Vertigo At History's Edge

Okay, I really want to thank a few people.

I especially want to thank WFMU.

There are quite a few radio personalities on WFMU

who really helped publicize.

Frank O'Toole and Doug Shulkin, who's the director there.

Let's see, Fabio and Dave Mandel, quite a few other people.

So I really thank you.

It's one of the hippest little radio stations around, 91.1.

So WFMU, thanks a lot.

I also want to thank Rick Doblin of MAPS,

which is a group called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,

a very serious organization in Charlotte

that does a lot of pioneering work

in encouraging serious research into psychedelic drugs,

something that hasn't been done seriously enough for a long time

for obvious reasons, and they do wonderful work.

So anyway, kudos to Rick Doblin and MAPS in Charlotte, North Carolina,

for those of you who want to check them out.

All right, on to the main event.

I don't know.

Every time I introduce Terrence, I go through a few changes.

Terrence is certainly remarkable,

and there are quite a few things that are remarkable about him.

Whenever I think I've heard his rap,

and I figure I know what he's going to say,

he'll blow my mind and do some rant on monogamy, monotheism, and monotony.

Or he'll, at the Seeds of Change conference in San Francisco last year,

he's delivered an incredible political tirade against militarism

and dealing with the issues of overpopulation.

So he's full of surprises,

even though we know generally the territory he covers.

He's capable of pulling the rabbit out of the hat on many occasions.

One reason for that is that he has the good fortune, I guess,

of being part of that white tribe of the Irish,

who are the best white rappers, certainly,

overall, you know, of any white ethnic group.

And I've got to admit that I don't always agree with Terrence.

Of course, I don't always agree with anyone,

not even myself, on different days.

But I have a hard time sometimes accepting ideas

about the singularity at the end of history in 2012.

I'm a little too earthy or earthbound

or limited in my ability to fantasize that way,

although I always enjoy the intellectual ride.

I also can't quite accept his blanket dismissal

of many spiritual, all spiritual traditions and techniques.

And even though the psychedelic experience

has been a centerpiece of my life in many ways,

or one of them,

I also, more than Terrence,

am very wary about some of the potential downsides

physiologically, psychologically, even ideologically.

But nonetheless, that's not really the point.

And you're not here to hear me.

You're here to hear Terrence.

But Terrence is the only person

really putting himself out on the line

with an incredibly courageous stand,

really defending the psychedelic sacrament experience,

which has, after all,

been one of the centerpieces of many, many cultures

around the world,

whether it's Ayahuasca in the Amazon

or Soma in the ancient Vedic texts of India

or, you know, psilocybin in ancient Mexico

or so on, peyote.

These have been incredibly important substances

in many, many ancient religions

and are still widely used today,

as most of you, I'm sure, are aware.

So Terrence has really put himself out there

and I think see more and more young people

are taking to his message.

And I worry sometimes that he'll become too popular

and that the ruling elites who somehow so far ignored him,

thank God,

for the most part,

might suddenly pay more attention

and that worries me a little bit,

but I know that Terrence wants to get the message out

to as many people as possible,

so perhaps they're seduced by the sinuous syntax

into not quite comprehending what he's talking about.

Let's hope that that's the case.

Anyway, and as a spokesperson,

I can't imagine a better spokesperson.

What an orator.

You know, that's what I think Terrence turns me on most

is his incredible ability with the English language.

If you can imagine a combination of Plotinus,

James Joyce, Lord Buckley, Ice-T, and Charlie Parker,

that would give you some idea of Terrence's abilities.

Anyway, so let's bring him out

and see if he lives up to my rap.

So I trust the mic is adjusted

and been through that,

been there, done that.

Good.

It's great to be back in New York on a spring evening.

I can hardly restrain myself

to pour into the matter at hand.

However, before I do,

I want to thank JP

for that lengthy disclaimer and introduction.

Now you know where he stands

and I think I know where I stand.

The occasion for being here,

if there needs to be an occasion,

is that the invisible landscape

is finally out in a new edition.

It hasn't been available since 1975.

And somebody said to me,

you know, it's really good

that the invisible landscape came out last

because you actually sort of went downhill from there,

which I sort of agree.

I think it's the best piece.

It's also the least compromising.

It's not something you can shout about

from four feet behind the footlights.

It's more

the Brothers McKenna's collective stab

to immortality.

Anyway, it's available.

I think it's a very interesting book.

I hope you'll read it.

It's the companion volume

to True Hallucinations,

which has been out in hardback for a year,

but is now also out in paper.

So much for the necessary self-promotion.

Okay, this is called

either Vertigo at History's Edge or End.

I'm not sure which

because I hurried past the poster this morning

when I wrote down the title.

My notion with this lecture is to talk about

is there any reason why smart people should hope

in other words,

can one combine intelligence with hope

and not betray one or the other

is the only reasonable position

of intellectuals and people steeped

in Western tradition and history,

one of total hand-wringing,

head-scratching despair.

This is the official position

of the culture, as a matter of fact.

Hope is very un-chic,

or it was until recently.

There is now, I think,

a turning of the corner

on this issue in the culture.

First of all, simply because

despair has been done

very well by a number of people.

The French got there first.

Nobody is going to beat them

at that game.

And we've been at it since 1950.

And I think the various positions

have now been run through.

So is there a reasonable basis for hope?

And how deeply do we have to reconstruct

the premises of our worldview

in order to legitimately believe

in the human enterprise,

ourselves and each other?

Well, the answer is you've got to go deep.

We've been on a bummer for a long time.

Western civilization enshrines

as its central mystery

the law of thermodynamic entropy,

which is a huge bring-down.

It basically says

everything falls apart.

Everything dissipates

into less structure,

less order.

Everything is fleeting.

And from materialism,

we've learned to accept the idea

that death is the yawning grave.

your compost, that's it.

A series of very

quote-unquote existential presumptions

have been built in

to Western civilization

over the past three or four hundred years

with greater and greater ferocity.

And this hopelessness

is a concomitant

to the rise of hierarchical managerial structures

in Western society.

In other words,

a precondition for

hierarchical management of society

is a docile,

confused,

disheartened population

stabilized in an economic system

that places a premium

on low awareness,

repetitious,

uncreative lives.

And this is the kind

of situation

in which many, many people,

more and more people,

find themselves.

So, because I have an innate intuition

that the universe

is a more positive enterprise

than that,

and because I think

a fair examination

of nature

would support

this anti-existential position,

I sort of wanted to

talk about this

this evening

and show

how some of the things

in my shtick

which are most misunderstood

and most misrepresented

are in fact

in orbit around

this attempt

to empower optimism

in a domain

of believability.

I mean,

it's easy to be an optimist

if you're a nitwit,

but, you know,

to be an optimist

and be cool,

this is the challenge.

It's not easy.

I think that our worldview

has overlooked

two fundamental facts

about the nature

of reality

and the absence

of these two fundamental facts

in our models

of how the universe works

is what has given us

such a downward trajectory

into factionalism,

existential despair,

a broken connection

to nature

and in some cases

to each other.

Two fundamental things

were overlooked

and I want to discuss them

and then show

how the recovery

of these things

feeds in

to a legitimate optimism.

Okay,

the first thing

that science overlooked

and by science

I mean

the entire

Western value package,

the science,

the politics,

the religion,

the aesthetics,

because it is all

derivative

of Renaissance science

and transformed

classical values.

what was overlooked

was what I call

the conservation

of novelty.

Now what I mean

by this

is something

very easy

for you

to convince yourself

is happening.

The conservation

of novelty

is simply that

over time

the universe

has become

more complicated.

New levels

of complexity

become the foundations

for yet

deeper