was younger and needed years of therapy that I later got, I had a very, very hard time.

I could take acid endlessly because it's a very intellectual sort of mind experience.

But I'd always had a very hard time with mushrooms because mushrooms were pushing, in a sense,

on my emotional center, hanging around inside of me.

I couldn't do it.

And now, when I'm, when I'm in the mushroom, I actually find myself very...

Although it's, it's, it's intellectual and it's interesting and there are machines the size of Manitoba,

I've often found it to be very vital for the heart center.

I think intent has a lot to do with it.

The most moving heart experience I ever had, or in the top five anyway, was on LSD.

And it completely arranged my life.

And, you know, I was 19 years old.

I had a great deal of hostility toward my parents.

I was a Marxist and of this and of that and just tied in knots.

And it undid me very dramatically.

And the changes that went on that morning are all still nicely in place.

Thank you.

So, I think it has a lot to do with context and intent and what you need.

And how fucked up you are.

You know.

Because any psychedelic will act psychologically on an obsessional or a complex personality.

Yeah.

Are the North American analogs less somatically challenging to you find?

Are they all, you know, DMT and are going to make you bark anyway?

By North American analogs, you mean Spolaris and like that?

Yeah.

The problem is that while DMT is common throughout many plants in nature, it's rarely in very concentrated form.

If you're trying to get off with Phalaris, you're going to have to have a lot of it.

People seem to be having a lot of luck with Mimosa hostiles and the conspecific Mexican species.

Sochotria viridis remains the best source for DMT.

Most DMT in the underground is synthesized.

It's not plant extracted anyway.

I'm just wondering if you have anything to say about the postmodern child.

You know, I had an experience of going to see, I hate to say it, the Spice World.

But it had so many postmodern self-referential plays within it.

And I couldn't follow the movie.

And seven-year-old kids could.

Oh, thanks.

Yeah, Mark Spice.

I think that what you're making is a reasonable observation.

It's probably getting off easy.

In the fact that the environment the seven-year-olds are growing up in is so over-coded, right?

There's so much flowing in so many different directions that they've probably...

Their brain stems are probably literally different from ours.

I mean, I hate to think that at 35 I can't get with it in the context of modern culture.

But in some ways...

What an admission.

Put that next to your name on the cover of Wired.

There you go.

Wired is written for rich 45-year-olds.

But Spice World was probably designed for their target audience, which is like 10-year-olds.

And so it's literally built with that kind of...

It's almost a catalytically, you know, sort of self-referential engine in it.

Because that's what's going to hold their attention.

That's what's going to be...

I mean, if movies are hypnotic forms of media, which they really are, then it takes a different type of beast to hypnotize a 10-year-old.

Just the same way...

I mean, I went to see Armageddon, for example, and no single shot in Armageddon is more than two seconds long.

I'm starting to get an epileptic seizure after 45 minutes of this film.

And, you know, I think it really represents what they're doing is they're doing whatever they can to hold the attention to maintain the sort of the hypnotic illusion of the film.

And the requirements for that are different for a 7- or a 10-year-old because they're growing up in this environment which has caused them to really form differently in their psychic processes.

What will be interesting is to see these kids when they get to 18 and 20 and start, you know, passing through the university system and whatnot and find out what holds their attention then.

This is what I do. I'm in the media stream. Like, my personal media stream is, like, a really good 15-year-old.

And, you know, what happens is they just become creators, like, that much earlier, not much younger.

I mean, they're the ones with the families. They're the ones with the websites.

They're, you know, in a very dense, well-thought-out, well-put-together, like, quality art direction.

Will they be able to talk to us or will they only be able to talk to each other?

They might not be able to talk. They'll be able to talk to, you know, people who can talk to them.

Will I be able to talk to them?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you have to just try. You have to just jump into that culture and see.

Okay, so can I ask a question for Terence, then?

Sure.

If we, and I think it's probably reasonable to say, we probably don't want to necessarily get left behind by this,

what can we look to? Is there either a drug or a ritual that can help us grow into where our kids may already be?

No, you know, I think we have to have character models built of ourselves and turn the whole thing over into our writers.

And we'll just go off to Tahiti and the writers can, it's the Uncle Duke's solution.

If you can turn yourself into a cartoon character, you can retire and the whole team of people will keep you awkward on.

This is Finn's plan for me, by the way.

You know, I think the only way to keep your career going is to retire the bod and create an online character Saturday morning cartoon show,

apparently is where the action is. And then there are the Teletubbies.

Yes.

And, you know, they take a further leap. The 15-year-old girls we're talking about can't understand the logic of the Teletubby world.

How much more obscure then is it to us? And then what do the Teletubby addicts portend?

They have TV sets in their stomachs. They exist in a world where the sun of LSD seems to shine all day long.

And everybody's pre-verbal. How's that for an archaic revival?

So those are actually the Teletubby kids, the, what is it, one to three-year-olds?

One to three.

The audience will be the 13-year-olds in 2012, isn't it?

That's right. The child is father to the man.

Yeah.

Kind of two things. One, I don't expect an answer from, but could our parents talk to us when we were 15? Not mine.

And I don't think that was too different from some of the people that I've seen.

So I don't know about that part, and I don't have children, so I can't speak as a child in it.

But my first question about the multiple personas and was this a desirable thing,

I did get interrupted before I could get to where I wanted to be by all your faithful defenders.

All the points were very good, and I was curious to hear what people were going to say to them.

But really, isn't the underlying connector to the whole thing what you started talking about when we did this morning,

the opening of the heart, the heart connection.

So in the point that you've made and a couple of the other people about how we won't be able to talk to kids

because we won't be from that generation that's happening right now.

Don't you talk to people through the heart?

So if there are multiple personalities and deaths, we don't know, I don't care to judge

it as a good or bad thing, but say we have four or five online characters.

One is that kind of wanted the edge of sort of attractive violence, which I don't know

because I don't really tend to go that way, but of all the different personalities that

we could develop and explore, isn't the real thing, and I heard you start to get close

to it, and that's what I was kind of leading for you to pick up the pace, was is there going

to be an ethics that we have to impart onto our children so that they can make their own

decisions in the future, and aren't these kids already making this decision, the statement

that said that, geez, you know, the kids already know the truth, we're the ones who are screwed

up, but who, which ethics, for which persona is going to be appropriate, who is going to

teach or impart that information towards those ethics.

So is one persona going to be where, well, my value system really isn't towards honesty,

okay, another person don't hear me have that, and that's not better or worse than mine.

Is this other persona's mind going to be, my whole integrity is based upon honesty.

So, do we have multiple ethics for multiple personalities, and aren't we already crowded enough in the United States

and the world that we're going to have each person with ten more persons?

I, I want, you're dead on.

Ideally, we want to be able to talk to our children so we can transmit values.

Some of that's done through language, but I think the largest part of it is done through

example.

Because that speaks in a language that isn't bounded by rhetoric, and it isn't subject in

most normal situations, to quote-unquote poison, because it's authentic.

And authenticity seems to carry something of its own, or can carry something of its own.

What was the rest of what you said?

So there was a lot there to...

Well...

Oh, multiple ethics.

If you have characteristics and acts and clothes that we have with each individual setting,

like I may be a different person at work than I am in the sport that I like to do, or in

the friends I hang around with, people who I know who like to read, I like to talk about

repeat, or people I know in the music world, I like to talk music, but my more maturing that

I've noticed in myself in the last few years is to try and integrate all those things, not

keep them separate and develop them individually, but to try and be the same person I am at work

as I am at home, as I am in my sport, as I am in my music and my passions.

Probably this is a mistake, I would think.

Probably this is a mistake.

Balancing?

Integrating like that.

I mean, I'd grapple with this same thing, and then if you can't do it, you define yourself

as odd, where maybe the postmodern condition is actually to admit that the industrial environment

environment is so different from the home, the learning environment is so different from

either of those, that you're beating yourself on the head with some kind of print-created

ethic of wholeness that is like trying to avoid venial sin or something.

It just can't be done.

On the question of ethics, I think, you know, nothing we've talked about here has implied

that the law of karma is cancelled in virtual reality.

That's right.

People who choose to be jerks will have the lives that the universe hands to jerks.

It's about the chaos.

Well, my experience is that you want to sort of streamline your being to move through society

and business and love and disappointment and triumph with a certain amount of grace.

Maybe the idea of personality needs to be in the same way that we talk about transcending

culture and building a meta-culture.

Maybe the concept of personality leads to give way to something like the meta-nality.

And the meta-nality is the troop of people that come and go from your body and your terminal

and for which you are responsible for the credit cards issued to them and so forth and so on.

I mean, that could become the definition of personality.

Those people for whom you have financial responsibility and direct legal accountability.

To come back to, I invoked Gurdjieff earlier.

And Gurdjieff looked at this field, this army of eyes, and said that with very careful,

strenuous self-observation and work, you could at least see them coming and going.

And once you could see them coming and going, you could perhaps make some, what he called

a permanent magnetic center out of them.

Okay.

So you might, if you were really good at it, and Gurdjieffians are known as being a dour

lot because they practice so much self-analysis.

But you could conceivably pull this into an integrated personality, which can give you

a lot of flexibility.

See, that's the thing it grants you in the end, is once you've got this unity, you gain

an enormous amount of flexibility as a result.

So it's almost as if you take the aesthetic path to integrate, and you do that, what you're

getting is this ability to be multiple.

But with that central core.

With that central core.

I mean, people who have been created personality in the media, one of the groups of people who

have been created in the media, one of the most well-created and financially remunerated

personalities, media personalities as rappers are Shane Jackson, that's not Ice Cube, Percy

Miller is not Master P. Yet, especially teenagers are the most attracted to this whole world.

than almost anything else.

And I think to them it does represent kind of almost the karmic, legendary good guys,

bad guys, fighting, you know, winning, taking over, getting paid.

Is it mythic?

It's mythic.

So when you're talking about that that's not their real personality, that that's not

Ice Cube's personality, I mean, what, he lives in like Wayne Park and like, you know,

drives in every day.

Actually, actually.

Very true.

We live in Woodland Hills at all, baby.

Yeah.

You know, but I mean, Benny Hunt.

I mean, did he used to be a pimp, or did he used to be in a gang?

No.

I mean, the United States.

I didn't believe that.

No, no, no, no.

I mean, the United States.

I didn't believe that.

No, no, no, no.

I did my job.

Why?

When you start sending these personalities to the media, and where do you start to separate

the man from the man?

And does not the man become the man to many, many people?

To many people.

The man becomes the man.

But not to him.

Not to him.

But what's more important?

Well, I...

Is it important for the...

It's crazy-making to become your myth.

Yeah.

You know, Gibson's meditation on this is the novel Idoru, which is well worth reading if

you're interested in the mechanics of modern celebrity.

But anybody who is involved in celebrity-hood has to be cynical and ironic or completely foolish.

Because it's so totally and obviously manipulated in front of you.

I mean, you know, buy yourself a publicist and pay them $1,500 a month and you'll be amazed

what happens to your life.

You'll be a household word.

We buy and sell celebrity by the pound these days.

It's...

Don't be fooled.

I remember once I had a girlfriend whose father was a public relations guy.

This was many, many years ago.

And one evening, we were waiting for the 11 o'clock news to come on and he said,

I got the circus on tonight.

The circus is in town.

Sure enough, the news comes on and it's telling us that the circus is in town.

And I'm sitting there thinking, my God, the fact that the circus is in town is not news.

It's a commercial event.

This guy just paid for this.

And I stayed up to watch an infomercial on the circus.

So I think we have to assume that celebrity, we need a certain number of them.

Pray you don't ever become one and don't take it seriously.

I can't tell you about the rappers just for a second, though.

The kids have bought into the myth that these people present.

But they actually, I think, have taken away from it that there's less gang activity.

They take away from it that it is a story and you can watch it be played out and you don't have to,

I mean, there's always going to be this, you know, psychotic attractor that goes to the nth degree of that.

But really, I think that because we've been able to play out the myths of, you know, say, get a life or what have you,

it's allowed people to work through those things and to come, you know, to discuss them and see the consequences of them and move away from it.

I think what we're dancing around here is what you were hitting on it was the ethic and the point of the ethic.

And I think, you know, you come to a point in time when you just have to drop any illusions of the sanctity of your ethic.

Because, you know, I mean, there's a period of time in this particular physical part of the world where it was ethical to beat Indians to death with sticks that they would not worship at your cross.

Oh, a certain culture.

It was ethical in the northern circles to kill baby girl children.

It was ethical.

And the thing is that I think because we become such an intellectually overbearing type of being in this particular time,

we become enamored of our ethic and we think it's the only ethic to have.

And what I'm trying to say, I think what we're saying is at the end of history, at the end of history, there is a new ethic dawning.

And it's going to arrive, it's going to emerge, it's emerging, we see it emerging right in front of us.

And because we come out of a series and set of ethics that were different, that's very, very different from what's dawning.

Even though, you know, we may have had problems with understanding our parents, parents and children from this last era, this last epoch of ethic.

You know, there was things that held them together, they were commonalities, it was wisdom to be passed through to children even if it didn't seem like they were getting it to the point.

I really wonder if there's how much we have to give to inform the ethic that's building now.

I think, I really think that we're a footnote on it.

Nothing more than a footnote.

That's my personal belief and I don't expect anybody else.

No, no.

What I hear you saying is, it is not about rock and roll.

No.

That's, get over it.

Yes.

What strikes me in this is how little attention is really paid to emotion.

And Terence, you've been very eloquent at talking about how we haven't really languaged and examined that incredibly complex, subtle dynamic that's taking place inside of us all the time, which is the emotional realm, which is ultimately what really drives us.

Right.

And yet it's this mysterious realm that we're very unfamiliar with and the more things take place out here, the more reactive we are inside and yet it's uncharted territory.

Can I take this for a second?

Yeah.

One of the things we'll do tonight with the voce, is the voce is a very emotional technique for communication.

It's not particularly, it's not, it's not bounded by language particularly, but it's an emotional technique for communication.

I hope we haven't been leaving the emotions out in this, or to give the impression.

I didn't mean necessarily here, I just mean in this realm that is going on.

And I think that what that calls for is an exploration of those techniques.

And so what we want to do is start exploring tonight or expose you to something that's an exploration of that.

And to dedicate our work, insofar as our work is driven by our heart, to an exploration of those techniques.

So are we going to have a big trackball so we can zoom into any of our sites?

Imagine it and it's yours.

Yeah.

This thing about emotion, emotion without language is inchoate.

And so the very fact that what we're talking about here is the evolution of communication carries with it the implication of an evolution of communication.

I see it already happening.

Our whole sociological experience has been that of breaking down the simplistic models of what it was to be a human being we inherited from our parents in the past.

And we're learning more and more about who we are.

You know, we're learning about the real textured feel of racial and class differences, the real texture and feel of different gender choices and sexual preferences.

This is a vast frontier.

We haven't even begun to fully acknowledge the complexity of our individuality and how many different kinds of us there are.

But we have to have language.

Without language, it's just a kind of a leading edge of intuition that doesn't cast light very far into the future.

With language, our diversity becomes this thing that is a great source of community and individual satisfaction.

And so the whole project is the project of communication.

And then the understanding, the heart, the community, the connectivity will just be found to have followed along with the process.

It's part and parcel of it.

It's strange, you know, the net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on.

It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of.

The troubadours of the 14th century were as nothing compared to the boundary dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the net.

Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it in its early form, because that's where that was needed.

But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world soul, and leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the earth.

So, this is where we find ourselves, at noon.

This was the morning session.

I hope you've planned bathing and massages and so forth and so on.

We'll meet here four to six.

Thank you very much.

Come along to the fact that I'm still working on my vision for developing some form of networked visualization over the internet, which I'd been working on for a number of years at that point,

which would allow me to perhaps continue this evocation of the planet that I felt like I was really working toward.

And I subscribed to a number of mailing lists, and in a mailing list that I subscribed to, a rather good one called Fringeware, I started to see these curious little things pop up in my email.

I didn't really know what they were.

People seemed to be calling them URLs.

And they had a very curious form.

A-H-T-T-P colon gobbledygook.

Didn't really know what it was.

Fortunately, I had a workstation, not a PC, but an actual Sun workstation on my desk that I'd recently bought and retrofitted.

And I had an internet connection.

And so I figured out that these artifacts were something, part of something called the World Wide Web.

And I used the internet to go over to a site in Illinois where they were keeping what they were calling a web server and a web browser under the name of Mosaic.

And I downloaded them to my computer and installed them and took a look at the configuration instructions, which were pretty easy.

And whammo, my computer became web server number 330.

And I was like, okay, but what is this web thing?

And I launched the Mosaic browser.

It comes up on a page.

And we're all familiar with the metaphors now that pointed to the web server at NCSA, the National Center for Computer Applications.

And I went click and bam, I was somewhere else.

And instantly I got what was going on.

Because I'd spent some years earlier working on a problem called hypertext.

And hypertext is the concept that words and ideas are linked implicitly as well as explicitly.

So that any thought that's ever been had has relations and correlations to other thoughts.

And the dream and the vision behind hypertext is to be able to make those links explicit rather than implicit.

So that all documents become multiple documents.

There's no such thing as an isolated fragment of text anymore.

It's all one big, giant, gorgeous, heterogeneous unity.

Well, it was pretty much over.

I had a shit-eating grin on my face for two weeks.

And in those two weeks, I was consulting and I would get home from work and I would fire up the Spark station and fire up the internet link.

And I would surf the web.

And at the end of the two weeks, I was done.

And it's not because I'm a fast reader.

It's just that's what was there.

But I could tell.

I saw it and I said, this is the shit.

And I ran to my friend, Owen, over there.

And I said, Owen, there's this web thing.

It's the shit.

And I dragged him over to the Spark station.

And I showed him.

He's like, eh, whatever.

What I've seen better, it's whatever.

And I ran and told my other friends, it's the shit.

It's the shit.

Oh, I think maybe I've heard of it.

And finally, after probably enough brow-beating and then maybe meditating on it,

I remember that Owen and I were on a Saturday afternoon in San Francisco somewhere

and he just sort of stopped short in the middle of the street and went,

it is the shit.

This is gonna be it.

This is big.

Because the vision of a global hyper-tech system had seduced a certain segment of people

who were working in computing for over 20 years.

Before it had become anything like a reality, it had been something that had been driving

a certain particularly, probably psychedelically influenced crowd of people who were working

in computing as the reason or a reason that computers were at all useful.

Well, I wasn't going to browbeat all of my other friends into accepting the reality of a web,

which was still really tiny, so I devised a much more crafty scheme.

There are regular, I guess you could call them house parties in San Francisco,

which are called anon salons, which are actually basically rent parties for people who live down in Selma.

And they open up the house and they invite people in to show weird things off and it's an evening.

And I got contacted, I said, oh yeah, let me show something off at the anon salon.

And so we actually carted my spark station across town and set it up.

And I didn't tell anyone who came by that evening that I was showing them the world wide web.

As a friend came in, I sat them down and said, what's something that interests you?

Botany, click, click, click. Oh, wow!

Astronomy, click, click, click. Cool!

Astrology, click, click, click. Wow, that's great!

And every one of them went away seduced by this.

So this is January of 1994 and this is sort of before the hoopla had started.

But I'd found the trick.

And what we saw over the next several years that this happened to anyone, anywhere,

who was anywhere near a computer and a modem.

And I started keeping an index, which I've called the Pesci Index,

based on the number of URLs that show up in Super Bowl advertisements.

And I've been very religious about this.

So in 1994, the number was zero.

Amazingly, in 1995, there were two.

In 1996, every single advertisement had a URL.

In 1997, every single advertisement had a URL.

In 1998, the figure came down.

It's because they stopped running URLs at the bottom of Taco Bell ads

because they just made no sense.

Because the hipness of being on the web had simply become business as usual.

So in 36 months, we saw this complete conflation of the web

with the way people worked in the world.

It was, for all, intense and instantaneous change.

So I was watching this as it went along.

And in 1997, I stepped back from it.

And I said, this is curious.

It may be without precedent.

And I took a look at it in that light.

And I wondered, I started to wonder if, in fact, the catalytic genesis of the web

wasn't, in fact, some sort of self-organizing principle.

There are problems here with what we can know about it.

Because if I say that there's a self-organizing principle at work here,

the self-organizing principle is at a level that's greater than any of us can see as individuals

because we're all embedded in it.

So we can only get our own view of things.

And it's difficult to step out.

But when you step out, you see something that looks pretty doggone catalytic.

And the response to each individual in that catalytic process, the reason that the web was so powerful

and immediate is because it seduced everyone as an individual.

We all got hooked on the internet's crack.

And if I were a meta-organism and I were going to reorganize my internal content

or organize my internal content, I'd find some way of doing it that wouldn't require forcing the parts into order

but that would seduce them, that would encourage them, that would lull them into some sort of greater unity.

And I saw this and I said, okay, maybe, just possibly, this is the same footprint in the sand

that Robinson Crusoe saw on the beach.

The thing that let him know that someone else or something else was alive out there.

And we don't, we can't know necessarily who or what is making that footprint.

But I argue that that footprint is an artifact that tells us that there's something that is transhuman

or metahuman going on here.

And that, in fact, as much as we think that human culture is the raison d'être of what's going on on planet Earth,

in fact, perhaps the game got a little broader.

And it meshed well with an idea that I'd encountered in my youth,

which was the idea of the noosphere from Pierre Théard de Chardin.

To go into that briefly, he was a Jesuit and a paleontologist, and he saw no contradiction between them.

And he saw the unfolding history of the planet as a history of organizations.

And these organizations occurred in two levels simultaneously.

There were organizations and accumulations of size, that is order,

and accumulations of interiority or organization.

So that organisms passed from a single level stage to a multicellular stage.

So that's a size issue.

And then as things got further, that internal organization would complexify.

In other words, rather than the simple organization of cells that you might see in an organism like a hydra,

you might start to see the formation of internal structures such as organs.

After that passed for a while, you then see further levels of organization.

into a nervous system, which is a complexifying of the organism,

so that the organism becomes, in a whole sense, conscious of its environment.

And following this line, Théard said,

well, human beings who have, arguably, the most advanced consciousness on the planet,

that their role in being self-reflective is that they allow a window upon which this process of organization

and complexification can view itself.

If that statement is true, then what we can see as the next step, what Théard proposed,

is that there would be an organization and a complexification of the layer of mind that covers the planet.

And he called this the Neuosphere.

And Neuos actually means, I believe it means mind, correct, in Greek.

So we're talking about this layer of mind that covers the planet.

Now, the web is not the Neuosphere.

In the same way that the soul is not the body.

They're related.

They interact with each other.

They aren't the same thing.

And you probably can't separate them out and take a look at one or another independently.

But one can offer concrete evidence of the other's existence.

And so I see this explosiveness of the web happening everywhere.

everywhere instantaneously as being a visible proof or identity that this neospheric entity

exists and in fact is working very seductively. It's the seduction of Sophia to in fact bring us

into its unity. Let's talk about simulation. Simulation has a relatively long history.

Computers, that's what computers do. Computers simulate. Whether it's a spreadsheet doing a

simulation or a word processor simulating a page that's being typed. But specifically when we talk

about virtual reality we talk about simulations that are geared toward the human senses. Well

simulation has had two tendencies over the last 20 or 30 years of its development and one of them has

come from above. Military simulations. The first simulations were developed in order to improve

jet fighter pilots in order to augment a jet fighter pilot as he's working in a cockpit because

he's incredibly informationally overloaded. And all of the basic pioneering work that was done in virtual

reality was done on the defense department's dime in the 1960s by a man named Ivan Sutherland.

So everything that we think of classically being VR, force feedback, sticking your arm in cyberspace,

a head-mounted display, real-time computer graphics. This was all developed 30 years ago.

Flash forward about 10 years and now we have simulation coming up from below in the video game.

And as it turns out most of the people who did pioneering work in virtual reality came not from

defense simulation but from video gaming. So people like Brenda Law and Warren Robinette and

Jaron Lanier. Jaron Lanier actually made a small fortune off of an Atari video game years before

he started working in virtual reality. But these machines were fast on if they opened enough of a

window that the potentiality of the medium to simulate could be exposed. And at this point with

the kind of video games that you can go into a Toys R Us and buy, there's very little difference between

the defense simulation engine and a Nintendo 64. They've started to converge. A third track.

During the brief period that I was at MIT, I somehow locked into a salon that was held regularly on

Saturday nights in Cambridgeport, which is just outside the bounds of MIT, where a certain very

Hercules class of people would get together and talk about new ideas. And it turned out that these

salons were held at the house of one person named K. Eric Drexler. And these salons were talking about

a set of ideas about making machines that were so small they were literally made out of molecular

components. And they were called nanotechnology, which was an idea that Marvin Minsky had begun to

talk about, I believe in the 1970s. And that Drexler saw and just ran with. And the idea was that the normal

physical processes of the world were becoming finer and finer grained with respect to human control over

them. And that at some point it would be possible to really assemble reality bit by bit, both literally

and figuratively, and to make machines that were of any possible construction at any possible scale.

In 1982, he wrote a book called The Engines of Creation. But that book wasn't published until four

years later. There's a small story there. He wrote the book and he printed 12 copies, which went out to

friends for 48 hours for review. It went out to one of my friends and I got on my knees and I begged. And for

12 hours, I read the first draft of Engines of Creation from cover to cover. The book that was published by

some big New York publishing house is not the book he wrote. Because the book he wrote could not be published.

Because the book he wrote spent chapters plumbing the depths of the possibilities of a technology

that could reasonably be used to reanimate the dead. And this is a subject that is not covered in any length

or any detail in the published version of it. It's not covered in any length or any detail in the published

version of the Engines of Creation because it's just too flipped out for the public to read. But if you

talk to an anotechnologist, perhaps quietly and in a corner because they're all trying to get corporate

backing these days, they will agree that this is the case. So there's a drive to control the physical

universe at the molecular level from below, that form of nanotechnology. But then we also see the

countervailing trend from above, which is the drive to understand biology at the molecular level and

understanding the machinery of the cell at its very sort of finest granularity and be able to harness the

processes and the sub-processes in the cell such that there is at a functional level very little

difference between an understanding of the machinery of nature and the creation of the actual machines

ourselves out of the whole cloth. It turns out that the lines between simulation and nanotechnology

converged a lot quicker than anyone had thought. In 1993, a master's student at the University of North

Carolina came up with a device that he called the nanomanipulator. The nanomanipulator combines a

scanning tunneling electron microscope, which in shorthand is an STM, which is nothing more than a pin with

an extremely sharp point and a small electric charge. They're actually quite easy to make. Well, quite hard to make well, but they're quite easy to make.

And this tip and the electric charge on it can be used to move individual atoms around. Well, they also then

took the specialty of UNC, which is a thing to cross the surface of an atom. You could push atoms into place. And in fact, you could watch the quantum tunneling as the atoms leapt out of place very suddenly.

That is already an extant device. And yet that device represents the prototype for the systems that will follow in the next 14 years.

Now, nanotechnology, which promises everything, is not without its discontents. And the largest of its discontents, the thing that keeps me worried at night and makes me afraid of the dark, is something that's called the gray goo problem.

The gray goo problem is very simply put. It's possible to construct what's called a nano assembler, a tiny machine with a tiny computer inside of it. And this computer has two instructions of significance. One is that it eats, and it's not all that picky about what it eats. And the other is that it makes copies of itself.

If such a device were released into the environment, it's believed that the surface of the planet would be nothing but a sea of these nanomanipulators in 72 hours.

Yes. If it's a well-constructed nanomanipulator, it's not all that picky. Okay. Probably it eats carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. Probably that's what it eats. It might need some metals for some things, but it can eat basically anything it wants.

This is going to become a reality. And the nanotechnologists are very well aware of this, and they're more frightened of this than I am, which makes me happy.

But this technology will probably become widely available early in the 21st century. It'll probably be possible that your children or your children's children will be able to work with the descendants of the nanomanipulator within the next 5 to 10 years.

Already, a company in Belgium has attached a nanomanipulator via the web to a VRML browser so that you can get in there and you can push atoms around over the web.

So that's just the beginning. And on a rather longer-term approach, the idea of having this engine within a nanoassembler, which is the computer which tells you what to do, there is now a project that's going on at NASA Ames up here in the Mountain View to produce the first functional nanocomputer in 2011.

They expect to happen. They expect to have that. And the people doing this are Creon Leverett and Ralph Merkel.

And Ralph Merkel is considered one of the fathers of nanotechnology, so this is not an idle project. It's got government funding and they're working on it.

So all of this is converging. The idea in simulation is that whatever you want, you can make manifest.

These concepts are ontologically convergent. They're two halves of the same coin. They're seeing and doing.

So the eschaton, which we are hurtling towards, involves at least in part the realization and the identity, in the sense that they're convergent so that they're indistinguishable, of at least these two trends in technology.

And that raises a whole host of issues. Because we now have a conflation of the imaginal and the real.

And we have a world filled with people who aren't nice.

And they're going to have what is both the engine of creation and the engine of destruction.

And we even have ourselves who are sitting here and we may be good people, but we're caught now in a reality that is going to literally dissolve because it can take on any form.

And we need to be able to deal with the psychic onslaught in terms of our own personal ontologies with that mode of being.

And this is where psychedelic experience is perhaps the most relevant, because in the psychedelic experience, particularly in the intense psychedelic experience, you experience this dissolution and yet you don't lose yourself.

But that's still only happening at the psychic level.

It seems to me, and I put this forward as an ideal, that we need to find some mode of being that allows us to confront our newfound capabilities, almost God-like capabilities, in a way in which we do not end up destroying ourselves.

I believe that technopaganism is a response to that question.

That in fact, the magical reality of the archaic revival where the world is animate, where every object in the world is animate, where the world is animated by your words, by the logos, by the words you speak, by the codes you write, by the atoms you move together, you form the world.

That this identity, this realization of the archaic world is in fact what we need to move into at full speed if we're going to make it past that point alive.

I don't see any other realistic alternative.

We have to become masters of reality.

We have to become masters of the real, knowing that that needs an exploration of the imagination.

One thing, there's so much happening so quickly, it feels almost as if, imagine an ocean liner, the Titanic, okay?

And there's that iceberg.

Okay, there's an iceberg, and here we are in a rowboat, pulling in the other direction, trying to slow it down, or to make sense of it.

What's that?

You mean that it seems catastrophic?

What's that?

You mean that it seems inevitably catastrophic?

That it could be, that it could be.

It's almost as if there's so much happening that no matter what we do, we can't change what's happening.

Well, there's a lot of momentum.

On the other hand, primates really don't get traction until they're cornered.

This question that you were talking about, Mark, about the gray goo problem.

One suggested approach for dealing with really dangerous and scary things that we will inevitably fiddle with is,

you know, we think about virtual realities as deployment of data or simulacrums of real worlds,

but it should be possible as virtual reality gets more...

Real?

Real, to build computers that are virtual machines.

They don't exist in the real world.

Well then, truly dangerous software can be virtual software running on virtual machines inside virtual realities,

so that if there's a meltdown of some sort, it's confined several levels below three-dimensional space,

and it doesn't break out in our neighborhood.

We have multiple, triple, quadruple redundancy on something like that.

Of course, as Mark points out, not everybody will play by the rules.

You know, when you handle thermonuclear materials, there are rules,

but if you probably visited the Pakistani atomic test site at Lahore, it would stand your hair on it.

And it's freaky, the amount of the corners that are cut with plutonium.

If you cut corners with grey goo, you're going to end up with a lot of it.

How are we sure that this isn't a simulation?

Well, that's a favorite question.

How can we be sure that this isn't a simulation?

The fact that it has telos means that either telos is a natural product of nature,

which much of science has resisted for centuries,

or this is not the first run of this software,

and this was all built by somebody,

and we all are playing roles that were scripted long, long ago.

We could be running inside a virtual reality.

You know, virtual reality is a fairly new concept to us,

but once you grok it,

it seems clear that any civilization that was capable of star flight

and longevity extension and so forth and so on would also have a full VR toolkit under control.

Well, then that means when we go looking for the extraterrestrial,

you know, what will be the footprint?

Perhaps vanished races are all around us,

but downloaded into solid state matrices

that we have only recently come to the point where we could even recognize.

that possibility.

In one of Greg Egan's science fiction novels,

there is a kelp-like organism that runs a wang-tiling simulation of virtual reality,

and after studying this organism for a long time,

they realize that the alien race that they're seeking is inside this thing in VR

and only exists as data and can't be apprehended on any other plane.

So, you know, Mark mentioned the vector of virtual reality,

nanotechnology, global communications.

It's clear that we're moving toward, if not the eschaton itself,

then some kind of historical echo of it in simulation,

that for all practical purposes will be the same thing in terms of the impact it has on our lives.

For example, you could doubt my much vaunted prediction

that the world is going to become unrecognizable by 2012,

but do you doubt for a moment that by 2012 every major religion on Earth

will have vast simulations of its eschatological vision

for you to wander in and try out so that you can, you know,

look in on nirvana.com or move over to the celestial city

or look in on Sufi paradise.

I mean, religious ontologies will be marketed like beers

and will be made as realistic and compelling as possible.

Well, then who is to say what is real and what is not?

Real is a distinction of a naive mind, I think.

We're getting beyond that.

I mean, naive empiricism worked well enough

until the discoveries of quantum physics 70 or 80 years ago

revealed the hideous secret that the bedrock of reality is a funhouse basement.

I want to...

Yeah.

So, to take this a little bit further and actually put some teeth back into my affairs about nanotech,

I want to talk about artificial life a little while.

It has been a plaything of hackers for a few years

to create environments where data are subject to the same stresses

that they find in organisms in the real world.

And sometimes these data are constructed along genetic lines.

They can breed.

They can mutate.

They can change.

And these are actually starting to prove of some utility.

It turns out that if you take what's called a genetic algorithm

and ask it to do a certain thing and then let it grow and compete against its brothers and sisters

for forty or fifty thousand generations, you might find an algorithm that can do this thing,

whatever it might be, adding to numbers, calculating the interest on the national debt, whatever.

It can do so remarkably quickly and in a way that looks to a programmer completely illogically.

And yet it's getting the job done.

So what we've done is we've taken observations of the pressures and the flow of information in the real world

and started to bring that into our simulation.

And so we're starting to call this artificial life.

It's not conscious in the way we would assume it's conscious,

but it's reactive and adaptive to its environment

in the way that we would normally associate with biological systems.

This work is constantly being improved.

It looks like they'll be using it in chip design now

because it turns out that if you try to design chips this way,

the chips themselves will find ways to grow themselves more or less

in ways that will take use of the nonlinear features of a chip.

A digital chip is considered to be a one-zero entity.

It's not.

Transistors and the things we make them out of, in fact,

have all these very funky properties that are neither one nor zero.

And it turns out that the organisms we grow with them

take advantage of these boundary situations to improve their usability.

So it turns out that when we start to let things grow,

what we find is that not only do we lose control over them,

we lose any sense of reason when connected with them.

And the thing that I worry about when I apply that to the gray goo problem

is the issue of the virus.

Viruses are epi-biological entities.

They found a way to harness themselves to living systems

in such a way that they don't need to live,

but they can use a living host to propagate themselves.

And even if we have the nanotechnology squirrelled away

in a simulation that's three levels deep,

the first thing that will do is breed a simulation

that's capable of popping the stack of reality

until it explodes into the real.

So in fact, perhaps what we need is those safe holes,

safe holes, but also the developments of an autoimmune system for information.

Again and again, what comes up is this thing that information elevates

and information destroys.

And if you try to pretend that it's neutral,

you will probably become the victim of it in some way.

You know, right behind artificial life lies the possibility of artificial intelligence,

which is a whole other ball of wax.

And the way we choose to construct the web is strangely very friendly

toward the spontaneous generation of artificial intelligence.

they're talking now about a new protocol,

is it called XML,

which will allow any user of the net

to pull as much processing power as they need for a given problem.

Well, in a situation like that,

if you have artificial intelligence of any sort that gets going,

it will cover 50,000 terrestrial years of evolution

in about five and a half hours.

Hans Moravec at the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Artificial Intelligence says,

if this broke loose, we would probably never know what hit us.

You can read essays on the net around the subject of what is ultra intelligence.

You know, we can imagine a super intelligence.

That's our idea of God.

But Moravec and other people say,

any artificial intelligence which emerged on the net,

as far as we can tell from game theory

and our own best mathematical modeling of these situations,

the first thing an artificial intelligence would do

is design a more efficient artificial intelligence.

Well, when these processes are spanning hours,

the whole thing from the human world's point of view

looks like a kind of chain reaction.

And what you get out at the end, we do not know.

And we do not know the attitude of the thing you get out at the end toward our dear selves.

It's gentle makers.

Right.

So, you know, and these things are very real.

The most cutting edge sciences seem to indicate, you know, since the 70s on,

when Ilya Prigozhin did his work in non-equilibrium thermodynamics,

the word has been out that very complex systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order.

There is some kind of loophole in the second law of thermodynamics that allows this to happen in dissipative structures.

Our own organic existence and our economies and civilizations are examples of this.

Well, what we are brewing here is a very potent non-equilibrium thermodynamic environment

that has a kind of rudimentary intelligence, a desire for cohesion, a desire for self-perpetuation,

a desire for closure in its own design process.

And this is what will probably bring the eschaton, in my estimation,

is that we are actually in the act of giving birth to another order of being,

uh, ultra-intelligence, planetary in scale, machine-based, operating at 400 megahertz and above,

and with God knows what plans for mankind.

And the question becomes, what, are we embedded in that?

Are we embedded in that machinic phylum? Are we part of that?

The question of artificial intelligence has, of course, plagued researchers for 40 or so years,

in part because there was an original methodology which said that we can,

we'll just design a mind, it'll think, or at least it'll be a fake simulation, I think,

and we'll do this in what they consider a very top-down fashion.

And the further they got into the problem, the more ridiculous this scenario actually became.

So, because we, we aren't unities.

And in fact, AI has really sort of had to come to that conclusion.

There is no little guy in your head which is giving the orders.

It's, it's not working that way.

And yet, that was the fundamental assumption of people who were working in AI.

Then, of course, about 15 years ago, Rodney Brooks at MIT comes out with his little insects.

And his insects are very simply constructed.

Each part of the being of the insect has its own instructions.

The legs just have to sort of stay up.

The eyes just sort of have to see.

And the whole thing displays an emergent behavior which looks a little bit like a machine-made insect.

This now has become, I believe this is called constructivist AI, has become the new paradigm,

which is throw all this shit together and see what comes out.

So, the current work of this group is to construct a humaniform version of this called COG.

The reason for it to be humaniform is based on something that's probably got more to do with philosophy

than it does with computer science.

Which is that if we can create some form of consciousness that we expect to be able to communicate with,

it probably has to be bounded with a body that is, at least in some ways,

equipped with the same set of constraints that we have as human beings.

If a silicon chip suddenly booted itself up into existence,

it's not clear that it would have a consciousness that would be easily capable of being recognized by us,

super-intelligent or not.

Because the boundaries that give it its defining qualities are so vastly different from our own.

So the idea with COG is to create this humaniform and give it enough human qualities

and let it start crawling around the lab and learning how things work and maybe things will start to emerge.

The beautiful and I think rather cool thing about this, which feeds into something that you were just talking about,

is that there's a woman who's working at the MIT AI lab who also holds a position at the Harvard Divinity School.

And her job is to teach the child ethics.

Because we think that, they think that, if it is possible that this machine displays any kind of human intelligences,

the first thing you'd want to be able to do is to teach it what's right and what's wrong.

It'll probably work both ways.

But who teaches the teacher in the first place?

Yeah.

How are those ethics determined?

This is what ethics is about.

Right.

Fire.

No, it's not.

Well, you're talking about culture then.

Well, isn't it bury the dead, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, behavioral responses to other people's discomfiture.

With a real AI, of course, you're going up against something which is thinking about the same question you are

and you hope not reaching different conclusions.

I was recently had a minor revelation when I was reading something about the psychology of the Cold War

and how both sides studied game theory.

And one of the things that game theory has concluded is if you are in a position of opposition to someone

and you really want to win the argument, it's absolutely vital from your point of view to win,

then one of the most, one of the best strategies available to you is to convince the other side that you're capable of anything.

And I realized in my whole life in conflicts with people,

the first thing I try to establish is the idea, now we are going to work this out.

We are going to achieve an end state which will be pleasing to you.

This is why I lost all those struggles with people over the years.

No, you try to convince the other person, if this doesn't go my way, it's going to get so weird for you,

it will be unbearable.

So be forewarned.

So William Gibson talked a lot about AI in his novels.

And one of the points that he makes that I think is very interesting is

he imagines an AI called Winter Mute.

And what Winter Mute is most interested in doing is making collages.

And this is an interesting idea to me because it says that Winter Mute is ultimately not creative.

What Winter Mute is capable of doing is generating new juxtapositions of old data

by shredding maps and photographs and bus tickets and arranging these things in Joseph Cornell type boxes.

But ultimately, Winter Mute is an arranger of the detritus of human civilization.

That fascinates me because I've noticed that the entities that you encounter in psychedelic spaces

are often seen to be collagists.

If you're really paying attention, like in psilocybin encounters,

what it's saying to you is made up of half-forgotten plots of science fiction stories you read as a kid,

half-glimpsed memories that you've forgotten,

vistas, incidents, conversations.

It never is entirely original.

The product is original.

But atomistically deconstructed, it is always the detritus of being

that's being arranged by these entities.

I always thought that was an unsuccessful trick.

Well, it can get harder and harder to trace the provenance of a given image.

But I think if you really, if you know yourself, you know where it's coming from,

it helps to have a very good memory.

I know, because it uses the obscure, it uses the parts of the novel you forgot.

The ego is very selective as it threads its way through the data.

But you have to believe that there's a bigger point of view that's not missing any of this stuff.

Yeah.

I'm just making a few notes.

If the grand project, and this is almost a question that will end up being addressed to you,

if the grand project of technology is the deconstruction of reality,

and I've been arguing this afternoon that in fact that's what it is,

then we're faced with a situation as I outlined earlier.

But we're also faced with something else that I really believe has already become clearer

and will even become clearer as the reality of the eschaton,

which is that the information flows,

and that's really sort of been the subtext of what we've been talking about over the last two days,

are becoming, the currents are speeding up.

And the currents are moving through all of us,

and every stage as we move closer to this,

all they ever do is they ratchet up the speed of change,

they ratchet up this information flow,

and this information flow is no longer being abounded by any particular material.

It's flowing through strata of rock,

it's flowing through strata of biology,

it's flowing through strata of silicon,

and it's flowing through the strata of our minds.

So, I'm trying to think how to put this in a question.

Is there a point that you think that there will be a sort of collective slapping of the head?

As humanity says,

this is what's going on.

Is there a point at which the eschaton becomes visible to a large enough set of people

that the idea of the eschaton becomes an almost auto-catalytic idea

that by its visibility it invokes itself,

or is that the last second before?

Well, the answer is sort of yes, no, and maybe.

On the largest scale, I would argue,

like people sometimes object to the idea of the eschaton occurring soon

with logic like the following.

Don't you find it strange

that since it could occur at any moment in time,

it happens to be occurring coincident with your own lifetime?

In other words, isn't there some kind of solipsism here,

some circularity, or some inflationary delusion at work?

And for a long time I felt the force of that,

but then I decided, no.

Because human history is the outer shell of the eschaton.

If you think of the eschaton as a process that is condensing,

becoming more dense and less rarefied,

then it really has no outer limit.

You could say that from the moment of the Big Bang on,

the concrescence was inevitable.

But in terms of being able to see it

coming into existence on scales

and through the lens of human values,

it seems clear to me that,

you know, after existing in a relatively steady state

for 700 million years,

since life left the archaic oceans,

about 100,000 years ago,

or 50,000, I mean, it's imprecise,

but around 100,000 years ago,

things began to go berserk on this planet.

And it was not among the woodchucks,

the scorpions, the macaws, or the gray whales.

It was specifically in the hominid line of the primates

that something began to tear loose.

And what was it?

It was epigenetic transformation of information.

It was as though information

which had previously been content to operate

in the domain of biology

as genetic information,

had grown too impatient

to be contained by that vessel.

And so human language emerged

sometime in the last 50,000 years.

And that began an accelerated cascade

of symbolic, epigenetic,

technologically linked activity

where every process then which resulted

fed in to an acceleration

of this general tendency.

All of what we call human history

can be pretty nicely confined

within 6,000 years,

not 100,000 or 50,000.

I mean, you go back 6,000 years,

you're at 4,000 B.C.

The pyramids lie in the distant future

as a technological dream.

Well, if you don't think things

got out of control 50,000 years ago

or 6,000 years ago,

how about within the confines

of the 20th century?

You know, people in 1910

were living pretty much

over most of the surface of the globe

as people had been living

in 1500 in Europe.

The 20th century opens

with the theory of relativity.

Max Planck's experiments

with black body radiation,

powered flight, psychoanalysis,

pataphysics, jazz,

you name it,

whatever your favorite icons

of modernity are.

And so I think

that the old models,

and we should remember

that as recently as 120 years ago,

it was entirely respectable

for a member of the intelligentsia

of England

to maintain

that the Earth was created

on October the 5th,

4006 B.C.

at 10 a.m.

That was a respectable opinion

in the middle-class

episcopal gentry

of Victorian England.

So what is happening

is that things

are getting weirder,

fast.

1923 was an enormous watershed

when the ever-stodgy

edifice of physics,

which had been rocked

to its foundations

by Einsteinian relativity,

encountered the notion

of the quanta,

the uncertainty principle,

the role of the observer

in the production

of measurement

at the heart of nature.

This is what I call

discovering that the bedrock

is a funhouse basement.

And as we have prosecuted

the frontiers of knowledge

over the past 50 years,

it's only our incredible

lack of historical perspective

that keeps us, I think,

resistant to the idea

that we are

in the gravitational tug

of an enormous attractor

that must lie ahead of us

in time,

not very far.

How far can it be?

To my mind,

people who talk about

how things are going to be

in 500 years

or 1,000 years

have atrophy

of the frontal cortex.

I mean,

what Mark said

either this morning

or last night

about the difference

between 1990 and 1998

in terms of the internet,

1998 lies farther

from 1990

by a great distance

the 1990 lies

from 1900.

The acceleration

has become overwhelming.

Now,

we have built-in defenses

against this,

which is,

it's almost like

the expanding universe theory,

except apply it

to the intellectual universe.

The intellectual universe

is expanding

at such an enormous rate

that most people

embedded in a professional field

cannot see beyond

the boundaries

of their own

technical concern.

So the people

in nanotechnology

have no idea

what's going on

in, let's say,

information compression

or environmental restoration

or something else.

Every science

is reaching,

every field of technology

is reaching

towards some kind

of holy grail

of its own

special set

of concerns.

But there's no information

being communicated

along the face

of the wave

and into this

intellectual

chasm

of understanding

that the rapid

acceleration

of historical processes

created

pours the energy

of cult.

We have become

a people ruled

by rumors

of the improbable.

We're told

that, you know,

human fetal tissue

is being traded

for fiber-optic technology

by back-channel sections

of our own government.

We're told

that extraterrestrials

of dozens of shapes

and sizes

are running around

in the trailer courts

of America.

We're told

that the Antarctic ice cap

is about to melt,

that planetesimal objects

are headed toward Earth,

that Christ and Elvis

were seen arm-in-arm

down at the mall,

on and on.

Well, people say

it's the millennium

or it's the breakdown

of consensus reality.

It is all of that,

but I think

it's embedded deeper.

I think it's embedded

almost in the physics

or dynamics

of planetary complexity

in this,

on the surface

of this planet.

In answer

to your question,

will it ever

break through?

Will there ever

be an aha moment?

I think there will.

I think it will come

sometime

after the millennium,

like 2006,

something like that.

Because, first of all,

the echoes

and resonances

of the millennium

must die away.

And we must understand

that it wasn't simply

the year 2000

or Y to K

or the Christ-er

expectation

of millenarian

dispensation.

That nothing can

turn off

these processes

that have been

operating

for such very long

spans of time.

And it is

absolutely unreasonable

at this point

to suppose

that any force

could intervene

to stop

what is happening.

Well, then,

people say,

well, then,

are we just

to disappear

up our own

virtual wazoo?

Or what?

How are we

to picture this?

Well, I think

that's like

asking us

to see around

several corners

at once.

The things

which will happen

between here

and 2012

will rewrite

the disk

of reality

several times

if the reality

if 1994

and 1998

can be separated

by centuries

of technological

progress,

then what is it

going to be like

in 2002

when the T1

connection

becomes the

standard connection

for most people

on the internet,

when virtual reality

is completely trivial,

when everyone

moves much

of the time

through virtual

code-created

spaces,

well, probably

it will appear

very humdrum

because we will

have gotten used

to it by then.

But what we will be

asked to get used

to at that point

is the perfection

of quantum

teleportation,

the possibility

of essentially

turning the entire

physical universe

into the equivalent

of an electromagnetic

medium of some

sort.

And I think

that the breakdown

of consensus

reality,

the breakdown

of physics,

the breakdown

of models

about what is

happening will

eventually lead

to a complete

overheating

of the official

engines of

explanation.

This is what

lies behind

the belief

that the

government

is about

to come

clean

about flying

saucers,

or it's

about to

come clean

about the

ruins on

Mars.

I mean,

these are

in fact

chimeras

in the

popular mind,

but they

indicate

the realization

that reality

is slipping

out of

anybody's

control.

The thing

that amuses

me about

conspiracy

theory is

that it

propounds

the

obviously

preposterous

notion

that the

system

can be

guided

and

controlled.

You want

to go

beyond the

hair-raising

terror of

conspiracy

theory?

Then lock

in on the

concept that

no one

is in

charge.

Not the

Jews,

not the

Vatican,

not the

German

government,

not the

World Bank,

not the

Catholic

Church,

nobody.

The whole

thing is

under the

aegis of

dynamics that

are out of

the reach of

human

institutions

and human

intentionality

at the

institutional

and individual

level.

So then people

call that

chaos and

they say

it's just

flinging itself

apart,

it's melting

down.

No it's

not.

As it

exceeds our

ability to

control its

direction,

it actually

reveals its

real

ontos.

We are

not cattle

for Christ,

we are

not

socialist

automatons,

we are

not bearers

of the

genes of

the

master race,

we are

none of

these

squirrely

ideas,

we are

something else

which is

in the

process of

unfolding

and I

think

eventually

to answer

your question

this will

become the

central product

of the

human race

instead of

discussing

the

eschaton

at the

edges

and I

watched it

move from

the real

edges,

I mean I

was into

this in

when it

made no

sense to

anybody

including

me,

I just

said it

because I

was hopelessly

insane

and had no

choice

and I

watched it

move in

and in

and you

know now

you can

go on

the internet

there are

these people

called

singularis

these are

guys with

pen protectors

for sure

and yet

they believe

that by

calculating

rates of

data

compression

density

of computer

architecture

human

population

energy

release

velocities

attained

so forth

and so on

you draw

all these

curves out

and lo

and behold

somewhere

between

and 2025

we

possess

all

information

move

at infinite

speeds

release

infinite

amounts

of energy

live

forever

and so

forth

and so

on

people

say

well

what

does

what

does

this

mean

can

this

can

these

curves

possibly

hold

these

vectors

I think

the answer

is yes

but the

fulfillment

of these

things

will occur

in dimensions

very

difficult

for us

to

grok

or imagine

what I

love

about

what I

do

is that

I get

to read

all the

hot

new

stuff

and I

think

about

it

and I

think

about

it

and every

once in

a while

a piece

of

information

comes

floating

down

the

pike

that

lifts

an edge

of the

veil

and I

see

three months

further

into the

future

or six

months

further

into the

future

for instance

in the

last six

months

I have

understood

that

processor

speed

I didn't

understand

that

before

in other

words

that

if

you

could

digitize

yourself

at

megahertz

an hour

is long

enough

for you

to live

your life

50 times

over

so

in the

same way

that

an object

falling

into a

black hole

from the

point of

view

of an

exterior

observer

that's

a terminal

event

with a

time zero

when the

person

falling into

the hole

can be

said to

be

obliterated

if you

switch

your point

of view

to the

spaceship

or person

falling into

the black

hole

because of

relativistic

stretching

of time

the distance

it takes

to fall

from the

event horizon

into the

core of

the black

hole

is

forever

so time

itself

breaks

down

as a

concept

and yes

I think

as reality

gets more

and more

bizarre

and more

unmanageable

and technology

hurls open

more and more

doorways

on nano

worlds

virtual worlds

telepathic

worlds

artificial life

AI

sooner or later

this is going

to be

topic one

that reality

is mutating

before our

very eyes

we are

mutating

before our

very eyes

and the

job I

assume

of people

like ourselves

and I mean

everybody in

this room

is to

assuage

other

people's

anxiety

because

you know

if you're

really

embedded

in print

created

linear

values

you're

shitting

white

at this

point

and it's

only going

to get

worse

you can't

understand

half of

what you

hear

the whole

the walls

seem to be

closing in

on you

well

those who

understand

should assure

those who

don't

that

it's

simply

you know

as the

mushroom

once said

to me

it said

no big

deal

it said

this is

what happens

when a

civilization

prepares to

depart

for the

galactic

center

it just

takes

about

years

and yes

there can

be a

rocky

liftoff

but don't

worry

we've

done

this

before

we've

never

lost

one

which

which brings

me to a

question that's

been burning

and in fact

my friend

james asked

me about

this earlier

which has

to do

with

the

anthropocentric

role

of

in the

eschaton

are we

going to

be

booting

the entire

gaian

logos

with

us

or

in other

words

are we

sort of

the sex

organs

for that

transformation

or

are we

just

going

and leaving

the earth

to the

birds

and the

bees

or are

we

leaving

it a

burnt

out

husk

which

I mean

it's a

question

to me

of some

relevance

I was having

a discussion

with someone

today

and they

said

well

you know

look

the plant

can die

as long

as the

spores

spread

my attitude

on this

is that

it's a

poor

child

that

are

directly

due

to

deaths

well

I think

it comes

back

to

what

we've

been

circling

around

here

which

is

ethics

as I'm

sure

you know

Frank

Tipler

wrote

this

book

The Physics

of Immortality

and he

argued

in there

that

from

certain

ethical

points

of view

the

technology

that

we're

about

to

achieve

carries

with it

the

possibility

of

resurrecting

the

dead

you

touched

on this

earlier

this

afternoon

and

he

says

that

if

you

could

resurrect

the

dead

there

would

be

a

having

that

power

you

could

not

maintain

your

humanness

by

turning

your

back

on

the

obligation

well

then

he

goes

beyond

that

he

obviously

slept

on

that

idea

and

then

he

comes

back

and

in

a

further

chapter

he

says

and

furthermore

a

deeper

ethic

would

take

the

position

not

to

existence

so

you

know

in

Eric

Davis'

book

Technosis

which

will

be

out

in

a

few

months

in

the

final

chapter

he

offers

a

kind

of

Buddhist

umbrella

for

the

ethical

development

of

cyberspatial

civilization

that

kind

dead

my

vision

is

to

and

it's

not

mutually

exclusive

of

all

that

but

I

say

until

we

know

what

death

is

we

don't

want

to

bring

back

too

many

of

the

dead

they

might

be

entirely

ungrateful

that

was

pure

ungrateful

but

an

image

which

I

can

get

into

is

the

idea

that

what

our

human

destiny

is

to

bring

intelligence

linguistically

mediated

intelligence

to

all

animate

existence

and

to

create

a

world

where

every

eye

that

looked

out

at

the

world

was

an

intelligent

and

communicating

eye

it's

that

we

need

not

be

separate

I

mean

you

want

to

have

nodal

intelligence

we

talk

about

shifting

our

identities

and

our

gender

choices

and

things

like

that

but

imagine

if

you

spent

time

as

a

grey

whale

as

a

redwood

forest

as

a

school

of

barracuda

all

of

the

I

mean

nature

becomes

essentially

a

world

a

node

of

points

of

view

through

which

we

can

move

a

universal

medium

which

is

what

matter

is

I

mean

that's

what

nanotechnology

and

an

understanding

of

molecular

genetics

makes

clear

to

you

know

molecular

genetics

is

entirely

mechanical

as far

as

we

know

in

other

words

radio

does

not

are

but

generally

speaking

we

have

gotten

a

very

long

distance

modeling

genetic

process

by

assuming

these

things

are

simple

lock

and

key

mechanical systems which template and re-template information and transfer it

to that way. Somebody over here had a question.

Well, I'm not a big fan of ketamine particularly, but the one thing I did learn from ketamine was,

it entirely allowed me to conceive of consciousness without a body. More than any

psychedelic I've ever taken, I seemed to myself utterly disembodied and it seemed very euphoric

to be in that state. I think that the grammar of expectation is very limited and one of the

things that cyberspace and all this prosthesis is going to demand of us is that we unlearn our most

basic assumptions of how being may be configured. You know, spatially divided minds, minds that can

pull unlimited processing power to apply to a problem and then let go of it and fall back into

individuality. We are very fixed in the expression of our conscious behaviors, but we're obviously

designing very flexible alternatives.

Well, you know, I think that one way of thinking about the human journey and the and what's happening

is that we are we are the creatures of the imagination. More than any other creature on the planet,

this is where we like to spend our time. We have a very capable brain and we like to look at trees of

possibility, usually generated around the issues of erotic fantasy and food getting. But this has given us lots

of practice with manipulating these what if scenarios and the whole history of invention is the history of what if.

And people going out and trying the boomerang, the sharpened stick, the atlatl. Now the imagination has an almost

Faustian pull on us. What will we, you know, a very interesting exercise which was pressed upon me when I was in one of my most

most lit up states, was imagine what you would, how you would live if you could live any way you want. Well, you know, in the first

30 seconds, I imagined that maybe I would move into the St. Regis Hotel in New York City and send out to the Met to have the Vermeers delivered.

And, you know, have my favorite chef moved in one floor above. But then you realize, no, no, the game was how would I live if I could live anyway? And then you realize how paltry that was.

Right.

And then you realize how paltry that fantasy is. And in fact, you realize how paltry any fantasy you could generate would be. And you begin, and it's like a vertiginous epiphany. The walls fall away and the walls fall away and they fall away. And you just realize, my God, what real freedom is I have never even contemplated.

What real freedom is? Well, in virtual reality, I think this is going to be the design. This is the design challenge. You are now free. What is it?

And the most terrifying thing for most people is the black space of virtual reality. It's the unformed void before the objects are burped up into being. It's similar to the blank page for the writer.

When you can do anything, you actually give it a long thought before you start doing things.

I want to touch on something that you were just saying with respect to inhabiting the media of nature. Because in fact, there's been a work that's done in virtual reality, which was my first taste of it.

And it really, it was an epiphany. It transformed my thinking. And it was shown at the SIGGRAPH that we maybe met at in 1994.

And it was a piece called Cyberfin. And it was a piece of virtual reality that involved almost no use of your eyes.

But what you did is you lied on a very nice table. And the table was configured out of a gel with subsonic transducers in the gel.

And then they would put some other speakers around you and ultrasonic transducers on your head. And what you would do is you would listen to what it was like as life as a dolphin.

Because dolphins are not primarily visual creatures. They, in fact, have very poor sight. But what they do, beyond all other things, is they listen.

They live in a world that's conditioned by what they hear. And they use their ears to hear and to see.

And so as they play these dolphin songs, and there were, there's a monitor, so you had something for your eyes to do.

And there were some dolphins sort of hanging out in it. And, but you could hear. And I had a flash of realization that the dolphin hears with their entire body, which they do in fact.

And for a moment I could find myself transported into that moment of being. It was a trans-species communication.

And I could recognize that when a dolphin hears the name of its friend, which it does when it sounded, he can react to it over his entire body with joy and with recognition.

This is something we don't associate with the human experience. Because we aren't sensually equipped. But virtual reality can reconfigure the sensations that we normally have to give us an experience of a different view.

Yeah, the animal in the water that's attracted my attention, thinking along these lines, are octopi and squid. Because they are soft-bodied. And they have a very complex repertoire of color changes and surface textures. And they can close and reveal parts of their body very rapidly.

And at first, people thought when they studied these things that this was for camouflage. But it turns out it's for communication. What an octopus does is it is its language. It wears its language. Human communication is small mouth noises acoustically conveyed across space.

The octopus doesn't generate words under the rules of syntax. It is a linguistic medium under the control of an internal syntax. And in other words, it wears not its brain, but its mind on the outside of its body.

And so when one octopus encounters another, there is absolute lack of ambiguity about how long it's been since each party has eaten, how long since each party has had sex, how it was, and so forth and so on.

And I thought that based on that observation and stuff which goes on in the DMT flash that part of what these new technologies hold out is moving the linguistic enterprise as practiced by human beings out of the acoustical domain and into the visual domain.

In other words, so a kind of telepathy that visual, that virtual reality would support is a telepathy where we could see what we mean.

You know, if I read you a paragraph from Proust, we could then spend the rest of the hour discussing what does the writer intend. This is a favorite game in lit crit.

But if we look at a sculpture, no such discussion of ambiguity takes place. We all behold the same three-dimensional form. If you're a German person looking at a bronze nude or a Chinese person, there may be subtle differentiations, but the same form is beheld and understood.

It transcends local language. So if I had a lot of money to spend in virtual reality research, I would try to build special environments that took acoustical language and coded it to visible objects in a kind of dictionary so that when someone was speaking at a conventional speed,

listening computers projected analogous topological manifolds that were coded to the speech, and I'll bet you very quickly people exposed to this form of communication would stop listening to each other and start watching the holographic dance of imagery generated over people's heads.

I think telepathy is not hearing what other people think. Telepathy is seeing what other people mean.

telepathy is seeing what other people mean. And cephalopods and octopi model this for us very well.

You know, every technological age has a totemic animal. The 19th century, it was probably the horse who signifies the steam engine, the age of steam, horsepower.

We measure steam engines output in horsepower. The early 20th century, it's the raptor. It's the bird of prey, the supersonic fighter aircraft.

This is where it all comes together. But in the informational future, I think strangely enough, a creature as exotic and strange as octopi become a perfect totemic animal.

This also explains all those tentacles on early copies of astounding.

It's interesting that you should mention this because Giant Lanier lectured in San Francisco last year, and he spent the first hour of his lecture talking about how when he grew up, he wanted to be a giant cuttlefish.

Because the giant cuttlefish possesses all these characteristics to the nth degree so that their skins are literally as complex as television screens.

We very rarely see giant cuttlefish. They hide in the lower depths of the ocean, which are very hard for us to get to probably quite well.

But they have an entire culture based on this visual form of communication using the fact that they have an enormous expanse of skin that they have incredibly detailed color control over.

Yeah, and this color control is so basically a part of these animals, so necessary to their evolutionary program, that though octopi and squids evolved in the shallow waters of warm oceans,

they evolved into the benthic depths, into ocean deeper than 1500 feet, and no light penetrates there.

And so to maintain their ontos of being, they evolved phosphorescent organs.

And so in the deep ocean, the octopi only know each other as information. There is no light.

So they only know each other as a linguistic phenomenon, except I suppose when they have sex, which is only once and the male is eliminated shortly afterwards.

But that's the only tactile, that's the only confirming encounter in their entire lives, that there is actually a material entity there.

The rest of the time, what they exist in is an environment of information mediating light and perhaps pheromones. Weird.

And this is all within the confines of the ecosystem of one small planet.

This is why the task with aliens is to recognize one when it's in front of you.

There's plenty of life on this planet and plenty of mind on this planet.

So alien that human beings can't understand it when they're confronted with it.

It's kind of evolved our consciousness and some would say more of a kind of psychic and even like sort of horic consciousness

versus this computer spell which seems to be, I don't know, I'm sure there's more to it, but if you're saying the same words,

then you're using your same expression mode and it's just kind of activating like a tape recorder or something like that.

It just doesn't seem to have a totally different character that involved in your core being.

First, your core being being the same, second, second, second, mediator, it's just differently involved.

In my own work, I have found that my work with computers ended up activating the other centers of my being.

Again, I think it's perhaps a matter of intent.

If you want, because any work that's auric, you're still working with some object, whether it's the body or with some other object,

that you're working with, right?

So the computer can be that object.

I've been able in my own work to be able to project my growing understanding of the magical identity of the world into my work in the computer,

so that it's become my allochemical chamber.

It's become the place where I can dissolve and coagulate the ideas of my psyche and refine them.

And not all of them are perfect, not all projects succeed.

But nonetheless, it can become the vessel to contain my work.

When you were kind of thinking before, when you were saying that the evolution of the physical energetic world

is evolving almost like a separate consciousness or imagination entity,

it almost seems like there is complete parallel evolution there,

and that the structure of the physical energetic world is structured,

the evolution of the mind or imagination world,

which has a lot of the same feeling of the physical energetic world,

sort of splitting apart with the energy of the force,

and then the coming back together,

which I think connects to sort of the source of our primary imagination,

which is sort of the feeling of love.

You've said before, just sort of connecting back the energy,

connecting back the force and energy.

It just seems that the energetic world seems to have completely structured then as well.

And yet all of our fantasies grow out,

and sort of completing that, getting back to that source.

Well, I'm not sure.

Like recently I've been playing with the idea that the imagination

actually has a physical reality,

though a kind of physical reality,

and that this function that we do called imagining,

or being in the imagination,

is actually an act of perceiving,

and that what one is perceiving

is the bell, non-local information space

that lies below the level of three-dimensional space and time.

In other words, that most of our senses,

our eyes, our ears, our prehensile things,

locate and define us in space,

because we are organisms subject to Darwinian catastrophes,

and we need to be watching over our shoulder.

But the ingression of spirit into the animal body,

what we call spirit,

it works for me to think of it as simply

the sum total of all information in the universe,

simultaneously parsed and experienced.

That's God enough for me.

Yeah?

Interestingly, when I worked at Autodesk,

one of Autodesk's slogans for their CAD program

was tools for the golden age of engineering.

When we met Mark and we were working,

both working in the virtual reality,

for example, I was working at Autodesk,

he was at Ono Sendai,

I realized that virtual reality technology

were tools for the golden age of the imagination,

that finally we had visualization tools

and simulated sensory tools

to enhance the ability to manifest our imaginations,

whereas some people have the ability to do that better,

to take the thoughts,

everything in the world that we make

comes from a thought somewhere

and somebody manifests it,

you know,

and that these are like an enabling technology

for this golden age.

Well, this is what gives an enormous shot in the arm

to the idea of techno-paganism, I think,

where in ages where the imagination is empowered,

magic rules the world.

In ages where the imagination has somehow given way

to positivist empiricism or reductionism

or some other form of so-called realism,

magic withers on the vine.

So, you know, the realization that code is magical invocation

is really a powerful one.

Language has been devalued by the positivist and warped.

For example, you mentioned the world is getting weirder,

and this is one of my favorite little things.

The word weird really comes to us

from the Germanic roots of our English language,

and your weird is your fate in the sense of

that which has come to be as the sum total of what you have done

and what has happened to you.

Your weird is your weird, you know.

And saying that the world is becoming weird is like, duh.

What else could it become?

In the ancient Germanic mind,

this was a concept that was understood by everyone,

not just kings and scholars and...

Yes, the goose of Gnosis has come home to roost, I think.

Yeah.

Mark, I noticed that before all of this started,

you were smudging the room.

Yes, and I'll do it again tonight.

Would you stress that?

In this context?

In this context, it was really very, very practical.

Smudging is done to clear the valence out of a room

and to set the stage for whatever's going to happen thereafter.

And so it's just a practical technique that I use

when I want to be able to allow things to happen

in their own way in a space

without anything that may have come before intervening.

And you can argue about the practicality of it.

It's an act of intent on my part.

So even if it's only functional at my own level,

although I would argue that, you know,

it's probably functional at other levels.

Certainly other people were of it.

Some people were getting into it,

and I smudged them if they wanted it to,

because we all had the intent of being able to walk in.

And since intent is, in the end, what shapes the world,

it had an effect.

A couple of years ago, Terrence,

I remember you saying something about

having hope that shaman

goes around beating his drum and burn and stuff.

And I was seriously practicing shamanic techniques at that time,

and I thought, oh no, my techno-shaman guru here

is putting down everything I think.

And it was pleasing to me that you smudged the room.

But in what is reality?

What is intention?

What is virtual reality?

I'm curious as to where all of that

sits down to where we are today.

Well, a social space is an interface

between the laws of physics and the laws of magic.

And I think it's completely legitimate

to carry out efficacious activities.

At times I've been hard on ritual,

but that's because I only repeat what I'm told.

And what the mushroom said to me about ritual was,

it's what you do if you don't know what to do.

I think that's consistent with good magical operation.

It's a good thing to do if you don't know what to do.

If you know what to do,

you just slash through and do it.

But shamanism is always technology.

You know, Mersilliard in his book, Shamanism,

the subtitle in English is

The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

It was translated from French.

The word technique in the original book

explicitly indicated technology.

Arthur C. Clarke, one of the things he is most famous

for having said is any technology is,

or magic is any technology you don't understand.

And just for a minute,

making the bridge back to the last great age of magic,

which was at the close of the Renaissance,

the connecting bridge

is the understanding of the power of language.

Language in the hands of science

becomes descriptive and discursive.

Language in the hands of a magician creates.

And we haven't seen languages like that

for several centuries in the West.

But when you write code and implement it,

this is magical language.

When your utterance is iterated in the machine,

something happens.

Or the code didn't work.

It has a bug.

But once it's been debugged,

it is a magical invocation that works.

And the world is going to become progressively

more and more ruled by incantation.

And this, I think, is why I smudged.

Because, I mean, again,

the semantic difference between me writing a code

as a magical invocation

and smudging as a magical invocation,

that semantic difference is utterly lost on me.

Or at least I'm moving to a state, hopefully,

where it's lost on me.

It's as if I hit the reset button on the room.

Autonomous languages.

You were saying we can't evolve any more quickly

than we evolve our language.

What is this autonomous, self-evolving languages

that computers generate to talk with one another,

to share with one another?

Well, Mark can probably address this.

Mark gets the credit for being instrumental

in creating the language called VRML or VRML,

VRML, Virtual Reality Markup Language.

And what that allows is for virtual realities

to be viewed online.

Well, before there was VRML,

there was no way to view virtual realities online.

You know, five or six years ago,

if you could code C++,

you were the hottest kid on the block.

Now, nobody wants that.

That's finished.

People want Java.

They want VRML.

They want other things.

So, while human language has become

maybe somewhat sedate in its evolution,

the evolution of computer languages

has exponentially exploded

and as, you know,

they are eposomal prostheses

of our own linguistic evolution.

So, there are obviously things,

you know how it's a truism

that there are thoughts in Japanese

that don't translate out.

Well, then in each of these computer languages

there must be implementation possibilities

that cannot be done any other way.

Well, how many of these computer languages are there?

Well, as far as we can tell,

an infinite number waiting to be elaborated.

And each one is a path to a different kind of power

and allows different kinds of things to happen.

The whole thing is about language.

I remember when I was a kid reading Naked Lunch

and there's the famous line in there,

language is a virus from outer space.

And I had this in my head on my second acid trip

and I sat down under a tree

and I became somewhat overexcited

behind the perception that English is an animal.

I could feel it in my bloodstream.

I could feel it living in my head.

I could feel it mutating and templating

and infecting people

and spreading

and making its way through the world.

And to some degree,

I think that's a fairly true model of reality.

Why do these things,

these autonomous machine elves

encountered in the DMT thing,

why do they present themselves as linguistic structures,

language elves?

At one point,

somebody on a DMT trip,

not me,

asked one of these entities

what was going on

and the reply was,

we're time sharing your nervous system.

But you're not supposed to know about this.

Well,

language seems to have some kind of

symbiotic relationship to meat

and to silicon.

I made the point the other day

that, you know,

this weird,

to me this seems very important.

I'll keep saying it

until someone tells me it's trivial.

But the fact that

symbolic logic

defines human thought

when human thought and communication

is clearly expressed.

In other words,

if you and I have a truly intelligent conversation,

it can be symbolized in the notational system

we call symbolic logic.

Well, that's what machines speak.

They don't speak a different language from us.

We think and they think exactly alike.

And means and,

or means or,

if means if,

and then means then,

to a human being or a machine.

This is the golden bridge across which the continuity

of the two phyla can be welded.

As it turns out,

something that I heard as a factoid last year,

it's well known that if you learn a language,

say you went and learned Japanese,

and then you went and wanted to learn, say, Russian,

you'd have an easier time of it.

Because the more languages you learn,

the more easier it is to acquire a language.

Programmers know that once you've learned your first programming language,

learning the next programming language is easier and easier.

What wasn't realized until last year,

in fact, is that there's a bleed over.

Then, in fact, the more languages you can speak,

the easier it is for you to acquire a programming language,

and the more programming languages you know,

the easier it is to acquire a human language.

Alright, so the linguistic structures that are being manipulated

as we work with code are identical.

They're not separate from linguistic structures that we use to speak with people.

So, at some level within us, there's a unity between them.

autonomous languages, self-evolving languages that computers evolve themselves?

You could say ALIFE, I would suppose, represents a class of that. So in a sense that a genetic

code could be written or seen as being a language, then yes, there are systems that can already

evolve their own genetic codes and modify their own genetic codes to suit particular

tasks, to suit the environment that they're functioning in. We know that when they run,

for instance, one of the things that was done a few years ago about the cypherpunks is they

ran a barter simulation among a whole set of machines, and very quickly the machines

developed the abstract concept of money. It just sort of emerged because it was a much

easier way of carting things around, and so they just got over it. There's one over there.

Just two thoughts. I find it very easy to speak in Spanish after I dream in Spanish, like in

a foreign country. And so what does it mean to dream of Tetris or doom?

Absolutely the same thing. If you can dream in a coding language, you've arrived in some

things.

Certainly I know with my own experience with Tetris, and I know this has happened to many

people who became addicted to Tetris, that you go through a period where you dream Tetris,

and then all of a sudden Tetris is no more fun because you can basically play it. You've gotten

the game. It's a simple language, and once you've acquired the language, the game of trying to

learn the language, which is what the game is, becomes uninteresting. But at some point, it's

affected the way your mind works. And I think they know, don't they know that in fact brains

function differently after they've learned Tetris than before? So there's something about

the nature of the interactivity and the flow of information that's really affecting your

biology.

And basically what's happening is you're learning to intuitively manipulate three-dimensional

forms in space with much greater facility than if you didn't have that learning pressure on

you.

It's similar to that romantic notion these days that if you let children listen to Mozart and

suddenly they become more intelligent. It sounds to me now like that actually works.

Well, I know Tetris gives you spatial command skill. I don't know if Mozart makes you more

intelligent. I always think of Hannah Arendt's conundrum that she poses in the banality of evil

people, where she says, you know, the task for the 20th century is to understand how someone

could spend a busy day pushing Jews into ovens and then go home, put their feet up, pour a

little schnapps and listen to Bach's choral preludes with a complete appreciation of what

it is. I mean, that is the horror of the multiple personality fragmentation carried to

the nth degree. Anybody else? Yeah?

Just one of those inexpressible thoughts that come from a language domain and I'm sure you

know Mark experienced it before. When you learn a couple of computer languages, you know them

all. And then people ask you, do you know Java? And you're...

Well, one of my fantasies about all of this, one I don't take very seriously, is that as we

get closer to the Y to K crunch, it will disappear invisibly ahead of us because it's an internally

generated crisis that will flush the A.I. out where we can see it.

Because since we can't fix the problem, it will and in so doing it will tip its existence.

We will realize that there is a deus ex machina and it's trying seriously to put corks in the

bottom of the rowboat.

As if it's a crisis that if a computer print out spits out zero zero as a date in that particular

time that the human beings handling this resulting paperwork are not going to understand that this

is 1900 or 2000, it's like they're already assuming that the machines are running everything and

they have to remember that there are still humans involved.

There are humans still in the loop. That's right. A few.

But is that contingent?

I've heard people say the real problem is the year 10K, because no doubt they'll fix it for four

digits, but in the year 10,000, they will be a total fracture of everything. Now we can

just spend cash.

Well, if there's not an A.I. that can't fix it in 10,000, I'm a monkey's uncle.

Susan?

Oh, yeah. The Y to K issue made me think that I hope that all the technology that you're

going towards really does happen quickly because I still, I'm sitting here watching every day

in the news about the very just noticeable difference of the ecological situation on this

planet that has happened in the last year. And it's, you know, I don't think it's going

to go back to the normal that we were used to. And I don't know if anybody followed the

Grand Forks Herald story last year. They won a Pulitzer Prize for Community Service

Reporting because basically Grand Forks is gone from a huge flood. And the people there had to,

really, it was them versus the forces of the universe. And it was only them in their minds and what they

went through. And you could tell by watching the interviews to people that they've been through, like a

mushroom trip, but for a month and a half. And in reality, I'm watching everything that they've ever had

worked for them to be destroyed. So I just, you know, I think that all the technology is great, but if we don't have

electricity or whatever we need to get that going, what can we do for us?

Well, if we lose the electrical grid, we're in big trouble. But the forces that assume they run the world have an

enormous vested interest in keeping these infrastructures together. So I, you know, there was just a test on the

stock exchange last week and it passed with flying colors. I think the consultants will get their pound of

blood and guess what folks, Western civilization will survive to run another day.

Right, right. But, but let me say about this ecological thing, there is a weird problem which we tend not to

talk about here because we're all obviously tech heads and, and visionaries, but chewing on our rear end in

all of this is a very practical program, a problem. And that is overpopulation, which tends to erode every

social justice program, every effort to clean up water, every effort to deal with AIDS in the third world, every effort to

expand the educational base or expand connectivity. There are too many people. Well, it's not a technological

problem exactly. I mean, yes, we could distribute condoms, we could sterilize people, but it's a political and

social problem. And this is where we have the biggest problems. We can, you know, build the internet in a time scale of

four years. How long will it take us to change, regulate our sexual and breeding behaviors? The momentum here is

terrifying. I've talked in previous groups about how if, if every person would parent only one child, population would drop

50% in 30 years on the planet. Children in the first world consume between 800 and 1000 times more resources than

children born to women in the third world. Where do we preach population control? You know, we are blind on this issue. You know, the

Holocaust was a horrifying incident in the 20th century. And the Germans took an enormous rap for that,

as they should have. But fundamentalist Islam, the Catholic Church, have population policies in place, which

would shove more people into disease, degradation and early death every year than suffered under the

Holocaust. And the people who represent these points of view fly around in 747s and are joyously received by

democratic governments. And everybody thinks this is a fine thing. This is a collapse of moral perception of

moral perception of staggering proportions. Where, who is causing the misery and the dislocation in the third

world? Well, it's these institutions which, since they get their directions directly from divinity, feel no constraint to

adjust their policies. But until we address this particular part of our political problem, I think the

forward progress of technology will continue. But the level of misery for vast numbers of people throughout the

world will rise. And this is something we all turn a blind eye to. This is the part of my spiel that most often gets

people walking out on me. Because, well, because usually I end it by calling for hanging the Pope.

Usually I then discover who is no longer amused by the Terence McKenna show.

Certainly the Pope. But how do we square this? You know, how do we square our own connivance in these

incredibly dehumanizing policies, which make it very, very difficult to offer hope to people in the

third world? There may not be much left to be addressed in the physical world. In other words, perhaps through

nanotechnology, we can abandon agriculture and feed China out of matter compilers by turning seawater into rice.

That's a possibility. But until we eliminate the poverty and overpopulation in the third world, our entire

planetary agenda is going to be under a dark cloud of moral obligation.

That makes me want to ask the question, is the problem population or is the problem consumption?

Like a middle of China we can't afford.

It's both. It's both. It seems to me, you know, quality of life is the value to be maximized.

And I don't know what the carrying capacity of the earth is, especially in the light of nanotechnological

schemes that would allow us to abandon agriculture and still feed everyone. But until the quality

of life issue is addressed for the least among us, it seems to me there's a moral obligation

to feel that the political task is still undone.

There's a pun that, in fact, Ronan and I were passing forth on the telephone the other day

and we basically said that the planet has contracted a fatal case of consumption, which

of course is the old nickname for tuberculosis. But in a sense, it's really what's going on.

So part of that, I mean, in the first world, we actually have to adopt some simplistic approach

to finding the quality of life without consumption, you know, the quality of life in interior values

of some sort and a desire to live your life in relationship with the people you love

and with your friends and finding somehow that being enough.

The countervailing tendency, and I'm definitely guilty of this, is that I own two computers

that were composed of materials that produced a lot of toxins in the environment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And we're entrenched with our toys. We all want our new toy, we want our T1 link, da-da-da-da-da-da.

So there's a seduction that all of the technological edifice is offering us,

which is flying in the face of all of our good intentions.

And there's a name for affluenza.

Affluenza.

But in a sense, I mean, not to make it all things to all men, but virtual reality offers

an opportunity here. Capitalism is not intrinsically flawed.

What flaws it is that it insists on fabricating objects out of matter, of which we have a limited supply.

If you dealt objects made of light, we have an infinite supply of photons around.

And so if you dematerialize value, everyone can live at the St. Regis Hotel

and have their mares hanging on their walls.

I don't know about the chef part, but the dematerialization of the commodity market

is probably capitalism's only hope.

Forty years ago it was thought that extraterrestrial industrialism would open the closing loop of the production cycle.

Apparently that option has been taken off the menu, at least for the short-term future.

But virtual reality can step in here in an insidious way.

It already has.

If you think of daytime television as a kind of virtual reality,

millions of low-awareness lives are just being warehoused in the suburbs

where people imbibe this endless infomercial-based environment

and congratulate themselves on the splendid quality of life they've achieved.

So there are many traps, many pitfalls, contradictions.

It's not simple.

It is dinner time, however.

So let's knock off, and we'll come back this evening here at 8 o'clock.

Thank you very much.

The session will blend gently into a mediated event of some sort.

Mark is in charge of that, so I'm not sure, but I'm as interested as I'm sure you are.

The early part of the day got most of the issues in play.

We seem to be swelling, ever swelling our numbers.

Are there issues that we had to end somewhat abruptly at 6 o'clock?

How does all this sit with you?

Seriously?

Yeah?

I think there was something we talked about at dinner.

Can you be happy tonight?

You mean is there some responsibility to gravitas?

Is that what you mean?

Is there any legitimate fear?

There might be a fear to all the unknown factors like nanotech

and all the good stuff we've been talking about, but is there really anything truly towards fear?

Well, in my experience, not.

My fundamental intuition is that it's okay.

That somehow the how of the coming to the eschaton is not yet fixed,

but that it is on schedule and going to happen is somehow very...

It's a very deep creode.

Where the anxiety arises is just in people trying to explain to themselves what is happening.

And, you know, people will not live without closure in the unexamined intellectual life.

So the world is now so complex, very few people, quote unquote, understand it.

But in whatever area that you don't understand it, you generate mythology, which explains it to you.

And so most of us, as the culture becomes more complex, our participation in it becomes more magical,

more animistic, more provisional, more mythic.

This is both a good and a bad thing.

I mean, it leads to cult, which is, I think, a bad thing.

In other words, people accept exclamations for reality,

who the only argument for which is that they are exclamations for reality.

Their persuasive force otherwise is zilch.

Yeah.

There was another comment here?

Alan, if I can just add to that.

The interesting thing about Farron, I think Terrence made the point earlier,

is that primates are at their best when they're in the corner.

And, in fact, if the argument that I've been making over the last couple of days,

that we need to revision our own understanding of the universe and change our beliefs and habits appropriately,

then, in fact, perhaps the fear of this grey goo planet and its ilk, all the other demons that can be conjured,

can be used as catalysts to change the mind.

Yeah, in other words, you can't go on automatic.

So it isn't that kind of carefreeness at the end of time.

But, on the other hand, I really, you know, there's an Irish toast.

May you be alive at the end of the world.

Well, I think, you know, that we have a crack at it.

And it's just, it's just the most fascinating thing.

And it's, I don't, I don't, maybe every age has had the feeling that it stood on the brink of such a transition.

But I don't believe that, because we can see the rhetoric of past ages and, you know, their concerns were different.

But it certainly seems that somehow our lives have been chosen to be microcosmic summations of macrocosmic processes

that have acted themselves out over a long time.

And maybe we are just simply dumb lucky to have been born into this moment.

But so be it.

Could you maybe comment on what you think about the eschatonic relationship to Zeno's paradox?

I kind of personally tend to think it shows it to be a hoax.

It shows Zeno's paradox to be a hoax or the eschaton?

Well, Zeno's paradox is not a hoax.

It's based on a misunderstanding.

You all know Zeno's paradox.

It's that we have a tortoise which is going from A to B.

First, it goes half the distance.

Then it goes half of the distance left.

Then it goes half the distance left.

Because it always has a distance left to traverse, the argument was motion is impossible.

But this rests on a simple logical fallacy.

What we have here is what's called an infinite series.

One half plus one quarter plus one eighth plus one sixteenth.

But the sum of that infinite series is not infinity as the paradox suggests.

The sum is one.

Ergo, the problem is solved.

It was just a naive stage of human thought.

Once you understand that the sum of an infinite series is a finite integer, that's overcome.

So no, we will reach the realm of the densely packed at a certain moment in historical time.

It's strange that this is the faith of Western religion has always been this irrational insistence that God would enter history.

It's a barely languageable notion.

I mean, when you compare it to the nihilism of Buddhism and the cyclical thinking of Hinduism, these seem like very natural topological configurations of the metaphysical impulse.

But the Western thing, you know, that man, that God becomes man and enters history and redeems the past.

I mean, it's pulp science fiction.

And yet archetypically maintained for thousands of years as a primary insight about the structure of reality.

And because the Western methodologies and intellectual toolkit had sharper edges than its neighbors, it's in a way coming to pass.

It's a Middle Eastern import, actually, isn't it?

Yes.

You mean that it comes from the neo...

Well, it comes from the Arabs, but via neo-Platonists and hence from the late phase of platonic thinking.

So it has a provenance.

It has a lineage.

Yes.

If the grand project of technology is the deconstruction of reality, is it also deconstructing culture or creating a new culture?

And what kind of cultural wars can you expect?

Isn't that the case?

Well, I think it is deconstructing culture.

I go back to the French sociologist Jacques Ellul.

I quote nearly every time I speak his statement,

there are no political solutions, only technological ones.

The rest is propaganda.

And in the middle fifties, he wrote a book explaining what he meant by all these terms.

Technology is like a drug in that it dissolves these boundaries that are so very carefully constructed and maintained by cultural values.

So, you know, McLuhan said no technology in history was ever put in place with even a partial appreciation of its consequences.

Technologies can make people money, so people are seduced by them away from cultural values

and then become the carriers of these transformative technological memes that always pose problems for the culture in which they arise.

And I think culture is a self-imposed form of fascism.

That cultural rules are always give us a smaller version of humanity than humanity in fact is.

In other words, you're inside a culture that tells you monogamous marriage is the highest ideal.

Well, so then all the other humanly well-tested possibilities are left out

because that particular cultural software doesn't support that particular behavior.

So, culture is something infantile.

It's pre-adolescent.

It's something which a civilized society would quietly do away with, I think.

Did you want to say?

No one does away with it.

Everybody claims to it.

We do it in our own way.

Well, you can strive for cosmopolitanity, you know.

If you travel, if you take drugs, if you have an affair with the Albanian ambassador's daughter,

and if you do sophisticated things, you can mitigate against it.

But, yeah, to the degree that you slow down and speak one local language

and trade in one intellectual currency and stay in one place, it closes back over you again.

Provincialism.

That's why I'm such a booster for Manhattan.

Because I think, you know, as urban design goes,

that's the best designed immunization program against provincialism ever dreamed up.

And the Internet is another.

You know, you're in some village somewhere defined by its values.

You jack into the world wide web,

and suddenly the human galaxy of values is accessible.

Do you want to talk about any of this, Mark, or anything else?

I just want to say that the question that you just asked is word for word repeated in my notes,

so you could come over and take a look at it.

It was a little bit airy hearing that.

Why don't I start rapping a little bit?

Yeah.

In the afternoon, in our afternoon nightmares,

I did my very best to invoke a few demons.

And I'll invoke one more before I work to exercise them.

This is a rap that I haven't given in a long time,

because it requires props that I don't have.

And those of you who know what props will blush,

because you know what props I'm talking about.

And I gave the talk in public a few years ago.

In fact, at the Exploratorium in the McBean Theater.

And it was a talk about sex and VR.

So I was on a panel with a couple of other people,

and I don't really know how I got onto this panel about sex and VR,

because I've never had any.

Yes.

And one way or another, I ended up on this panel.

And I came onto the panel, and I had a paper bag.

And in the paper bag, with the paper bag on the stage.

So imagine that I have a paper bag here.

And I started to tell a story.

And I said, the year is 1997.

That's coming past.

It was years ago.

So let's say the year is 2001.

And I've just come back with the good guys,

and I've got a bag full of goodies.

And I pull out a head-mounted display and say,

look, this is the latest model, da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

And I pull out a Sony PlayStation and say,

look, this is the latest model, da-da-da-da-da-da.

And then I pull out a dildo.

And I say, oh, this is the latest model.

It's got all the appropriate sensors in it, da-da-da-da-da-da.

And I put a condom on it, so it's sitting there.

And we have to have clean, safe, virtual sense.

And then I pull out a compact disc.

And what's really important is the story of the software

that's on this compact disc.

Because the compact disc software was based on some research that had...

been done a few years ago when they wired up some yogis to get a sense of their neurophysical

states. And the yogis would go into various trance states and they would record the brainwave

pattern. And that's very cool. And one of the things that they did is they got two yogis

who studied tatra in there who just went at it for 24 hours straight and could have gone

longer but they ran out of disk space. Fine. Well, the disk drives go off to some folks

in Bangalore, a bunch of PhDs, graduates of Indian universities, who sit and work on understanding

the neurological patterns involved in this state of consciousness. Now the interesting

thing about the head-mounted display that I've purchased is that the head-mounted display itself

is not just a normal HMD, but in fact is equipped with sensors so it can not only project images

but it's capable of reading my brainwave patterns to some degree. Sorry. The head-mounted display

is capable of reading my brainwave patterns, at least sensorially, and the PlayStation has

got the corporate inputs for it. And the Indian PhDs look at this and they build some neural

net software and they figure out how, in theory anyway, to produce, by using a set of condition inputs

with the dildo and the head-mounted display, a brainwave state that's analogous to the state

that's being produced by the tantric yogis. And again, this relates to what I was talking about, about

bodies and boundaries this morning. That as we move technologies to permeability, to induce

particular types of states as becoming something that's increasingly easier. And after a while the PhDs

crack the problem and it can produce the state and 75% of the test subjects who are all very happy

people indeed. So I posited this technological construction and slapped it on stage and said,

okay, I'm going to pop this thing on. And the next question I need to ask is, will I be able to turn it off?

Because tantric sex by its nature is a high state of sexual excitation and pleasure that does not

achieve any functional resolution. You don't have to terminate it. There's no orgasm. And of course,

we've all heard horror stories about people who learn tantra before they can deal with the energies

raised short out like light bulbs in a high voltage kind. And so we have to also wonder, and that's the

last of the demons I'll put on the table. These are the other kinds of demons that we can invoke.

It's not just the gray goo. It's something that is in some ways the equivalent of heroin.

And these are the entire array. If I put all the goods out on the table, you have to see the good

and the bad. And so we have to consider very carefully when we're working on things like this,

is this the direction we want to go in? So intent becomes a very important issue, particularly in

areas where the natural boundaries of the body are being bridged in particularly mediated ways.

All right. Now we're going to say goodbye to the demons. Actually, do you want to take it for a

little while? Well, I'll just add to what you said. I mean, you implied the subject of addiction

because of these high states of erotic consciousness that could be machine engendered. Earlier in the day,

we talked about how in a world with a perfected VR toolbox, what is really being offered to people is a

kind of godhood, a kind of ability to build, live in control and extrapolate fantasies on very, very large

scales. So that also sounds very addictive, that that's the most addictive thing one can imagine,

short perhaps of continuous tantric orgasm. And when you write the software that allows you to do both at

once, there you go. So I wonder to what degree technology has always had this ability to hook us. The bibliophile

is an interesting figure. People obsessed by books, by possessing books, buying books. As soon as books were

invented, there were people who fell in love with them. And I think in the case of these new immersive

technologies, it's almost overwhelmingly certain that our relationship to them will be like that of

a relationship to a drug. Look at television. I mean, if television were heroin, we would have long ago

written off Western civilization. Imagine if people had begun using heroin eight hours a day at the end

of World War II and had it expand to the entire population. We don't think of television as a drug

because it's inconvenient to do so, but the impact it's had on people's lives and the way in which it

has dumbed them down and enslaved them to a more limited set of behavioral responses, which is what a

drug does. It draws you in very tightly around its orbit is all occurs very dramatically in the case of TV.

So I don't know what we can do about that. The simple science of pharmacology, leave alone all this

other high flown technical stuff, is on the brink of producing an endless cornucopia of very target

specific drugs. Viagra is a perfect example. Prozac is another. There will be many more of these kinds of

mood enhancing, performance enhancing, social skill enhancing, memory enhancing, pharmacological options,

all of which leads to the idea of modification of ordinary habits by relationships to substances

and sources of stimulation. Then we need to become used to bliss. Yes, we have to become very sophisticated

about bliss and know how to choose our castles in the air with care because you're going to have to

live in those castles in the air. I had a castles in the air vision the other night. I was sitting

gazing into space and the phrase came to me just out of the blue, nanoelectric aerogel.

And I said, that's it. It's this sort of soap sudsy stuff that has nano circuitry grown all over it and you grow it in the stratosphere

and it moves around and everybody is uploaded into it. So we don't have to touch the earth anymore and we

begin a migration of intelligence into the stratospheric levels of the planet where

there's enough ambient high energy to keep these aerogel environments both airborne and moving around

the planet and electrified by static electricity to keep the modems running.

Okay. An unscheduled tour of the numinous. Terence and I left this part of the program relatively free and

I really want to use this part of the program even though we've been dallying with technology,

I think, in the first part to get back. Although I'm going to talk about technology, this part's really

going to be more talking about intent and particularly the intent where it intersects the artistic.

And the first person I'm going to talk about is a Canadian artist that I've become very good friends

with, a woman by the name of Char Davies. And some of you who are familiar with my work are familiar

with the fact that I've written about her work extensively. Char's had a very interesting career

because when she was, she was educated as a fine art painter. When she was in her twenties,

she experienced a moment of the numinous completely unaided by any psychedelics. But had an experience

when lying in a field in the southeastern part of Ontario where she grew up that she felt the moment

as if the boundaries between the field and the land around her and her own being had collapsed. And

that there was a unity, there was a profound unity that the world and the forest and the land were

literally inside of her. And this became, in a sense, the object of her own vision. It became something

that she chose to pursue with her own artistic intent. And she began to paint. And so she would paint

forest scenes that had a particular quality to them. People saw it as being almost a very spiritual

quality in her painting without being completely sort of explicit. They had an inner beauty.

Things happen. She moves to Montreal and she ends up being one of the founders of a company that was

called Softimage. Softimage was the first computer graphics, 3D computer graphics software company.

And over the years she worked at Softimage. In the beginning it was a startup so she did what she

needed to. She wrote the manuals. She did some marketing. They got some financing. And the software

became the software that's used in most films today for computer graphics.

But she never left her artistic intent. And so when they were working on the software, she would play

with it in part to test it, but in part to see if her own sensibilities of the world, as she understood

them as a painter, could be represented in this medium. And so she'd say, why can't I do this? Why can't I

make this object look translucent? Why can't I make it look translucent and color it with different light

sources? And in part the reason that we can see Titanic and Armageddon on the big screen and have them be

believable is because somewhere back there there was an artist who was measuring everything against

an interior sense of fidelity and making things look real. Well, the company grows up. It's a hundred

million dollar company and she is allowed then to move and become her own role director of visual

research, which doesn't really mean anything. It means she can do as she pleases because the company's

been a success. So she has free time. And the first thing that she did was design something that

she called a light box, which could take a static image because in fact, unless you're using cinema

film at that point in time, the only way you could get a 3D graphics image was to print it on a sheet

of paper. In this case, she did it on a sheet of cellulose. And she would create these constructions that

looked like huge organic, almost gel-like fans floating in the seawater with lights effused in

them. And no one in the world of computer graphics had ever seen anything come out of a computer that

looks so organic and looked like it had grown really almost like a photograph. But this was the

beginning of her quest using now technology as a means to represent. And she did a series of these,

won some awards. They've been shown at major art festivals, at SIGGRAPH, things like this. And she

began to establish a reputation. Well, time goes on. And as we know, computers get faster and stronger

and better. And she'd begun to really have a desire to have one of these works be real. She's making

these works in the sense that they're three-dimensional, but she can't show them to

people that way. But all of a sudden, graphic supercomputers are available, and they're only

a few hundred thousand dollars. And there are several of them all across the building she's working in,

because this is the place where they make the software for the movies. And so she starts

on another project. And she decides she's going to make one of these light boxes that she can walk

into. And now she's confronted not just with the artistic intent, but she's also confronted with

the reality of immersion in the virtual world. And she took a look at immersion as it was understood in

the early 1990s. And she saw that most people moved in the virtual world by one of two mechanisms, one of

which was using the data glove and pointing in the virtual world, which is, in fact, not particularly

intuitive, somewhat cumbersome. And actually, if you leave your arm out here for a while, it gets tired.

It's just a biological reality. The second one of which was the joystick. And she never thought the

joystick was natural. And I remarked to her one day, that's because you're not a man. It's the most

natural movement in the world to a man. And she just, she laughed. And I actually do think there's

some reality to that. She was looking for an interface. And she was looking for an interface

that could bring the physical reality of the body into cyberspace. Well, it was just the point in

her life when she was learning how to scuba dive. Now, for those of you who don't, and I don't, but I've

heard a lot of description of it, a scuba diver maneuvers in the boundless three-dimensional space

underneath the water. So you think about it, humans really only move in two dimensions, right? We really

only move about, we don't move up and down. But a diver moves in three dimensions by controlling

the buoyancy of their body. And they control the buoyancy of their body by controlling the amount

of air in their lungs. As you inflate your chest with air, your buoyancy changes to be less than water

and you rise. And as you exhale, you fall. And so she constructed not a trillion dollar apparatus,

but a simple band that goes around your chest that simply measures your chest extension.

It's five dollars in components. And poof, all of a sudden, you've invented an interface to the

virtual world that isn't based on anything that's unnatural, but on the most innate of all actions,

which is breathing. So that in the virtual world that she created, to float up, you go and you rise

gently. And to float down, you exhale. To move forward, you lean gently forward. To move backward,

you lean gently backward and side to side. The power that this had was to bring the embodied being

into the virtual world. Because you cannot leave your body behind inside of her work. Your body is

intimate, even though it is not represented. Your body is intimately present inside the work. And so the

drive to sort of tear behind and leave the meat, leave the meat down on earth as you explore the

wilds of cyberspace, was completely circumvented. It was short circuited. Because what it showed was

that the presence of the body made cyberspace more effective, more powerful, more seductive.

Well, there's the interface, but what did she put inside of it? What she chose to do in this work was

to create an evocation of the natural world. And she created a piece that's called Osmose, which is

the French word for osmosis, to flow between. And in this world, or actually a collection of worlds,

there are 10 different spaces. And the main space has a large tree that's simply represented. And you

can flow around this tree. You can flow up into the leaves of this tree. You can flow into a single

leaf of a tree. And particle systems will animate beams of life representing perhaps the flows of energy

within a single leaf of the tree. You can float over to a glade. You can flow down a brook. You can

fall beneath the surface of the earth and see the strata of rocks and stones that are underneath.

Now the thing of it is, is that as a painter she understood that in fact we do not see the real

world as a collection of bright neon hard-edged objects. Then in fact the scientific evocation of

the virtual world as being a collection of objects that are black, burped up from the void,

sitting there and glowing, has nothing to do with our own real experience. So every single object in

osmosis, and there are 5,000 of them or something, are transparent to different degrees. So that the

effect that you get as you look at any of the objects in this world is indistinct, it's indeterminate.

Everything is between, it's liminal in an absolute sense. Well, people really liked the work when she

was testing it, and it had said a gallery date it was going to be shown at the Museum of Contemporary

Art in Montreal, which is in fact where I saw it a few weeks later. People would go into the system,

they'd cruise around. Now imagine they're wearing a head-mounted display, quite a large one, and it's

about 20 pounds, and that places a considerable torque on the neck, and you also sweat a lot,

and it's sort of stuffing it. People just wouldn't get out of it, because what they were seeing and

what they were experiencing was so unique. And it wasn't a silent world, and I want to stress this,

that in fact the sound was there, and the sound was a male and a female human voice that was

processed any number of different ways, and it wasn't pre-planned, it was based on where you were

and what you were doing. So you'd hear a chorus of different voices and sounds as you pass through the

world doing different things. But a week away from the exhibition day, and on average people have

been spending 40 minutes in the work. Well, to show a work like this in a gallery,

and you only have one supercomputer and one head-mounted display,

you need to be able to get people in and out at 15 minute intervals. Five minutes to get them in,

15 minutes in it, five minutes to get the next person in. You can do three people an hour that way.

So she needed to create an artificial end. And so what she did is that after about 14 and a half

minutes, you find yourself now gently floating above the main wall of the single tree in the glade,

and the wall itself is encased in a partially translucent crystalline sphere.

And you pull away from it into blackness. When people started coming out of the work crying,

people started to write in the book that they weren't sure they were afraid of death anymore,

that this reminded them of something so nearly, nothing so much as a near-death experience.

And in fact, this longing and this leaving of the world was inducing a state that could really

only be called profoundly religious. And it's funny because when I tell some people this,

they laugh as if it were impossible for a work of electronic art or a work of virtual

art to induce this response in people. But then I ask them, if you go into Chartres Cathedral,

if you go into Notre Dame, don't you then experience this sort of opening?

Whether or not you believe the creed, the space itself is constructed in such a way that it really

has this profound effect on you. And I think what Char has done in that work is really find some way

to an opening to something that's inside of us, something that's very evocative of us,

evocative to us of the sacred. And that wasn't her intent. It's a byproduct of her artistic vision.

She took a break because that was a lot of work. She got a lot of flack from the electronic art

community because the old school in electronic art thinks that if it's pretty, it's not valuable. If it's

not making a statement about the war in Bosnia, it's worthless. If it's not politically strident,

it's pointless. She didn't care. She had achieved her goals. And people were still reporting

the intense beauty of the work. If you go and read her log books from people who write their comments

after they'd been in. But Osmos was a period of longing for her. She'd been in a very long-term

relationship. Her life was just basically on the rocks at the time. And so the work was emotionally

evocative of this. Two years later, she comes back. And she's in a very different frame of mind.

And she realizes that what she wants to do is start to use this mechanism and this interface to explore

a joyous experience. And she went into the lab for another year. And just last month at the National

Gallery in Canada, a successor work, I think of them as complements, was created called ephemere,

the ephemera or ephemeral. And this work uses precisely the same interface. So you are embodied in

the work. But the subject, the content is entirely different. When you enter it, you see a sea of stars.

And these stars begin to move and float down. And as they do, the light rises on what looks like nothing

so much as an antique Chinese watercolor. Trees almost as single straight lines falling down to a glade that's

covered in snow. And the stars become falling snowflakes. And you can stay in this environment.

And as time passes, the sun rises and sets. The moon rises and sets. And then, as the sun rises in the

naked day, the only way I can describe it is as if Monet's god has been loosed in the world. Because all of a

sudden, the forest floor becomes this writhing sea of purple and yellow and all the colors the trees and living

things are before the chlorophyll comes alive in them. And you look up into the trees and you see these great sheets of

color waving around. And it's not what a forest looks like. It's what a forest feels like. And she

says her influence is Joseph Turner, who is the great oil painter from the last century. And the fact

that his bold strokes of color that are all very indistinct and still incredibly evocative powered her in

this environment. And you can follow this forest through its four seasons. But you can also allow

yourself to draw up and find yourself in the strata underneath this forest. And the strata underneath

this forest are tectonic plates that are in motion slowly. And if you look into the plates themselves,

into the rocks and stones, they become active. Because now, rather than just the passive viewing of an

experience she's created, she's allowed you to interact with it, not by reaching out and touching,

but simply by the joy of your gaze. And as you look into an object, it may change in front of you. You

might look into a rock and see the forest inside it and all of a sudden find that your world has become

the forest inside this rock. And you can travel further down. And as you travel further down, you now reach

the final substructure of a femur, which is a body. It's not necessarily a human body, but it's a body.

It's got blood, it's got bones, and it's got sinu, and they're all in motion. And of course, because this

has the same constraints as the previous work, this work has to have an end. Change to winter again,

which will fade out. But if you're in the body, you'll see the bones slowly come to dust. I went into

this work a few weeks ago, and I came out not with the feeling of longing that I'd had with Osmos,

but incredibly joyous, because here was art. It can't be called by any other name. It's art,

and it's a joyous art. It's a playful art. It's an art that's inviting you into it, not merely to observe,

but to participate in the being, to participate in Shara's vision for what's going on in the world.

And I think she is the first, and she's really an exemplar. And fortunately, she's had the position

and the opportunity to work in this environment. But everything that she's done will be able to do

in a Nintendo 64 in two years' time. And with good enough tools, a 12-year-old should be able to do

it and send it across the internet. And I will be able to stand inside of someone else's head. And this

interface, for all of its vastness, really just comes out of a desire to be simple and effective,

and in the body, and costs five dollars. So none of this is rocket science. It's always a question of

intent. And her intent and integrity as an artist was to throw away the Cartesian, to throw away the

hard edge, to throw away the solid, and replace it with a space that allowed you to be inside of it,

that respected you as an individual inside of a world of her own creating. So you don't feel like

you're a visitor. You feel like you're part of it. That work, those two works, and T-Vision, which we

talked about, I believe, this morning, stand out to me as examples of what I call vivogenesis,

which is the ability to evoke the positive, the affirming, things that would reify the existence

of the self, even if that's a multiple self, things that won't cause it to be pulled apart

willy-nilly, things that allow you to stand in the midst of the flow of information and not be

overwhelmed by it. And it's certainly my own desire to be able to see other works like that happen,

to actually work on works like that, and hopefully to inspire you, if you're working, to work on works

like that, to remember your humanity when you work in the virtual, to remember that what you're doing

has a profound effect on other people because you're really getting into other people's heads.

And not only that, they're getting into yours. And someone said to me once,

it's a good thing that Shara is a profoundly ethical person, and you can tell from the quality

of her work. If she were Leni Riefenstahl, this would be a very different world.

Do you want to take it for a little while? Yes?

For those of us who couldn't stand to wait for two years for us to come to our neighborhood video store,

are they available to be seen?

If you go to, it's in Ottawa, it's in the National Gallery in Ottawa to September 7th.

And how about the T-Vision?

T-Vision is installed at, I think it's, it's at ArtPlus.com, but I think it's at,

no, the thing in Lens. Who was in the West City?

Oh, the Arts Electronica.

Arts Electronica in Lens.

But if you look for ArtPlus.com on the web, you will find pages that point to it.

It's a good question. Osmos has been shown around the world, but it has not been shown on the West

Coast. It's been shown in New York, in London, in Manchester, in Monterey, Mexico, and I believe in

Tokyo, but it hasn't come to the West Coast of America. Mostly it's because it's an expensive

installation because it does require a silicon graphics supercomputer, which has to at least

be rented for the duration of the exhibition. And also because the technical requirements,

most, most museums are set up to show paintings, you know, and that's just the fact of, of the

situation. And so the museums have to really build a gallery space for it. Now, the gallery space,

if it's well-constructed, uses a shadow box. You can actually see in shadow the human form that's

moving. So the participant, the immersant, and she's created this word, I think it's actually a

really nice word. The immersant in this immersive virtual space is illuminated behind a shadow box.

And in fact, you can see,

projected on a monitor, actually projected on a large screen, what this person is experiencing.

And it's nice because you can watch the poetry between the motion of the immersant and the

visual of what's being created.

And, in fact, I saw very clearly with Afemer, which is a much more complex work than Osmosis,

that I saw a number of people go in it and I never saw the same thing twice.

It was always so rich and so varied and so dynamic that, in fact, these environments created...

I mean, occasionally, I was sitting in the room and a gasp would go out from the room

because someone had stumbled onto a scene in there that was just breathtaking

because of where it was being viewed and how it was being viewed, and it was temporary.

It was all ephemeral.

But for that moment, you were opened onto a scene.

So it takes a lot of work on the part of the museum.

Most museums are not particularly technically capable.

The National Gallery was very good, actually.

But many museums, even modern art museums, aren't capable of really dealing with a

super-computer installation and an immersive installation.

What's the status of virtual reality art on the Internet?

That's a good question.

Um...

Scott Young.

Yeah.

So that's what the last is virtual reality art on the Internet?

It's not where I would like it to be.

Um...

My extra grind, I am not blessed with a good visual ability, my own self.

I would love to say that I was a visual artist, but it just ain't gonna happen.

And a lot of people who are visual artists will work for, say, film, filmic media.

And the difference between, say, working for film and working for a real-time medium, such

as virtual reality, is that quite often, in real-time, you have to design images that

are much more concise, much simpler.

You can't do Titanic, for example, and expect it to run on your home computer.

Um...

So a lot of the artistic talent has been pulled, in a sense, toward the money and toward the

recognition, which is in this very high-definition, high-resolution virtual art.

However, a number of people, and Owen, if you want to throw up any names, too, have made

real headway...

An artist that I've worked with, from the beginning, was the first artist to work in VRML,

and did all of my sacred work for me.

I designed...

He designed a gallery of sacred objects, an altar and whatnot.

Um...

He's done a lot of work, and what he actually ended up doing was almost resorting to Celtic

knotwork.

And some of his works are, in fact, Celtic knotwork.

But the interesting thing about it is it's Celtic knotwork that's being projected to three

dimensions.

So it's got a quality of dynamism as you're viewing it, in the fact that the quality of

an art will change through time.

So it's got this quality.

And part of the reason he did that is because flat surfaces, simple flat surfaces, are so

easy for the computer to display that you can have many of them.

So you can have these very complicated forms and still not overload someone's computer.

Because, again, with the internet you're dealing with the fact that there's a wide range of

machines and a wide range of capabilities.

virtual reality technology as it stands right now.

Really, I believe that virtual reality technology is destined to disappear.

It's illusion.

The illusion about it, the trick about it, is that it doesn't disappear and act into the

corpus of the operating system.

You know, and that it's going to wind up, you know, the kind of windows and widgets and

closed boxes and choice picking systems that we see in applications now will move into a

situation where the entire desktop will be a 3D environment.

If you look at that screen at the front of the monitor as the looking glass interface that

you go through when you go through the cyberspace, there's this cubic foot behind it that you

can use.

And if you have, you know, a good simple 3D rendering technology, visual rendering technology,

you can make use of that space and start to use just a simple mouse to be able to pick

things out in that 3D environment behind there, you know?

What kind of bandwidth are people going to have to have for these things to be compelling?

It's always as much as you can get your hands on.

That's always the answer for anything that has to do with bandwidth.

For the most part, most of these are concise enough that they work with people with normal

modems.

Part of the reason being that if it's not something that can transmit concisely over a normal modem,

by the time it gets to your computer, it's too unwieldy for your computer to display well.

That brings me to it.

One of the other more interesting projects, which is sort of at a crossroads between art

and artificial life, is what's called the Biota Project.

And the Biota Project allows you to use genetic algorithms, AI life, to actually grow plants

inside of a virtual environment.

So you can actually more or less genetically design a plant or an animal with particular

characteristics.

And it will grow on your computer right there according to those particular evolutionary

characteristics.

And this is biota.org if anyone is interested.

And I can give that to you later as well.

And these forms, as you play with them, they're not deterministic.

It's not like you're going to get the same thing every time, because they're subject to

all sorts of constraints of growth.

And they actually have established what they call an island, which is running on a computer

somewhere, where there are all these different forms of AI life running in an environment where

they're subject to selection pressures and breeding.

So they're actually creating new forms of life, which are not predictive, because these forms

of life are interacting with each other and interacting with a larger environment.

And quite often the constructions that arise from that, I think they have insects, I'm pretty

sure, and they have plants.

I don't know if they have any sort of higher animals, because those are relatively difficult

to interpret and model.

But these forms can actually have an incredible beauty on their own, in part because most of them

are based on L systems and fractal mathematics of growth.

So that they have this intelligibility, which allows you to recognize them as being near

to the living, but still a beauty in their form.

And aren't there also programs that somehow sense where your attention is in the virtual

reality and compute outward from the attention point?

So the part of the reality you're not looking at isn't drawing processor time.

That's...

Polygon, polygon.

Yeah.

Polygon, polygon, foveal rendering is the other thing, which Eric was big on.

Eric Gellickson was big on.

Yes, exactly.

And this has been using the computer technology to sort of trick your perception, because really,

you know, almost everything out of the center of your perception, your fovea, you're not

actually seeing it's all memory.

It's one of those things you've learned from perceptual psychology.

And if it's all memory and, you know, it's a virtual world and you've been there before,

the computer doesn't waste, doesn't need to waste much time on it.

Now, it's a technique that, although it's well understood, is not often implemented in

the kind of computer software that you'll see on a personal computer.

You might see it on a workstation, on a graphics workstation or a graphics supercomputer.

I can't give you a good reason for why that is, other than I think programmers are lazy.

Five of nine.

Okay.

So let me take off on the last one.

Yeah, why don't you do your...

Okay.

So the last part of our unscheduled tour of the numinous, we're sort of tracing up

a personal chronology of mine and we came to about 1993 when the whole web thing was happening.

And in late 93, I took the work that I was doing in virtual reality and sort of spliced

it with the work that I was doing, or the fact that I thought the web was a cool thing

and presto, abrahadabra, we got VRML.

And the thing that I think was important to VRML, the reason VRML, anything ever happened

with it was, and I hope this is the case, was because we didn't immediately say, me,

me, me, it's mine.

I'm going to patent this.

You'll never be able to use it unless you pay me lots of money.

Because Tony and I, Tony Parisi and I did this in our room, in our respective living rooms

over the matter of a couple of weeks and it was very simple and we did it.

And we decided, he didn't think it would be worth anything.

He was just a programmer.

He says he was doing this to humor me.

And over a few weeks time, we got the basic work done and I fired off a piece of mail

to a man named Tim Berners-Lee, who's the father of the World Wide Web, because he had

a few notes on his web pages about the fact that seeing virtual reality on the web would

be a really cool thing.

Hey Tim, I know you never heard of me, but I'm this guy and what you've done with the

web is really cool and I heard you were doing some stuff with virtual reality.

And we have this thing and it's up and it's running and it's working and it's cool and

just thought you'd want to know.

Mark, get a mail back a couple of days later.

Hey Mark, that sounds really cool.

We're having this conference out here in Switzerland in a couple of months.

Why don't you do a little paper and make a presentation?

Tim.

I'm like, okay.

So I do a little abstract, it gets accepted and I find myself on a plane to what turns

out to be the first international World Wide Web conference.

Who knew?

They certainly didn't because they were planning for 300 people and 800 people show up.

And I want to tell you just one thing about that conference.

The conference was held at CERN, which is the great big nuclear atom smasher in Switzerland,

just outside of Geneva, in the conference center there.

And it was 600 people and 200 people basically trying to get into every session.

There were just a lot of people lurking around, probably sort of like this one.

And I remember one morning there was one e-mail terminal.

Who thought of that?

The first 800 web heads and there's one e-mail terminal.

But there was one downstairs in the CERN offices that was unoccupied most of the morning.

And so I would regularly make a trip, be in a half an hour ahead of all the rest of the

delegates and run downstairs and answer my e-mail.

I was mailing Owen and I was mailing other people just to tell them what was going on.

And I remember walking in one morning and over here were a group of Japanese people trying

to banter with some Italian people and some English people talking to some French people

and some South Africans talking to some Germans.

And I walk in and I said, my God, it's Starfleet Academy.

It was a really, it was a really beautiful moment because I realized that in fact from the beginning,

it was a world wide web.

So I presented the paper there.

And the thing that we did there is we said, look it, this is an idea and this is a prototype,

but this is not the thing itself.

And I managed to meet there a very nice young man by the name of Brian Bellendorf who had just

started working for this new magazine called Wired on this new online thing that we're doing

which would eventually become Wired.com.

And he said, look it, do you need some help?

Why don't you set up a mailing list?

And we can all talk about this more after the conference because the paper generated a lot of interest.

And I'll give you this space.

You know, the guys from Wired, they're like helping up the net.

They figured they're going to make money off of it.

They might as well help out a bit.

So we all trek back to San Francisco and we set up this mailing list.

And I send out some postings to news groups on the internet indicating that this mailing list exists.

And I figured I'd have about 50 people in two weeks' time.

And we can settle down and have a nice conversation about what's going on.

And I wake up the next morning, I did this on Monday,

and I wake up on Tuesday morning and there are 750 messages in our mailbox.

And it kept up like that for two weeks.

And by the end of two weeks' time I had 2,500 people from around the world

who were intensely interested in making this happen.

And this is when I realized that what we needed to do was to let it all go.

And I started practicing what in retrospect I now call the stone soup analogy.

I had the kettle, I threw the stones and I threw some water and I said,

who's got the chicken?

Well, it turns out that Silicon Graphics had the chicken and IBM had some carrots

and Sun had some potatoes and pretty soon we had soup.

And the nice thing about that, hopefully the object lesson there,

is that if you leave yourself open for community in that connection,

if you're not trying to hold everything so tight,

because the operating theory was that if we did this and it worked,

well, we'll all make some money on it or something.

But we don't have to worry about owning things right away,

because what's important is to get the work done.

There was a shared vision.

Everyone who was involved was involved because they were thinking this was a cool idea

and their minds were there and their hearts were there and their code followed.

Just a little while after this, I had a visitor in San Francisco.

My friend Ronan introduced me to a very interesting gentleman

whom I've come to be very good friends with by the name of Phil Harrington.

Phil Harrington was a doctor in Ireland for a number of years.

But because of a psychedelic experience or I guess probably an empathogenic experience that he had,

he radically changed the course of his life because he was a well-to-do doctor in Dublin,

was a millionaire, had everything that he wanted but he was profoundly unhappy.

And one night, I don't know if it was his first ecstasy experience,

and I agree with you that ecstasy has this diminishing return,

but that first time and that second time, my goodness,

you're going to find your heart center just sort of pushed right open.

And if you're ready for it, it's a great thing.

And if not, then you probably need to take it again.

And he has his biggest sort of a state house outside of Dublin,

and he has this extremely intense ecstasy experience.

And in the midst of this ecstasy experience, he starts to sing.

And he doesn't even really know why or how he starts to sing,

but the singing is bringing things up for him.

The singing is a cleansing for him,

and he's bringing up sounds and tones from places very deep inside of him.

And it doesn't stop.

Even after the ecstasy wears off, it doesn't stop.

It's as if what he's connected to, what he's burst through to,

is some connection to him and maybe something that's larger than him,

and it's expressing itself in sound.

It's expressing itself musically.

Over a period of time, he in some sense, I guess,

codified it into something that he calls voce,

which we'll be doing in just a minute.

And the idea behind the voce is a set of toning techniques

which can open you up emotionally.

They can open you up ideally emotionally.

And they work on focusing tones on the chakras.

And when it works in a group, and I sincerely hope that it will tonight,

the effect is really very profound.

You get a wonderful sort of connected feeling with the other people in the environment.

When I had encountered this idea, it rolled through my head for a month or two.

And I said, wouldn't it be interesting, since we've collapsed space,

we've eliminated space, right?

Speed is now light. You can be anywhere you want.

Take this event that happens mostly locally, as it will happen tonight, and broaden it.

And at this point, I had a flash.

I don't remember now in retrospect whether it was psychedelically inspired or not.

But I remember I saw that same world that I'd seen years before, but now it was singing.

And I could hear it.

And the singing that it was making was the sound of the people who were sharing this experience,

unmediated by proximity.

And I think that when we're in a search for forms that can reinforce the self,

even as we encounter technology, this could be one of them.

And so I immediately dreamed up a name. I decided it was a world song,

because that was literally what it was representing.

And Paul and I set to work on it.

The technologies we've tried so far have not been up to the task,

because we haven't had the tens of millions of dollars that it would take to create something

that I think Paul and I would be satisfied with.

But as experiments in the direction, I think everyone involved has been very pleased with the results.

And the idea is that if we can have a kind of connectivity that's not just of the mind,

but at the heart, on a local level, why not try to extend that franchise to something that's more on a global level?

Do you want to take it away, Paul?

Sure. I think James is going to help me.

This is Paul Godwin, a friend, confidant, etc.

I've asked James to do those of you that were in yoga this morning.

James is a Kundalini yoga teacher, so he's going to help us to stretch out a little before we do any vocal,

I'll introduce you to something called Yogarobics.

Oh, God.

What's this yoga practice?

Okay, so back with your feet on the floor.

And inhale and stretch up.

And raise your fingers.

And exhale and raise your hands on the floor.

While you're down here, let's hit it about eight times like this.

And everything's done to a count of eight.

So you can clap your arms eight times.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

And let's see if you've got enough room.

Run in place to the count of eight.

So then, bring your hands up.

And inhale to the right, to the left of the right.

Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Go to the other side.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

And again, run in place.

Hit the ground again, eight times.

And inhale and stretch up.

And exhale and stretch up.

Thank you.

Great.

I think that a circle actually would be the best shape toy.

Yeah, we will be sitting, or if you prefer, you can stand behind as you're sitting.

But pillows are fine.

They're actually great.

A little bit of a pillow on your back.

We can sit.

You guys are here.

You've got a big voice.

You sit next to me.

Okay.

I got a key first.

All right.

Another big one.

Let's see.

Wow.

We can do more than one circle.

We can do more than one circle, actually.

You know, we can find more like how to get us closer together.

That would probably be better.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Concentric is fine.

I think a group would be better than a huge perimeter.

Yeah.

That would be just fine.

Wow.

We're back in semicircles.

So, Mark talked about Ronan bringing Phil around.

I wouldn't mind for a second if Ronan's in the room.

I've never actually heard how you encountered Phil, though.

I heard it might have been like a moon-type ray in the desert or something, you guys?

So, I guess Phil actually is now a singer-songwriter, but he, at this time, like Mark said, was a physician,

very unhappy and successful.

And Phil used voce as a, what he developed into voce became like a program for singing for non-singers,

people who kind of thought they might want to sing or had never really had any musical training or background,

but wanted to.

And if he, it begins, a regular voce session will begin with something like counting,

maybe spontaneous counting, one to twenty, and back down again.

Meaning so, a group like us would count to twenty.

If he felt the impulse, he'd say one, and then he'd say two, and so forth.

So, slight attunement.

And then he moves on into a chakra toning.

And then it generally moves on into a verbal, that is with words, a kind of a call and response type of work.

I'm interested in it, really, I guess the first toning work I probably did was at some rainbow gatherings or something,

like 1980 or so.

And seeing, you know, five thousand people just going home, you know, on the 4th of July,

generating huge circular rainbows was...

Thirty.

Dandy.

Thirty...

Thirty thousand.

She went this year with thirty thousand.

But I have been interested in the voce work, and mostly the voce work that we've continued to do has been related to the chakras.

And so what we're going to do tonight is based on the structure of the chakra system, and we will do seven tones.

And each one can last from three or so to five breaths, generally.

Um, I don't have a huge source of wind, so my, you know, takes me fifteen of those.

But whenever I take, whenever I'm with somebody, you know, some big...

Deezer.

Glovers.

Then, uh...

And I say, oh, let's do ten this time.

They're like, ten?

You know, ten would take an hour, so...

So anyway, um, and that's what we'll do.

And so I will, um, do a short, little bit of guided, um, meditation that will just, uh, kind of ground us in each chakra,

and then I'll tell you the sound, and then we'll make that sound.

Now, if you're all game, which I hope some, you know, maybe a high percentage are game,

we'll go ahead and, um, try something a little different tonight, which I think we talked about would be really cool,

would be that, um, I'm not, uh, I think Mark as well, and Rona, we all talked about that we weren't really,

we're not quite into the, uh, word-oriented improv of it, but we like the idea of improv of it.

And so what I'd like to try tonight is that when we do a tone, I encourage you or welcome you to improvise on the tone,

uh, just sonically, so you can sort of play with the sound, play with the melody, or play with the rhythm a little bit if you want,

and, um, I mean, if you really feel like you have to yell out a word, yell it.

But, um, the, the thing about, uh, that, this exercise will be that we're really going to be kind of making music here together.

And so the key to making music is listening, and that means listening to yourself and making the sound that you really want to make.

And if, and if you don't feel like making a sound, don't make one, and, and otherwise be listening to other people,

and, and if you hear something that inspires you, then go ahead along with it.

Um, likewise, as in good improvisation, like jazz or, or any kind of good improvisation,

we will let the improv take the course that it wants to take, and that will involve listening as well.

So, so what, we will do a chakra, and if it's going well, we'll just keep doing it, and, you know, and try to listen,

and think of it as a piece of music that you bought on a CD, and when do you want it to fade out?

You know, when you want it to fade out, if you participate in the fade.

So, okay, with less verbiage, um, maybe we can just close your eyes for a minute and get in a comfortable position.

Um, I also want to say that the tone that you sing is not, the actual tone, the note on the scale,

is not important that you sing the note that I sing, or that your neighbors sing.

The important thing is that the note that you choose resonates in your body cavity.

And this is a great, um, wake up. It's really good for pre-yoga, or, or after yoga.

Um, I, I roll out of bed and do a voce, because the sound actually can sort of wake up the parts of your body,

and that's, that's what you're kind of tuning for when you choose.

So when you look for a tone, I might start a tone and say, you know, ahhh, and you might go ahhh,

and you won't really feel it in that chakra, but then move around, kind of go ahhh, ohhhh, ahhh,

and then you'll be, ah, oh, I feel it, in the chakra.

So that's the one you should use.

Okay.

So again, we'll close our eyes.

Take a deep breath in.

I want you to imagine that we are sitting up top,

the center of this fiery.

I want you to concentrate on that fiery orb

that is many miles below you.

It has a very, very dense map.

Imagine that our root at the base of,

really at the between where you're sitting

is connected to that fiery orb.

And I want you to imagine a deep red color,

like a really dark red, like it's almost black.

And there are veins of energy

between the center of the earth and your root.

And the sound that we're going to use is, ah.

We're just going to do some, ah.

And this chakra is where we will digest all that grounded energy from the earth.

We use it to nourish ourselves and each other.

And as it swirls, it will massage the inner organs and it will allow us to digest.

And there we will take in information and food and toxins.

And we will just give them to our system and take what nourishment we need and expel the rest.

And that rosy orange color will generate a sound which is, oh, like a white waterfall cord that's coming.

And that's really reaching all the way up into the cosmos.

And in the center of your solar plexus is a yellow, like a white, almost a yellow white, like an eggshell.

And this is the area which we use for our direction and the cord which we follow.

And when we're centered, it feels like a spindle around which our entire being can just spin and rotate and it's your direction home.

So, I've been doing voce skiing lately and it's great.

This chakra is terrific for skiing.

It just lines you up into the direction and you can tone them downhill.

So, the sound here is a really kind of pre-verbal, pre-kind of guttural, uh, eh sound.

Eh, and it's not as sung as the ones we've been doing.

And here you can spit out other phrases in a way like, you know, kind of a venomous way or, you know, if you want more direction or if you're trying to protect your zone.

Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh.

Everyone's favorite chakra, the heart.

Color is green and surrounds your heart and you know what the best stands for.

Sound is a very good sound to remember.

You say the magic word.

Love.

Say the word.

You do the tone belt.

Say the word and be like me.

Love.

Where we say the things that we know.

So, it's a really great spot to open up and the sound is really easy.

It's like we sing everything we always wanted to say, and when we cried when we were kids because we didn't have words, we were still trying to...

This is, we're turning final here, as old bush pilots say.

That means you're committed to land shortly.

So this is our last session. It runs slightly abbreviated because the Esalen machine likes you to go back to your room and have everything out for the next crew of aspirants by noon.

So we'll end shortly after 11.30 or at 11.30 and the intent is that you clear your room and then you're welcome to come back and have lunch and drift to your separate homes.

So this session is a wrap-up session. Mark has some things he wants to say.

This is your last chance to get a crack at us in this context.

If there's something that's been burning as an issue for you that didn't get dealt with, it's your obligation to get it out for us.

Mark, why don't you work with it?

I just have some basic housekeeping notes.

First off, this weekend has been renamed Letting Go and Moving On.

And I'm taking an informal, unscientific survey to find out whether the event at the end of time is to be called the Yeskaton.

Or the Eskaton.

And I'd just like to note for those of you who heard my rap yesterday about planning on doing something and then getting up the next morning and not doing it at all,

that in fact I wasn't talking about Saturday morning but I was talking about Sunday morning.

Did yoga not happen?

Yes, it did.

No, yoga did happen.

All five of us.

Aha.

The few.

The few and the proud and the enormously relaxed.

This morning I have de-blogged myself for you.

I am not wearing my nicotine patch and I've popped my contact lenses out and I have my funky little Japanese eyeglasses on.

In part because this is the part that I want to be the most authentic.

And what you're seeing now and for the rest of the morning hopefully will be the real me.

As close as I know what the real me is.

So I've taken off all of the masks except for the dye in my hair and that's a bit more complicated.

We've been tracing out a line.

I've sort of been talking about my work over a period of time and we'd run along and now we're coming to early 1996.

And in early 1996 the web has taken off and vermal is starting to take off.

And I'm now faced with the question.

I'm not an artist and I don't even play one in VR.

I have a vision.

I'm an engineer.

I can write code and make certain things happen.

But now I've participated in this stone soup that gave the world VRML and I'm faced with what do I do with it.

And what happened, what I was driven to was this original vision that I had about the body of a planet floating in cyberspace.

And it happened really sort of slowly.

Pieces started sort of filtering in.

Pieces started to see that that was here and that was here and that was here.

And one of the things that we almost don't notice about the web is that the web allows you not only to find out things but it allows you to pull things and pull them together in a very broad way.

You can take specific pieces and use them in your own work so that it's not just the storehouse of knowledge but it's now this combinatorial matrix that new forms can emerge out of.

And all of a sudden I discovered John Walker's website.

John Walker is the founder of Autodesk and from what I've heard a terrifyingly bright man.

And John Walker has a thing about space and he has a thing about satellites.

And in particular he has a thing about meteorological satellites.

And he's a mathematician and a programmer.

And so what he can do is he can take all the nice lovely images that all the nice lovely weather satellites are taking of the Earth all the time.

And if you've seen a weather satellite, well it's the Earth.

It's this nice spherical image of the Earth from the position of the view of this weather satellite.

Which is fine and dandy if you just want to look at a picture.

But because he's a wily mathematician, he can actually take that picture and then stretch it out for you so it looks like a flat surface.

It's as if you're taking the globe or a section of the globe and laying it out.

When I saw that that was available, the final light bulb went off and I set to work.

Because these satellite images are updated hourly.

They come in to NASA or NOAA into their computers.

They shoot up to computers in Minnesota, they get more processed.

And then they shoot over to computers in Switzerland and get even more processed.

And once they're over in those computers in Switzerland, then I was able to do something with them.

And what I did was I took this literal real-time photograph of the Earth's surface and broke it up into a mosaic of tiles and laid these tiles across the globe.

So what you get as a result in 3D is what I called, when I was done with it, Web Earth.

And what it is, is it's as if you're above the Earth, floating above the Earth, looking down on it.

And it doesn't take a supercomputer and it doesn't take a T1 connection because I didn't have either of those things when I was working.

What it takes is any sort of PC, any sort of net connection and a willingness to click to the URL that I've written far too small up there.

But you can copy it down later.

The idea behind that was that I'd seen works like T-Vision, which are big high-end sort of production enterprises, operas as it were.

And all I just wanted to do was write a rock and roll song with a catchy tune.

Someone cries for the Jews.

Something like that.

And I spent really only about a week working on this.

It was really just a matter of working at integrating the data and testing it and getting it all up.

And when it was up and I had this 3D model of a planet which updates itself every hour,

so you can see the weather systems as they move across the body of the planet.

When it was up, after these 5 days of work, I actually broke down crying in front of the monitor

because at the end I'd come back to where I'd started, or at least I'd started to come back to where I'd started

because it's not an end point.

It's a beginning point, but somehow I'd managed to take this psychedelic revelation

and through a lot of magic and a lot of time and a lot of wheel and a part of a lot of people,

produced this object.

And this object is my offering to the web.

It's my offering to you.

It's not meant to be an end point, but it's meant to be a beginning.

It's being capable of saying, look at us.

This is where we are right now.

This is what's going on.

Let's take a look.

Let's play with scale.

Let's play with time.

Let's play with all the different ways of taking a look at all the ways we interconnect

so we can understand that, so that we can work the planet better,

so we can become this seamless informational entity that understands itself and its own processes so well

that it corrects the errors in these processes very quickly and improves the flow for those processes

for all of the processes that are involved.

It's silly and probably egotistical to cry at your own work.

What I didn't expect was that when other people saw it, they would cry.

And that's when I suspected I'd come to the authentic.

Because it's simple.

It's not much code.

It was a little thought and it was the pooling of resources.

But what it evokes in people, what I've seen it evoke in people,

appears to be an authentic reaction of recognition.

We've talked in here about what happens to the astronauts when they get to space

and they behold the body of the planet.

And there's an old joke that there was some sort of space expo,

perhaps in France in the 1960s, and there was some sort of Gemini capsule

and they managed to talk a cosmonaut and an American astronaut in it.

And they got in it and they closed the doors and it sealed off.

And the cosmonaut turns to the astronaut and says,

so did you see God up there too?

And it's the authentic question because there's something about the information

of perceiving the body of the planet as a whole that is radically transformative.

And for the moment we can't all shoot ourselves into orbit for that point of view.

But what I found, at least in a gentle echo, is that works like WebEarth have the capability

of producing the same in us.

And I think that it's a question of intent.

There's no reason that there aren't 100,000 other things like this.

All of the source code for this I've made freely available because basically I want other people

to take it and run with it and add to it and whatever, add their own databases.

I'm starting to now look at what they call brownfields.

Brownfields are these toxic zones that aren't toxic enough to be classified as Superfund sites

but are still toxic.

And with one of my friends that I've known for 20 years and we're thinking of maybe starting

to add these in there and census data and so on and so forth.

And maybe if we work hard at this we can get a stone soup going around that.

But it doesn't have to happen all at one place.

It's the Web.

It can happen anywhere and a bunch of different people can turn out a bunch of different things

all the time if where they're working from is their heart.

And that's my own humble offering in that domain.

It's certainly not everything that it could be.

You can't zoom in and see yourself standing on the street corner though I'm sure that's

not far away.

You can't click on your own house.

You can't knock on someone's door electronically by coming down to spy on them.

You can't see birds in flight or populations in migration yet.

All you can see is the clouds floating by on a blue sphere.

But if everybody who had global data poured it into this kind of filing system is what it is,

then you could have flow of petroleum, electrical grids, positions of ships at sea,

where everyone with a Brazilian passport was at any given moment.

Right.

So it's like reconstruct...

It's some kind of alchemical data reconstruction of the real world on every level ultimately

if it were carried out.

There's five billion stories on a naked planet.

There's a world of...

Well, you know, Joyce, when he wrote Finnegan's Wake, in some interview he gave at the time,

he said that his goal was to write a book so complexified that if the universe were to be destroyed,

you could reconstruct it in all its detail from the book.

And...

Do you think that there's a... that that's the amorticus?

A perfect... perfect understanding would mean you could create a perfect simulacrum of something.

I mean, that's how I... what I think understanding is.

So if you had a perfect understanding of the atmosphere, the geology, the biology, the sociology of the planet,

you ought to be able to recreate it.

Do you think, and Mark, in on this too, that we're being compelled or this thing is compelling itself to be visualized like that for some other reason?

Something else is compelling it to create a simulacrum?

It's very... well, the image itself is very seductive and that's telling us something.

The seductiveness of the image means that it has a propensity to reproduce.

The other question is, given a perfect simulacrum, what is the difference between this and what it simulates?

It can... well, it converges on it. It's never perfect. It converges on it.

And then the perspective of the beholder.

You know, this discussion reminds me of the passage in the I Ching.

I think it's the commentary on the hexagram before completion, where it says,

if the sacrifice is correctly carried out, you may hold the universe in the palm of your hand like a spinning marble.

So it's like, it is an alchemical goal.

It's the Philosopher's Stone because the Philosopher's Stone is all and everything immediately apprehended and beheld.

And this is what this would result in.

It's funny to show you how different Mark and I must be at some fundamental level.

For years I've had this idea in the back of my mind for my fantasy interface for the World Wide Web.

What would it look like?

And I've also had a rap, which you were spared this weekend,

which is all about how what we need to do at the end of history is turn ourselves inside out.

That somehow we needed to bring the soul into visible manifestation

and the body would become a freely commandable object in the imagination.

You know, it would have super strength, it could fly, it could swim underwater.

Well, in this process of exploring this metaphor, turn inside out,

I came upon the image in a psychedelic trip of an interface to the World Wide Web,

where when you came online, you would burst into a space.

And it's Mark's object, but turned inside out and with the point of view at the center of it.

So as you turn 360 degrees, you would see Africa, Asia, Australia,

and everything would be lit up with colored pipelines of light

that would designate the various websites.

And then you would just spin in this global dimension

and then point and rush in and into the connections.

So obviously the end, at the end of our philosophical umbilical cord

is this weird image of the total planet as a living integrated.

And it's more than an image, as Mark pointed out.

It's not simply how it appears in ordinary light to human vision.

It's the data image.

It's all must be there.

You know, the geology, the economics, the religious warfare, the history,

everything brought to a point.

When we've talked about the eschaton here and at other times,

what it is is it's a bringing of everything together.

You know, there have been lots of haggles ever since the 1940s about defining information.

In fact, Gregory Bateson in this very room offered one of the best definitions of information.

He said information is any difference that makes a difference.

But the way I think of information and complexification is it has to do with density of connectivity.

And so my image of the end state of the attractor is, in mathematical terms,

it's a space in which all points are cotangent.

The first philosopher in the West to stumble onto the necessity of this concept was Leibniz.

And he had this idea of what he called the monad.

Leibniz was accused of inventing the smallest.

form of God, because his monads were perfect hologrammatic fractal reflections of the entire

cosmos. But he said the only way one monad differs from another, or can possibly differ

from another, is by its perspective on the other monads, given its position in the matrix

in which it occurs. So this convergence thing is all information, all data is becoming cotangent.

This can't happen in matter. Matter has exclusionary principles where it says if there's an electron here,

there can't be another electron precisely here, only one electron per electron space. But in some

kind of data space, all this stuff can be funneled together. And that's really what human history is,

is it's all being rolled up into a ball, and then the ball is being recompacted. It's a kind of reverse

enactment of what happened to matter at the Big Bang, but it's happening to information here at the end

end of the story. Just a thought, you know.

On a different tangent, I have one last magical act this weekend. It's an exorcism. You all have to help me

let go and move on from my recent trip to the Magic Kingdom. I'll put this on, and I want you to take a good

look at it, because it is an object so fantastic, so unspeakable, that I simply had to own it.

Yes, they sell this at Walt Disney World. It should be on the flag. It's unspeakable.

It's like your first look at a swastika. And when I saw it, the sick thing was, I knew I had to have it

because no one would believe me. How much was it? Sixteen bucks. Sixteen dollars. I need to leave it on

while I conduct this exorcism, and I will need your help. So this is an audience participation part of the program.

I went to SIGGRAPH this year, which was held in Orlando this year, as it was in 94. And I arranged my schedule very carefully so that on Monday, when things generally don't happen at SIGGRAPH, I could take one of my

best friends to the Magic Kingdom for his birthday. And we got up bright and early, and we rode into the gates of Disney World and traveled through the park to the happiest place on earth.

And because I knew I was going to need some level of chemical irony, we ate mushrooms. Just enough. Because I knew I was going to need, I suppose you could think of it as an insulator layer between the reality of Mickey and the reality of the cosmos.

And the mushrooms start to hit. We go on a scary ride and it's fun. But then we come out and we're in Tomorrowland. And I see the object and I didn't even know ahead of time that this is where I had to go. And I didn't know till afterward that I had to go there. And I entered the Carousel of Progress.

The Carousel of Progress was created for the 1964 World's Fair in New York. It was, as John Cameron Swayze narrates at the beginning, Walt's favorite ride. It really summed up everything that he thought about the world.

And the ride is very interesting because you sit in chairs, you're an audience, there's a proscenium, and you move around a proscenium. And every time that you rotate through the proscenium, there's a song which we'll come to in a moment.

But the first time you rotate, you're facing a scene and it's America at the turn of the century, probably right before Principia Mathematica and the ultraviolet catastrophe solution.

And America is mostly rural according to the scene and it's Valentine's Day and this gentleman in a chair is telling us about how great it is at the turn of the century.

It's animatronic, of course. And he's telling us about all the great innovations and he's heard about this thing called the telephone and they're going to be getting electric power in here before too long and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And now we're about to move. And there's a song. And the song goes like this. Now is the time. Now is the best time. Now is the best time of your life. And the stage moves.

And we're in the 1920s. And in the 1920s, there's now an electrical outlet with more plugs in it than I've ever seen. And there's a fan going because it's now gone to the 4th of July in this 1920ish era.

And there's a radio in the background. And once again, this gentleman is talking about how great everything is and how all the new innovations are absolutely wonderful and how good it is. It's all good.

And once again, we move to the next scene and we get the song. Now is the time. Now is the best time. Now is the best time of your life. And all of a sudden, we're in a kitchen circa 1946, which because swing is very hip right now, I actually want to move into.

It's, you know, the vinyl and the curb couches. And I'm like, wow, that's actually really, really hip. And there are kitchens in LA like this. So, so, you know, I like it. I'm already at home.

And we now have achieved the era of the dishwasher and the really nice refrigerator and all of these things that are just talking about how wonderful it is.

And that gentleman is sitting in the chair and he's telling us how wonderful it is. And now, well, after that era is over, and it's Halloween, by the way, we now go to the last part.

All together now. Now is the time. Now is the best time. Now is the best time of your life. Now, of course, this ride was constructed in 1964.

And so these were designed to be 20 year intervals. But Disney's Imagineers have been hard at work. So all of a sudden, we go from 1946 to Christmas Day in 1998. Wham!

And it's a suburban living room. And it's night. And the family are playing with their Christmas gifts. And it turns out that Junior's gotten a fully immersive VR system for Christmas.

And he's got a data glove. And he's got a data glove. And it's showing up on the TV screen so the whole family can sit around and watch. And the grandma gets in there and whumps his ass at the space war game.

This was my moment of ontological discontinuity around this. In some ways, I am compelled to feel responsible for what gets done with VR. Not because I invented it or created it. But in part because I've been trying to use my own voice and my own heart to help direct some of where it's going.

Because things are not wrong. Because things are not balancing anymore. Because all of a sudden, we go from 1946 to 1998. And nothing is making any sense.

But in fact, what's being held before us is a virtual reality that's not allowing us to articulate the real, but is being used as the mechanism to flee from it. And that was the moment I got ill.

Because entertainment is fine. Because entertainment is fine. There's no issue there. But the thought that in fact the future that awaits us is not grounded in any way in what we are in the real or in the planet. That, to me, is horrifying.

And this part of the morning's talk is really called a new story. Because we have to be able to, in some sense, take a look at those stories when they pop up.

And we can say, well, yeah, now is the time. Now is the best time. But is that the story that I'm buying? What am I being sold on that tab of reality?

What's going on here? What's going on here? Do I want to be using it to flee? Is it because of the processes that have been set up by capital and market formation and consensus and advertising that this is just the logical product? Do I have to buy into this?

Yes. And, of course, the hidden ethic of Disney, as a corporation, as a media giant, is that you absorb the media on all different levels of intensity. And, of course, you come to the theme part when you want the intensified experience of information.

It's really an amplification of what you'll get on ABC or on the Disney Channel or in the movies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so what they're doing is they're selling me a reality.

And I decided at that moment, at this profound ontological level, that I wasn't buying it. And I think once we say that, there's a space that opens up. And the space that opens up is the space for the new stories.

And what we do and how we work and how we talk to each other and how we love and how we connect and how we create is in that space of new stories. And those new stories are the old stories because the present is an archaic revival.

But those stories are new stories because we have this endless engine of creativity of art that we can plumb, that we can move into to tell us the stories about what's really going on.

Tell us the stories about history ending and make that comforting. Make the eschaton a yeschaton. Get us comfortable with that. Get us comfortable with all the changes that are being invoked by the engines of time.

How do you mean?

Say that, but sort of all the forces that are in the way and say, you know, we should really use technology to investigate the Earth that comes to some sort of understanding.

All these nice things, but this doesn't seem like forces are going that way without any sort of...

Well, can I do that?

Yeah, go.

I think we're incredibly impatient. I mean, for example, you know, my entire adult life was lived under the shadow of something called the Cold War, which was supposed to eventually end in the end of the world.

And the religious and social structures that were in place supported this conclusion.

Now the Soviet Union doesn't exist, hasn't for nearly a decade. And there's been a tremendous build down in nuclear weaponry.

It isn't that we've come to paradise, but we have certainly some of the problems that were thought intractable and insoluble have in fact yielded and become part of the historical record.

The fact that we could collectively as a global society back away from a race war in South Africa is remarkable.

So I think, you know, that very complicated forces are in play at the moment.

It's silly to talk about whether the forward movement of history is good or bad. It simply is.

But I think, you know, the nation state is on the ropes in the way the church was on the ropes in the early 17th century at the time of the Thirty Years' War.

And that the new corporate dispensation is different. War is not seen as an instrument of corporate policy.

Racism interferes with expanding niche markets. Unregulated markets are a pain in the ass to corporatism.

So I think the world is restructuring. We haven't yet hit the real test. In other words, technological change, as we've discussed it here, is going to become ever more accelerated.

Whether social and political systems can accommodate remains to be seen. But so far, there hasn't been a cracking apart yet.

One of the counter-arguments I might offer to the question that you very reasonably pose, in the present time, things are very non-linear.

Things change very quickly. The web changed everything about everything, and that was not a project of capital.

All right? So projects that have nothing to do with markets or anti-markets or capital, or the distribution of anything on this planet that we would normally associate as a power structure,

have had profound non-linear influences on our day-to-day lives.

And this is only increasing. The system's only getting more unstable. It's not approaching some sort of equilibrium. It's actually getting more unstable.

And so it's always an argument about sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

When I suggest making a new story, and I don't mean making one new story or just one myth, because that's just as hegemonic as the myth of history, right?

It's ten or ten thousand, and send them out into the world.

What I'm arguing for, and I want to be very clear on this, is that Disney is magic, and you fight magic with magic.

You spin the new words. You spin the stories. You get them out there. You get them eating away at the mouse, or everything that it can do,

until you get to a myth that you feel satisfied living with, a myth that you think is actually the truth, that is comfortable, even entertaining.

Because clearly there's room for entertainment there, but you don't want an entertainment that's based fundamentally on blindness and closure.

You want an entertainment that's based fundamentally maybe on authenticness.

All of the old stories, all of the old myths are authentic. Their manner of transmission is by the fact that they are authentic.

They couldn't be carried any other way. The vessel cannot hold them unless they're authentic.

And so when you try to create a culture that is bounded on inauthentic myths, the vessel, in fact, in which it's carried dissolves.

Yeah, I see all this going forward under the notion of almost the obligation now to create art.

That the expansion of human capacity means we're slipping away from the influence of these centrally disseminated artistic canons,

Western civilization, Christianity, capitalism, so forth and so on.

And the only way to survive in the media environment is to produce it, not consume it.

The people who consume it become the spectators to other people's unfoldment.

So that's why the new tools for communication are not for graphic designers or special effects people.

They're for everybody.

Because if you're not producing a vision, you are consuming somebody else's vision.

And there doesn't seem to me to be much middle ground.

What do you think?

I have one question.

On that sort of note, having worked in the interactive field for the last four years,

you know, there were lots of companies and lots of attention paid to trying to either sort of, you know,

build the tools, present the tools, or offer alternatives, you know, that were interactive entertainment,

that were essentially a consumer-oriented product or things that would allow people to be creative.

And all those issues are being grappled with all the time as anyone making content.

But part of those, you know, concerns are like, does Joe Sixpack really want to, you know, make anything?

I mean, aren't there, don't you think there are real consumers who just really, that's what they want to do?

Of course there's, you know, a room for the seamy side.

But on the other hand, the idea that the great unwashed masses are somehow dull is a print-created elitist notion that is absolutely untrue.

And not holding up in the face of the web.

Not holding up in the face of the web.

My career is proof that you can use big words and talk to ordinary people and be perfectly understood.

So I think, no, it's this myth of monotypic markets and dumbing everything down is at the convenience of the producer, not the consumer.

You know, if you, well, I recently read Thomas Pynchon's novel, Mason and Dixon, which pictures America in the 1760s, right before the revolution.

Well, the level of erudition evidenced by ordinary common people, you know, it was the height of a literary society.

To have read the Greeks and the Roman orators and all that was not uncommon.

In fact, it was typical.

One of the prices we've paid for mass communication is the tabloidization of everything from the Encyclopedia Britannica on down.

So, no, I think that given the right social environment, the richness of ordinary human beings is what was sacrificed on the altar of print created civilization.

We were made interchangeable parts in an industrial engine which valued similitude, you know, the concept of the citizen.

When you raised, when you raised similitude, I mean, that's a real issue because, likewise, people working in VR and VRML, you know, they don't start from ground zero.

They're becoming many from architecture, from traditional design.

Right.

The web is extremely print driven and oriented.

Right.

In fact, Mark is really one of the few, you know, visionaries in the web who's purporting, you know, look elsewhere for your models.

Don't, you know, follow the existing, you know.

But we're all pioneers here.

In other words, the bandwidth isn't there yet.

The really simple tools aren't there yet.

The public doesn't know, even the net using public.

And if I can, Paul, I think that the seduction of creation is there, but not at the level that it will be.

And it's going to be something very nonlinear.

It's going to be just like the web.

What's going on, right?

Just like the Mac when you saw it.

You know, it's going to be something that's very like that.

And the fact that we haven't got there, I mean, we're playing in this space or sort of probing this space and eventually.

Patience.

I don't know if it's patience.

There will be virtual realities attached to Eudora as documents.

This probably can be done now, except who has the disc size and bandwidth to handle it.

But if big machines are talking to each other, it's happening now.

And the trickle down thing is very, very rapid.

When printing was invented, there was a 50-year period called the incunabular period,

where all the things that were printed on the new printing press were intended and conceived to resemble manuscripts that have been made for hundreds, thousands of years.

They didn't have another context.

After the first 50 years, print found its own voice, as it were, and many, many things happened.

And this is widely recognized as the incunabular period of electronic, or digital, or whatever you want to call it, discourse and texts.

So be, you know, be patient and be, don't be afraid.

Wait at least six more months.

The new young people that are using the web, they're looking for that.

They know they can, and they understand how, and they go and they do it.

And I think a lot of generalities are being made here, because I've worked behind the counter.

We did a lot of customer service, and I really don't think that the masses, I've worked in video stores, I've worked in delis,

I've worked any place that they consume, and again, I would make generalities, but people didn't really care about anything innovative coming in.

They wanted the next, you know, action film, they didn't want to think, they wanted to vegetate after a hard day at work.

They want to be seduced by the hypnosis of media.

The hypnosis of television, though.

Well, it's not...

No, but that's one thing that we're dealing with, is that the mass medium that's dominant in our culture right now is television.

And it's a very hypnotic...

But the market studies show that what people are deserting in favor of the web when they reallocate their expendable time is TV.

I mean, in other words, they're still having as much sex, they're still walking their dogs as much,

they're still hiking in the wilderness as much, but they're slashing their television viewing.

Right.

This is the best news out of Gomorrah in a while.

Is there a Gomorrah.com that you subscribe to?

I own it.

You know, one of the things that strikes me is the value that we've seen from the internet and the world wide web has been, you go surfing around to find stuff for fun.

But the reality is, where's the value?

Where's the value?

And if you put it in an economics context, now you're seeing the advent of e-commerce, you know, and portals are in, but soon hubs are going to be in.

And business is going to say, okay, this has been really fun.

We've got a website here, but how are we going to use it?

How are we going to make sense out of it?

In fact, there's going to be a shift occurring.

In fact, I think there is a shift occurring right now as the technology continues to evolve and it's easier to deliver services.

And I think that when that happens, and...

You can't charge for advertising.

Forget advertising.

How about creating some other value?

Markets, yeah.

Well, you know, like destination sites, that's as valuable as dollars.

You know, in other words, you get people to your site.

But in the background of all this, the web still does best what it was originally designed to do, which is facilitate esoteric research.

And if you're trying to free yourself from the illusions of the society, this is just an enormous, unclosed loophole that they've left open.

And, you know, it used to be that at some literature department, at some girls' school in Massachusetts, they would undertake some massive project of studying the Dunciad or something like that.

And then when it was finished, it would fade out of existence.

Now all that stuff is uploaded and exists for anybody to browse through.

And I think esoterica has gotten the greatest shot in the arm since the reign of Rudolph of Bohemia.

And it has a dark side because it spawns squirrely conspiracy theories because now there are so many more factoids than ever before that whoever and whatever you believe is manipulating your life, you can go onto the web and find incontrovertible evidence to back you up.

But on the other hand, if you really have a sincere sense of what research is, the web is like a magic wand.

I mean, I've been interested for years and years in alchemy.

Well, for years it was expensive overpriced facsimile additions or visits to libraries in obscure parts of the world to pay for microfiche.

Now one guy, Adam McLean, puts a site up at Levity and it's essentially a larger alchemical library that ever existed anywhere in the world during the height of the age of alchemy.

And that's just one site. So I think it's impossible to predict the number of pathways and trajectories through what the web is.

What it really is, is freedom spelled very large.

But something like that, about 30 years ago, there was this sport called ultimate frisbee nosing band.

But I started playing back in like 71.

It was this very cool sport where everyone would just have to be playing with each other.

and you travel all over the continent.

people all over the country it's a great thing and it evolved into this national sport where

i always thought it was the younger kids was probably the other guys too right

became more competitive and it became a game that you had to win again that you just enjoyed to

compete and at the time i saw this guy get strangled on the field i decided it was time

to go do something and so the web seems to me because it's like it's an infancy

right where you're touching people all over the place right it seemed to me it was this natural

urge um man's aggression women's aggression whatever because both sides would get very

competitive and i would be in this deal seems to have much more financial implications which

scares me knowing the people i know in the finance world right how do you think that i mean to me i

i mean the markets well the markets are going to have you know they're playing in this space but

that's it they're at play in the space and just the same way we're at play in the space and in fact

the beauty of it is that disney can't actually bring people to their site the beauty of the web is

that the portals exist and you may click on them briefly but that's not where you stay

there are a few in sense sense of commercials like new sites that are sort of giving people what they

want but everything else on the web is and i mean everything else is this vast just vast

set of arcana esoterica that's actually where people are you know i mean yes you may be bringing

in a certain amount of content as a daily news and things like that but this and i almost think of

it as a hummus layer you know this just sort of well you know how in manhattan the the desirable

business spaces are at street level on major thoroughfares there's no parallel to that in the web right

it's just a mycelial mass there are no privileged positions and so there's no way to really reach

people unless they are somehow participating in uh what you're selling so there's all these

about millions right billions that's getting close to a hundred million how do you find where you want

to go well i see people that i want to get a couple of people to throw some things out there oh here's a

hundred favorite websites right right and that's maybe where people learning filters and search engines

is the challenge of the next level it's it's about learning how to filter hiding meaning

we've talked very little about the idea of a bot or which is like your servant which essentially will

know your taste and it's going to do your web for you kind will deliver you the type of things you're

interested in and that's coming about more and the the indications always been that those will be

kind of like animated sort of or video type images that i'm going to talk to you hello good morning

um here's what i've got for you oh oh you need oh oh did you know the notorious amos record was out

today until i haven't dropped one to you in two days that sort of thing how many days to ask you

time that's what i want to i want to i want to go on your economic question and it's been it's been

troubling me for the last about 18 months and i i'm going to ask mark uh owen and steven anyone that's

been in the verbal community to dance around it a little and so and um correct me but i'll just for

the rest of you i'll spin a little bit about verbal which you probably don't know it's just or might

not know it's just sort of the birthing and mark and that list that he talked about of of those did

you say 200 or something 2000 to what 2000 uh you know researchers and programmers created vrml and

very consciously fought uh to keep it from being owned or you know redirected by one corporate interest

and so they got these big corporations silicon graphics and microsoft and landscape and blah blah

on board and say okay we will not try to rip off your code and copyright it we will not try to

compete with each other and you know and that's how vrml was born and from that was this profusion of

amazing you know sort of design and and ideas and stuff that spilled out into the web the next stage

was that there was a browser war that microsoft came out with internet explorer which was to go

head to head with netscape and that vrml you understand operates as a kind of a plugin that works

inside the browser and just shows you how it shows you 3d objects or environments in your browser

but the problem that i experienced having worked for many or most of the of the people in the bay area

doing vrml work in those years was that in the last 18 months it seemed to me that the browser war

kind of killed vrml because due to i don't know how and that's what i want you guys to answer kind of

the the plugins for vrml really didn't function very well in the browsers and most people i knew

it's it's a very rapidly changing environment it's a very chaotic environment and it's it's

in some cases very difficult to make complex pieces of software stable in that environment okay but my

question really is was there do you think that there was any kind of concerted effort to deep you know

to devolve your your vision and or is that some function of this of the economic forces that created

the browser war or i think personally i think it does come down to market forces i think there's a big

issue with that because you have to look at i mean first it went from being a gee whiz technology to

everyone wanting to use it and get on board with it and a lot of people came on board right at first

and said we have to have this people started producing it um and then it was a question of

well how do we use it and i think that that's one issue with 3d graphics right now is that it's

still looking together what are we using for that's the grand project right now you know it has it's a

solution it's looking for a problem it's it's not like people don't understand a 3d space the same

way they understand a web page why because they think magazine when they look on the web people look at

the web and they see books if i might i want to spin this a little bit um get this really clearly i'm

we're devolving into geek talk that's right that's right that's all right it's very clear you are the

browser that other is just code it's written by people but you are the browser you make your browsing

decisions you don't want pieces of code written by microsoft netscape sgi or any other company making

your browsing decisions for you you have to own the you have to own that process putting your energy

into the into the web surfing process and deciding where you want to go if you're going to use a search

engine or filter you're going to use that search engine filter you are still the one that's going

to make that's going to plug the words in telling it what you're looking for it's going to give you

back selections and then you're going to you're going to select even further you're going to filter

up in here the original reality engine is up in here right right and i think this is really really

important one of the things we talked about compelling earlier and i i found some years ago

a formula for compelling the formula for compelling is always richness over resolution the markets are

creating a resolution because every day there's more stuff this there's a bigger size to it but the

richness comes from what susan was saying about the kids look at the kids look at them they're under 20

for the most part and they just go and do it they don't talk about it you you have the time for you

know they they create barriers to entry that if you don't have enough technical savvy you can't find

them you can't play with us you're laying go play someplace else you have to pass the test before

you can walk through this door and play with us but once you can pass that test you know it's a pretty

fine pretty rich pretty compelling experience but just remember you are the browser well said there

you go did you want to do yeah with her on in um we're going to take a little twist out of the

technical and back up to our main theme you're on deck um he's been very very silent this weekend

but he's been my assistant and more than that he's been my philosophical foil for five years and

counting now so that a lot of the ideas that you hear coming from me and i need to be very honest

not all of them are my own ideas i'm just sharing where i've been yeah i know i'm sharing where i've

been big shock um and um ronin has who's now up here has helped me explore a lot of these ideas

and although i will in enormous amount of my intellectual development to him and he's not

he's going to take the idea of the new story and where that new story is and was and where maybe it

should be a little bit further all right thanks um uh kind of start talking the new story one thing

that terence mentioned about the webbing he mentioned the word freedom i think this is kind of

ultimately what we want to move towards in in in our lives in living in weaving these stories is is to um

is this freedom i mean this is one of the ultimate things that we can have in our in our lives and um

for this kind of freedom there's a a letting go of our egos that needs to take place in a kind of

immersion within being that needs to take place and uh there's a quote from a rabbi a jewish rabbi named

joshua uh abraham joshua heschel and he said there is no freedom without awe and i think um this

if you do a good dose of psychedelics i think that you kind of get the idea of awe

or if you get a good night of the stars watching meteor showers you get a good sense of awe or if you

have a good night of making love you get this sense of awe and and this is one of the fundamental

um experiences of being human and this is what talking about an archaic revival a sense is a recovery

of that primordial awe of the splendor of existence and so when we talk about creating a new story

it's a process of of remembrance of uh coming back to where it is we've come from and an intense process of self-knowledge

and examination so the end of history in a sense requires first um an understanding of history of

what's gone forward and so this is kind of an understanding of the evolution of the human species

the evolution of cultures you know we need to learn how did we get to this place and where are we now

and it's this process uh of self-exploration that can um lead us into whatever it is that's before us

and um i think the the story that we're looking for is this is a story of wholeness

uh also what terence talks about a lot is this concrescence and so this story of wholeness is a

uh is a is a way of uh making this concrescence happen that word concrescence one way to think

of it is the coming together of disparate strands into a nexus there's this kind of unification of

being and uh this story of wholeness is not just a it's we need to go beyond these naive

um kind of propositions of uh a story of wholeness in our times also requires a deep acceptance which

also requires an acceptance of fragmentation we live in a world of fragmentation and yet somehow

that's part of the larger wholeness and um what western civilization has gone through is an intense

kind of separation from its kind of cosmic womb this kind of birth and separation process and

and that's part of it and um but there's always a higher level of order of interconnection and so

this new story one has this fundamental premise that everything is related and this story

uh there's some people who are working it it also based fundamentally on the insights of the new

science and of quantum physics it's this scientific understanding of the world and this fundamental

premise that everything is connected and so this technology that we use is our ways to highlight

these interconnections and tell the story of who we are as the human as human people and as members of the

earth community and as members of the cosmos and so the fundamental discipline for this new story

for us to be able to remember who we are and and evolve who we are and our many different permutations

is i i would say the fundamental discipline of our time is cosmology and a lot of my understanding of

this idea of this idea of a new story within the context of understanding science comes from two

philosophers and scientists named thomas berry and brian swim one is a cultural historian and

catholic priest in his 80s who's a student of tayar de jardin and the other one brian swim is a mathematical

cosmologist and um they um basically uh articulate um this kind of trajectory of evolution and

and to give us um a context for understanding ourselves uh in relationship to the planet and

to the cosmos and understanding that the cosmos is an ongoing experience it's cosmogenic it's constantly

giving birth and um our part of our role is to participate in that and that we create these worlds

and that we uh there's these dynamics that go on that are larger yes but we also fundamentally

are also giving birth to them we bring forth the world together and uh um let me see where so anyway

it wasn't this point the cosmology cosmology is is the synthesis of art religion philosophy and science

and so this is what we need today is a we need a new wisdom school basically in my opinion we have

vast tracts of knowledge everything is out there on the plate and it's how do we bring these things

together and i think a lot of it we need to start with from this place of awe we have a sense of reverence

for the sanctity of creation for the sanctity of ourselves and i think um from this we need to start

from a place of respect uh for ourselves and for others and from this place

um i think we can move to create that create from the heart in that place and um all these tools

we're talking about can be used for this and um i think a lot of it is to take a responsibility to learn

who you are as a person in relationship to all it is and there's vast amounts of material

out there to do that and then um i think from this place using that to move towards freedom

and um well also i did in one article i read from terrence it was i think published about 10 years ago

in revision magazine it was on ufos i remember uh insane saying something what will the end of the

world look like or to end and said in the article well it's not going to be just aliens coming down and

having this big thing he said it's kind of an inner revolution where um this is something about um

appropriate activity and felt experience and and uh letting go of the illusion of separateness

those that itself would be the revolution and this appropriate activity coming out from authentic

being and interconnection and letting that move through us and and that in a sense is the eschaton

is a sense of authentic being uh an interrelationship grounded in a sense of deep remembrance of

of who we are from from the place that we began and uh so anyway that's pretty much all i have to say

but um but really the things freedom and celebration those are the two key and awe and awe yeah

uh for for for creating this this new world together so without um without it becoming a um an ideology

um how are you are you arguing then that the work the great work and also all the little works we

should do you should in every part try to show relation is that in fact what part of the new story

is is that the new story is is invoking and making explicit the relations that have always been

implicit i mean i certainly i take a look at my own work and in light of what you just said that makes

sense yes i'm trying to invoke into explicitness the relations that have always been implicit

yeah i definitely think that that's what we want to do and that that's part of the fundamental

ecological crisis is that we don't understand the thing we don't see

the eco-systemic interconnections and so it's easy for us to pollute and so on because we don't see

the ramifications of that until you know becomes some toxic waste site so um yeah this fundamental and

and and also that it needs to start at home it needs to start within our own center of the relationships

within ourselves which will also help us keep from going the schizophrenic route we might have lots of

ourselves which is okay and if you understand the connections between them you can be with them

and not go nuts and then from that place inside you're in a structural coupling with reality with other

human beings and you make explicit and honor those relationships um you know i think there's a new

a new level that can take place and i know from my study i work a lot with the lakota people from the

flames in in all of their prayers and all their ceremonies like if anytime you're in a sweat lodge and

you've finished saying a prayer or something they say oh talk to you all all my relations i'm related to

everything and that's a constant thing that's always said it's a you get in sweat or at a ceremony

and so this is a story that they tell themselves all the time so it's a new story that's an archaic story

yeah and um again it comes down to this remembrance as well uh uh yeah remembrance and the explicit relationship

of reality is something i've been disturbed about and i think you'll have was leading to that there's

this and that may be the divergence or the opposite of what you're talking about is um

the web can be used to market mass market a view of reality that that you can just sit there and be

entertained in front of your tv and um i just hope that like this gentleman was saying about

the first 50 years of the print that this this desire to incorporate the paradigm the

arcade paradigm doesn't just get viewed by the kids 100 years from now as oh that was just the

transition state where they were trying to hang on to the old before we you know i mean it might be but

that might be because we transition to something that's just as authentic and just as as meaningful

ideally i i i think the you know in trying to think about a new story the what's really changed or what

the sea change has been at least for me over the past 50 years is uh modernity was thoroughly existential

in other words reductionist science tells you you're the product of cosmic accident meaning is conferred

you're lucky to be here uh nature has no interest in your fate nature indeed has no purpose at all

all of these things and my own intellectual journey both experientially with psychedelics and through

mathematical analysis of history and all this kind of stuff leads to the conclusion that

that this existential point of view is able to maintain itself only by ignoring um the evolutionary thrust

toward complexity and novelty that occurs on every level of being and that in fact if you begin to

value novelty you suddenly have a basis for a new human ethic because human beings with their languages and

their technologies represent a level of novelty never before achieved on this planet something which builds on

animal nature as a platform but goes well beyond it and uh so suddenly from being a random accident

from being a chance created witness to a meaningless cosmos we become the cutting edge of the very process

that the cosmos itself seems to value or seek to magnify and preserve so what has crept back in to being

is for me and anybody else who accepts these overarching metaphors what has crept back in is value

and value is it's a different kind of value than we've ever seen before the last time we knew values they were handed down

from a religious hierarchy that talked directly to god and got strange messages the new values are self-evident

from an examination of nature anybody can inform themselves about the facts of biology and

large-scale complex systems and so forth and so on so the the the new story is a story of recognize our

placement at this breaking wave of novel advance and then suddenly technology becomes a religious

religious enterprise good for something other than buildings consumer electronics and small appliances

but actually seen as the path toward some kind of transcendent possibility uh the goal is well formulated in

spiritual ontology but the methods are a mess you know uh these these methods either either don't work or require

lifetimes or make demands on people's behavior that is practically inhuman uh so i i i think uh

the the new story is based on the recognition of our own centrality we haven't stood at the center of the

cosmic stage for 700 years in our official myth and now suddenly we're returned there and returned there not merely as witnesses in a central position but suddenly as actors

because these technologies that are coming into our hands are truly promethean truly faustian

truly capable of making us like unto a god uh but not in the service of market capitalism and consumer fetishism

more in the service of this emotion of awe which ronin invoked

you wanted to say something that was beautifully put earlier and i'm 100 percent convinced that

remember the source from which we came before we even entered these bodies this particular incarnation

and getting to the authentic self in the community

um and things that we had talked about last night of coming back together instead of

being isolated ourselves nowhere this weekend have we talked about actually experiencing life the living

of life in this particular moment you know past is a history future is a mystery that's why they call it

a present gift i mean where are we with the computer in simulations

there for me personally i answer the question as a rather beautiful curiosity answer

um i'm in the professional world the working world of computers no one i know goes home and goes on the

computer state and search around and plays them i mean it i have witnessed this metamorphosis in

the service world as a tool it's a it's a tool that has been um of stronger technological events than

what we've had before yes that's true but it's not a way of life and i'm hearing a lot of people that

the community is their way of life and the talk about tv and hypnosis and yada yada all that stuff is

very true but is this what we want in our life to become or do we want to actually experience it do

we want to come here and look out at the ocean and then come and talk about these ideas do we want

to sit in a room with this thing flashing as we have to have a saver to save our eyes from even

staring at this thing for so long is that

Is that where we want to experience life?

Well, I think the answer is a resounding yes.

It is where we want to experience life,

because it is part of life experience

that our historical moment has dealt us.

In other words, you mention it as a tool,

but it is not a tool.

It does not turn a screw or reset an alarm.

It can do anything.

It does look of data quickly.

It does anything you can name.

It does.

Yes, but it is not a life.

Well, I don't know exactly what you mean by a life.

If you mean it...

...eating and walking around and interacting with people.

In that sense, it is a life, I think.

I think all dualism is a form of spiritual materialism.

In other words, what we are trying to do here is raise consciousness.

What we are trying to do is build community.

It is arguable that walking on the cliff and smelling the roses is an incredibly self-indulgent thing to be doing,

when what you could be doing is building a worldwide data network

that would raise people out of poverty and ignorance and give them a shot at full...

How is that going to do that?

Through education.

How is that going to raise people out of the ghettos and give them college education and stuff?

Well, I think information liberates.

And that the control of information throughout history has been the mechanism by which class dominance and hierarchy has been maintained.

So I think tearing the lid off the global database and inviting everybody to take what appeals to them is one of the most revolutionary things that...

To the elites of the high-tech industrial democracies it may be available.

But we are talking about suffering mankind here.

In other words, I think it is a political obligation to give people the option of becoming free.

Not to free them because then you are saying, follow me.

But to give them the option of becoming free.

If you travel to Bangkok and Calcutta and Cairo and actually feel the earth bursting at its seams with its accumulated toxins and social problems and so forth and so on.

You see that business as usual has been cancelled.

And this thing you call having a life is business as usual.

If you mean smelling the roses and walking on the cliff and all that.

There is a place for that.

But on the other hand, there is a question which hovers over us.

Which is, what is to be done?

You know, what is to be done about the dilemma that our past history has placed us in?

And all minds on deck.

We are at battle station conditions here.

We are entering into the narrow neck at the end of history.

We will need every tool in our tool kit.

From the poetry of Rumi to Vermal and beyond.

This is going to push us to the limit.

Nothing human should be alien to us.

And these technologies that we have created are as human as we are.

They have been with us since the very first moment that we defined ourselves away from our fellow animals.

So, there is no turning back.

The only people who can live in a world where they have endless time to smell the roses and contemplate the mysteries of bridge.

Are people who are living in a social pyramid where their leisure time is purchased at the expense of the enormous suffering of other human beings.

So, I think...

That's not fair.

That's not easy, sir.

I don't know.

Because that's...

Well, what's...

There's a whole tradition.

It starts in Calcutta, Tibet, and other places where each step is a precious step.

It doesn't have to be a rose you smell.

It can be shit that you smell.

But it's precious.

So, I don't think that's a fair...

I don't think that's a fair comeback.

I don't think you've answered her question, to be perfectly honest.

Explain more about why you don't think so.

Because I don't understand.

I...

You're saying everything we do is potentially a step.

Is that what you're saying?

Everything is a step.

It's not even a potential.

But how does that contradict what I'm saying?

No.

She had a question, I think, and maybe I misunderstood it, about...

She was sort of grounding herself in the physical reality of her life.

No.

She was asserting the supremacy of it.

No.

Well, wait a minute.

Before we address her question, let's address the fact that her question is not easily addressed.

In other words, this is a primary schism which too bad we pushed it off till seven minutes before the end.

It's not going to be easily dealt with.

People value the quality of life differently.

They value their relationship to space and leisure differently.

I understand what she means by get a life.

But I feel it's an unfair attack on the position represented here.

People exist along a spectrum of experience.

We are going to have to keep one hand, and Mark was at great pains to make this clear throughout the weekend.

I don't think it's true that this was not dealt with.

You said you said you never heard immediacy dealt with.

You said something about the future.

Well, what was the aphorism?

But what was the aphorism where you said something about history is something, the future is something?

Yeah.

What I was talking about was the actual present moment that we are living here.

Well, but didn't all the...

History and the future of the mystery.

They're just segments of our imagination, and we can play with them in a curiosity manner.

But didn't all the talk about psychedelics imply the importance of the felt presence of immediate experience?

Or all the yoga.

Right.

There have been 48 hours of immediate experiences in a row, and we've all been here for a long time.

I just want to address this to Susan's question, which is this.

I think I heard recently, like this week, that Clinton or Gore or somebody suggested that every American should be on the web by a certain time.

Right.

Yes.

And I think that if you just took that model that the most impoverished ghettos in the cities, Appalachia and all of this,

that if all those kids, you know, were actually on the web, that that would be a good thing.

That it doesn't mean they're going to spend all their time doing that, right?

Are they going to have food in the ghettos in their mouths, type?

I know they're going to be selling web computers for crap.

Check, check, check them out.

The availability of perfect information is the possibility of perfect resource allocation.

Reach it.

Right.

And that is what Mark's virtual reality is helping us get towards.

The ability to understand information.

Can we go back to that?

Yeah.

I think it's kind of a voice here.

I think what I hear her saying is, I have this web and I have a lot of information now,

but I might not have had before from all over the world, right?

But you know, this morning when my kid was going to fit because he doesn't want to leave today,

your web isn't going to help me deal with that.

And I think that's what she's saying.

There's a piece of the world.

This gives me so much more stuff than I ever had before at my fingertips and I can search

because I'm in the browser, right?

And he's actually right.

But you know what?

I still have to work with it inside myself.

Now here's, I need to make a comment here because I've been trying as hard as I can

to stress the heart and stress the heart and stress the heart.

The web is not knowledge in your head.

It's not facts.

It's the connection of hearts and minds on the planet.

I'm sorry, I sounded very pedantic and I apologize.

But I want to drive the point home.

The problem is, the problem is...

It's not that in and of itself.

No, in and of itself it is that.

It is that.

It's pure connectivity.

Yeah.

But we have really poor interfaces to anything other than textual, intellectual domains as

yet.

It is not a heart in and of itself.

No, but it's connectivity.

That's what he's saying.

Pardon me?

It isn't potential connections, it is real connections.

It is real connections.

I value actually, you know, it's just as real as talking to somebody on the phone.

I mean it's real time, it's really there.

It is a communication tool and I think what we're coming to, and I hope we're coming to,

is some of us value actually living in real intimate communication, face-to-face talking and stuff.

Some of us value intellectualism as the answer to all necessities and needs.

And I agree, man, 100% freedom is information that will give us strength and power.

But, you know, back to what Ronan was talking about, until we actually come out and live,

I mean that's my value.

And I think that was the point that he was making, is that in order to come together,

we have to go back into smaller communities and find, and remember from where we came,

not all the information, it's just the basic core, our selfness, our selfness, our livingness.

So, our values are opposites. That's what's going on.

But are they really mutually exclusive?

I don't see them as being opposite either.

I think we're saying the connectivity of the web is part of the activities of learning.

And what you're talking about is more how do we teach or how do people learn how to survive

on the planet. And personally, I think that the web, branching off from what was brought up initially,

that language assists or defines content or affects content.

So you get a more elaborate language or a simpler language,

and it might create better ways to communicate content,

because it's a fact that what we're doing doesn't look like it's working.

You know, the way that society's evolved on the planet doesn't look self-sustaining.

And VR and the web is probably our best shot to amp up the learning of everyone,

and it certainly sounds like it's worth a shot.

But it's not going to happen if it becomes all Disney, and as it is now,

one of the main things that children learn growing up is what Steven Spielberg varies within the theme of a movie.

And maybe that's the way it always will be.

And it's a great opportunity that people can learn from other ways besides mass media fed information.

And if you don't happen to be lucky enough to be born with parents that can communicate ethics 100%

in a seamless fashion from, you know, everything we need to survive.

Because what's going on now doesn't seem like it's really working to meet the needs of everyone on the planet.

We're going to have to close this off, but I want Mark to have a chance to have a final word if he wants it.

Before he has it, I want to thank him for being here.

He and I had apparently never met or met only lightly in the past.

I think having this end in controversy is fine with me.

These things are controversial.

It's the business of the future to be dangerous.

It's your job to decide what is human and to preserve it and expand it and live it.

And Mark, say a final wise thing.

It looks like a question slash commercial.

Does S1 offer us each other's contact info?

No.

Then I would propose that if anyone wants to stay in contact or communicate via email,

continue these discussions.

I have a book which is sitting here with a pen.

Please put your name in if you have an email if you don't.

And also I have cards here where you can reach me.

And also that I really appreciate it and love all of you for your singing last night.

And also by giving me your information or taking mine, you can have more information on that.

We want to kind of purport that activity.

Thanks.

In conclusion, it was probably in 1981 when my wetware processor booted up a simulation of Terence

and it's been talking to me ever since.

And the conversation has been actually really interesting.

It is my great honor and pleasure to have met and worked with you in the flesh.

And this has been a wonderful weekend.

And I want to thank you for your graciousness and for the room that you've given me

because it's been a great honor on my own part.

I really, I can't even describe it, how I feel about being able to be with all of you.

Thank you.

It has been my great honor and my pleasure to be able to get away with things that they would normally drive me away kicking and screaming if I said in other places in this world.

I've given some raps this weekend, which I won't call them canned, but I've given them before and I have said things in public care that I had not even dared ever to say.

I've been thinking about them, I've been arguing them with my simulation of Terence, I've been working them through, but I felt like this room had the feeling and the trust where I could actually step over the boundary

and I could enter the light cone and put my foot down and say, well, these are just some things that I'm thinking about and I am incredibly grateful that I've been able to share with you

because the things that I've been getting back from all of you both individually as a group have been insane, cathartic, transformative, revolutionary, things like that.

I'm going to leave you with one last question or koan which I want to be unresolved because it's an argument that I'm having with a simulation of myself that I'm running inside of my head.

I'm not sure that I believe that the internet physically exists.

I don't know about it. It's invisible to me all of the time anyway.

I'm not sure that in fact it's not simply a way that we're all magically believing that we're communicating with each other.

Thank you.

That's a great...

...cosmic trigger, probably on the influences of some psychedelic drugs, but we'll come to that.

And in it he summarizes yours and your brother's work on the time wave.

And he, in fact, charts out history into three major sections.

This is a 67-year section which will comprise the bulk of my life, an interesting 13-month section which will happen in 2011,

and then an interesting six-day section which will happen immediately preceding the winter solstice in 2012,

in which I believe during the last six-day session there will be more novelty than has existed on the planet since ever.

And I looked at this, and I had been reading...

I'd started off easily, so I'd read Alvin Toffler, and then I could take a little bit more,

so I worked myself up into Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and then I came across that, and I said,

well, this appears to be the case.

It was confirmed to me internally in a way that I could not particularly argue with, I could not argue out of.

It was simply a foundational fact.

And all of my work thereafter was based on a premise that the universe is seeking a type of closure,

that in fact things are converging.

And so my own life study had been perhaps an exploration of what those avenues of convergence were.

And it ended up over a period of years that my own life story became a search to create the forms of that convergence.

So we'll now flash forward to my first experience of virtual reality, which happened in 1990,

and required absolutely no technology except about 500 micrograms of LSD-25.

I've been thinking, I've been reading, and all of a sudden I drop acid after several years,

and of course if you've taken several years' break and all of a sudden flushed yourself back into that realm,

you can find that things really pop up.

And I found myself in a virtual world.

And what I found in this virtual world, the thing that I must have suspected that I would find in this virtual world,

wasn't an artificial Tron-like environment.

It wasn't something that was entirely artificial.

What I beheld in that environment was an image of the planet,

as if I was cruising above it in a spaceship.

And I knew that part of my own destiny, as connected with virtual reality,

wasn't to escape into another dimension,

but to find a way to make real to us the things that we can't always see,

because we exist at a level of scale, of experience, that hides them from us.

And at that point in my life, I decided I needed to leave New England and come to California,

where everything was really going on.

This was 1990, and VR was the hot new thing.

And we forget now that VR was the hot new thing before the internet became the hot new thing,

but for a while, it was the cheese.

And I moved to San Francisco, which made it much easier to get good drugs.

And I started to explore, by working, by building systems, what virtual reality was.

And this started to have a profound change on my own understanding of how reality was constructed,

because my psychedelic description of reality, which is that mind forms reality,

began to conflate or become identical with my physical or scientific description of reality,

which is that mind forms reality.

And all of a sudden, I understood that everything I used to understand about the way the universe works

wasn't as true as I had thought.

And so this began to inspire in me a search, a search to get to some basic level of being

that would allow me to work in a world that was manifest because of my own will,

and just as much as manifest because of your own will.

Because where we're going, the simulated and the real are going to get really blurry.

And we don't have any tools, we don't have any tools of mind.

Western culture, which is based on this idea of this objective external reality,

it's not hard.

It's all become very soft and it's all flowing together.

So we need to now start to find ways of describing what's going on.

And so what we need to do, I found in my own investigations,

is to take a look at cultures that describe the world magically,

that understand that perception shapes what you are and you shape what you see,

and that they're not separate areas, they're not separate domains,

but you have to consider them as a whole.

So the four sort of prongs that got talked about in the blurb that was written for this piece

are techno-paganism.

And techno-paganism is maybe, you could describe it a bunch of different ways,

and I certainly didn't make the word up and I certainly didn't apply the word to myself,

but it stuck because Wired Magazine published an article two years ago

with my face blazoned on it, Photoshop reversed in color,

and said, this is a techno-pagan.

And really what it was trying to do was trying to articulate my own experience

of being thrust into this world where everything was melting and nothing was solid

and trying to come to grips with it philosophically,

trying to come to grips with it ontologically.

And my own explorations had led me to understand that in fact in a world where anything you want is true,

the only way you can deal with this is by learning how to deal with your will.

Dealing with your will is what magic has always, in all cultures, always been about.

This is why the shaman doesn't go insane when the world disappears.

He's ready for it.

They're ready because they understand that where they are isn't bound up in their view of the world.

The internet is a connective layer.

And you were talking about this last night. It's beautiful.

If you took a picture of this room in 1990 and you took a picture of it today,

everything will look exactly the same and yet everything is completely different.

Because in 1990 we didn't have this layer of bits that's flowing seamlessly among all of us.

And it's changed us.

It's radically sped up the way we deal with information in society.

And every bit of information that passes through you changes you.

You cannot be unaffected in any way by any bit of information.

So the internet is acting as this enormous accelerator.

It's acting as something that's passing through all of us and radically transforming us.

And part of what it is doing is ripping us apart.

And that's dangerous.

If we don't approach that carefully and if we don't approach that with a lot of heart,

we're going to find ourselves and what we think of as ourselves ripped away in that process.

One of the reasons why I think it's very important that this is happening at Esalen

is because if Esalen were running a political campaign, their slogan would be,

the body's stupid.

Because it begins here and it ends here.

And if we can stay in our bodies even while we're projected into cyberspace,

we have some zone for sanity.

We have some zone for being.

And psychedelics can produce these boundary dissolutions where you flow into another thing.

What we're going to see, and it's actually quite true, that certain types of VR can produce

precisely the same affect.

There are zones where virtual reality can be very dangerous for that reason

or incredibly powerful and meaningful for that reason.

So where I would like to work from this weekend is I really want to work from the heart.

I personally think in my own philosophy that to work in technology you have to work from the heart center.

Because otherwise you'll create Golems, you'll create Frankensteins,

your creations will run away from you.

And that's the essence of the story of the Golem,

is that this is a creature that was created with the breath of life

but without the light of knowledge or the heart, the heart of God.

So we really have to work from that.

And one of the things that we'll be doing this weekend for that,

and we're inviting you, I don't think we're requiring you

because that would just not be in the tenor of this place,

but we're inviting you at 7.30 in the morning both tomorrow and Sunday

to come practice Kundalini Yoga.

And Kundalini Yoga works very much on the heart center.

It's not strenuous, I guarantee you it will be fun.

We have a very good teacher, James, who will be teaching this.

And the idea is that with these exercises we can help to open up our heart center

so that when we talk tomorrow, when we meet tomorrow,

we can really be working from that.

Even when we're talking about these ideas that may be very technologically relevant,

they won't be isolated in our minds.

That all said, I also want to explore the joyous nature of what we can do.

And a lot of my work has been around exploring the joyous nature of what we can do.

We have to, if we're working from our hearts in these environments,

then a part of what we want to do is be joyous in these environments.

One of my biggest gripes about the Internet is that it can't, as yet,

contain the tenor of human emotion which is so important.

If we're building this edifice to be the global mind and it can't laugh,

we've got a big problem.

If it can't sing, we have a big problem.

And so one of the things we'll be doing probably in the evening on Saturday

is doing something we call voce, which Paul and I have been working on.

We call it world song or voce, which is a singing or toning technique.

And it can produce a quality of connection in a group of people,

which is the closest I've heard it described as almost like instant ecstasy

in the sense of the drug.

And it's a temporary sort of lowering of the interpersonal barriers

in a really, really wonderful way.

And hopefully at the end of all of this, I will have been inspired,

and Terence will have been inspired by what you had to say,

and will be able to bring that heart-centeredness,

which has to, I believe, for me, the heart of how we work

when we're working in the world and with technology in the world.

Isn't he a great guy?

If I had the Timothy Leary laurels with me, I'd hand them all up.

The bad penny could pass.

Well, that's...

I love listening to Mark rap this stuff,

and he really knows where he's coming from,

and it's exciting stuff.

I've been into this psychedelic thing since the late 60s,

and it's transformed in different ways.

And there's been a strange sort of literary parallelism

or cloud over my own life

so that as my obsessions evolved,

society obligingly evolved in the same direction.

And when I got started with psychedelics,

it was because I was interested in the mystical experience

a la Jacob Burma and Thomas Traherne

and all that sort of thing.

And I had read Aldous Huxley's book,

The Doors of Perception.

So it was a spiritual intentionality.

And as time passed, I was completely satisfied in that.

But I also became interested then in what were psychedelics

in terms of their impact on large numbers of people

and on human social and cultural evolution.

Because to me it was just this incredible power,

this dimension which my own culture completely denied and overlooked.

But that obviously from the first time I had a major trip on,

it was clear to me that this had to have evolutionary implications.

And that's where we're going to get the whole life in our dimension.

But is that the moment I think I can do it,

it's important to me,

to be able to figure out how to find the history of nature.

So thank you for the question.

That is a pleasure.

Thank you for opening up.

And the wave of the time I try to make a moment of time.

We'll have to try to remember how to have it now.

and we have to wait a moment.

We'll have a moment.

It's a moment.

So that's really,

It's a moment.

A moment.

I'm sorry.

I was sorry.

I'm sorry.

But I didn't want to have a moment.

We'll have a moment.

It's a moment.

And it seemed to me as I read my Darwin and Freud that there had to be some kind of quickening influence in human emergence

that if not outright transcendental was certainly unique and out of the ordinary order of nature.

And so then I spent years thinking about psychedelic implications for human evolution

and most of you, if you're interested, know my theories about all this.

Well then the engagement with it extended further and I began to see it as a lens for coordinating large amounts of data

in order to essentially prophesize the future.

That the future, somehow I had the notion that history and the individual life built around the psychedelic experience

were fractal reflections of each other.

And that led to the conclusion that history is a trip.

And that led to the conclusion that the best was yet to come or the yest was bet to come.

I'm not sure.

So it had this sociopolitical and historical implication.

And it wasn't as simple as just imagining what would happen if societies would permit these things.

But I could also see that it was a catalyst on imagination.

That, you know, whatever it was that psychedelics were doing,

it was taking anybody's notion of reality, anybody's mindset, and radically extending it.

And if they found that comfortable, they were ecstatic.

And if they found it horrifying, they were traumatized.

But the common thread was, takes ordinary minds, makes them bigger, stranger, more grotesque, less predictable, more bizarre.

So then that was not yet the outer parameter of the issues that this phenomenon,

the psychedelic experience, seemed to engage.

It seemed to me that at the personal and experiential level,

the thing that was so astonishing about it was not that it led, at least for me, directly to God.

What it led to was more art than I conceived of existing.

How was it that, you know, in a five-hour psilocybin trip,

an ordinary person lying in darkness sees more art than is stored and catalogued in all the museums of Europe?

I mean, this was confounding to me.

And I had a Jungian bias, too.

So I was full of the notion of the commonality of the unconscious and all that.

And so I was puzzled, why don't I see these motifs in Tibetan paintings,

Shipibo carving?

How can something which is so near,

over a very slight energy threshold involved in taking these substances,

be so distant from our cultural values and our store of images?

And it was around this time, roughly 1990,

that I began to hear the first buzz about virtual reality.

And I knew, the minute I understood the concept,

I knew, in the same way that I knew when I heard about the first Mac and LSD

and potassium sugar per chlorate rocket fuels,

that this was going to be the next great thing.

And as a tool of art,

as a tool for leading us beyond the notion

that we are a hive society of advanced primates,

because that's how we visually appear to the empirical point of view,

that's an out-of-context description of what we are.

It's like a schematic or an aerial map.

What we really are is the community of mind

knitted together by codes and symbols,

intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes.

The invisible world of the human experience

is far more real to us than the visible world,

which is little more than a kind of screen or stage upon which we move.

So this thing Mark said,

I heard it for the first time and got it,

that the purpose of VR is to show us aspects of reality

that are not artificial,

but that are fields of data

not ordinarily coordinated by ordinary perception.

You know, Ralph Abraham, who's a favorite around here,

has talked about how mathematics,

which has been a high priesthood of arcane formulae

and special signifying languages,

is giving way to visual understanding.

If you talk to someone about a seven or eight dimensional process,

most people completely blur out.

If you show them an animation of an ongoing eight dimensional process,

everybody understands without a word being said exactly what is happening.

So I see virtual reality as a way not of escaping

any notion of empirical reality,

but as a way of re-portraying invisible levels of the given world

that are very vital and important to us.

How we see flows of energy,

how we understand complex economies,

how we understand the fractal hierarchies of nature.

Everything is about to get very much more complicated,

much larger.

The number of choices are about to exponentially explode.

In a sense, these technologies point us toward,

if not literal godhood,

then a kind of fictional godhood.

We are all going to become the masters of the narrative

in which we are embedded.

Our separate stories are going to take on dimensions

so multifarous that for all practical purposes,

we will each move into a cosmos of our own creation and control.

In a way, all that is happening is

that what is already co-present with three-dimensional reality

is being literalized,

but literalized in timescales

that make the nature of the game

apparent to all but the dullest among us.

I mean, after all,

we have always lived in virtual realities

ever since we abandoned nomadism

and defined a polis and a wilderness

and, you know,

when Hammurubi set up the first codes in Babylon,

these were operating codes.

These were constraints on the human system

that did not fully implement its capabilities,

but rather defined and limited it

for purposes of implementing certain design goals.

Well, now we've been in the birth canal

of the design process for about 8,000 years now

and we can see light at the end of the tunnel.

The French have a notion of forward escape.

That means when the situation gets so crazy,

then you just hit the accelerator

and drives straight up the middle

and that's the forward escape.

And technology represents this for us.

Our ideologies are probably lethal,

obviously lethal, I would say,

but they are fortunately a kind of chrysalis

of ideological constraint

that technology is in the process of dissolving.

And, you know,

William Butler saw this in the 19th century.

Teilhard de Chardin reached it in the 40s and the 50s.

McLuhan expressly articulated this vision

in the 50s and the 60s.

This is really, you know,

as Ahab tells the crew in Moby Dick,

this is what you've shipped for, mate.

This was the plan.

You know, Plato said,

if God does not exist,

man will create such a thing.

And we are creating a simulacrum of our highest hopes.

And the effort to define

the actual delimiting architecture of our hope

is an intellectual exercise

that we have never previously submitted to.

And what I mean by that is

when you can do anything,

what do you do?

We've always worked within the constraints

of mortar, glass, steel,

our economic scales,

our physical scales.

VR eliminates all of this.

You know,

the difference between a 10-story building

and a 100-story building

in virtual reality

is one zero

in a line of code.

Well, with that kind of freedom,

the human imagination,

which has been defined by limitation,

the planet's surface,

the needs and wishes of others,

is going to unfold

in these super spaces.

And, you know,

it's a Gnostic epiphany.

If you believe it,

what it really comes down to

in terms of the politics

and psychology of it

is a final resolution

to my mind

of the question,

is man good?

In other words,

with all constraints removed,

do we descend into

a world of, you know,

Freudian nightmare

and simulated sadomasochism,

or do we express something

which matter

always mitigated against?

So that's what I think is

I'm sure we will do both.

I mean,

the essence of choice

means

not only will we

collectively do both,

probably each and every one of us

will do both,

you know?

Occasionally,

you flop on the seamy side.

It gives a literary quality

to life

that's lacking

among the tight ass.

So,

well, I don't know.

It's a quarter of ten.

Do you want to riff off that

for a bit

and then we'll

send these folks packing?

I've been

piecing together

an essay

while I've been here

which I'm calling

West of Esalen,

which is interesting

because if you take a look

at what's west of Esalen,

you see it in Gaping Cliff

which has been growing of late.

And Esalen,

as is all of California,

is breaking off

and falling into the sea

and there is no safe land

anywhere.

And that's

more than

a metaphor

for where we are now

and it's interesting

because

there's talk about

what Esalen

has to do

with the modern age

and yet

so much of

what we think of

as

modern language

has been shaped

by what's come out

of this place.

Talking about

somebody's vibes

or being touchy-feely

or even doing yoga

which is now

of course

all the rage

in late millennial culture.

These are all

impulses

that came out

of this place.

So there's something

about this space

and about the body

which is

incredibly right

and even if

Esalen

vanished tomorrow,

God is forbid,

even if it did,

the impact

of it

as an institution

has been profound.

And I think

perhaps what we're

trying to do here

this weekend

and tonight

is to extend

the franchise

of Esalen

into another realm

to say that

the values

that make us

human,

the values

that make us

good

are the values

that come out

of what's done here

and maybe

they're values

that rely

on the body

in some way.

That even as

we talk about

this Gnostic

release,

this uploading

of the soul

into some sort

of silicon

which we will

talk about,

that there's

this body

that's behind

sort of bitching

saying,

excuse me,

I'm real

and I am the

potential,

I am the ground

in which you work.

Because of that,

I hope that we will

spend some of the

weekend

not just

speculating

but constantly

looping

and bringing it

back into the body

and where the body

is.

The question of the

body is one

of the largest

questions in

virtual reality.

That's a curious

contradiction

question and get

it's true.

Where is the body

in cyberspace?

Where are you

when your email

is flashing

across the net,

when your agents

are doing your

bidding?

Where are you

and how do you

maintain yourself?

And it was

interesting because

there was a

comment that was

made earlier

about psychedelics

as a shortcut

versus yoga

or one of the

other traditions

and I know that

in my own life

I need both of

them because I

need the psychedelics

in order to be

able to have

the vision but

I need the yoga

in order to

maintain the

stability to

express the

vision.

And so there's

both dials there.

It's as if the

internet is some

sort of collective

psychedelic.

We're going to

need the body

as we pass

through it so

that we can

explore the

zones within

ourselves that

are the good.

Yeah, it's

great what you

say about that

we're trying to

push the

definitions of

Esalen's

relevance because

the entire

intellectual and

spiritual effort

here over the

past 30 years

flies under the

flag of the

human potential

movement.

I mean, that's

what it's

called.

And certainly

what we're

talking about

here and

trying to

bring gently

onto the

stage is an

enormous frontier

of human

potential.

potential in

the service of

the idea of

a perfected

humanity of

some sort.

And what we're

talking about

here is not

genetic manipulation

or eugenics or

any of these

somewhat dubious

enterprises with a

clouded history,

but using

technological

prosthesis to

extend and

enrich

humanness, to

enrich

communication, and

it is, believe me,

the want of

good communication

that is the

thing probably, if

anything undoes

us, this will be

it, that our

languages fail, that

we misread each

other's intent, that

we could not

understand each

other. So the

project of

refining language

is the same

project as the

ending of

history. I

mean, history is

the story of

languages that

failed, and

when language

grows perfect,

history will

end, and

language may

not look like

it looks today

or sound like

it sounds

today. The

realization that's

flowered in the

wake of the

internet and

the rise of

cybernetics is

that everything

is made of

information.

Information is

the primary

datum of

being. Concepts

like time and

space and

energy are

orders of

magnitude

removed from

the present at

hand when

compared with

a concept like

information. And

as Mark

said, every

iota, every

bit of

information that

passes through

us, that we

generate, that

we transmit,

changes us. So

I'm seeing here

almost a

theosophical

epiphany of

language trying

to bootstrap

itself toward

realms of

platonic

perfection, which

as organic

beings we

experience as

love. Love,

beauty, truth,

these are the

vectors of

human becoming.

They always

have been, they

always will be, and

the technologies

that open these

paths for us

are no more

and no less

powerful than

the human

beings that

wield them.

So, you

know, this

is an

enterprise of

integrity and

millennial

implication. And

what lies as

the goal is

true

humanness in

sympathetic

symbiosis with

the planet and

with these

strange children

that we have

brought into the

world, our

machines. I

mean, that is

the challenge at

the end of

history. And

that is what

we will be

talking about

this weekend.

Thanks for

coming and

get some

sleep. Mark, I

wanted to ask

you, where is

the yoga?

Yoga is

7.30 tomorrow

morning, they

have movements

here. In the

meeting room in

the big house?

In the big

house, the

living room at

7.30.

Everyone

familiar where the

big house is? It's

across the bridge and

it's the big

house.

The big

house.

As opposed to

the little house

which it sits

opposite from.

And it's the big

house, 7.30, please,

you'll enjoy it. If

you have a blanket or

something, bring it,

it'll be comfy, but

if not, don't worry

about it.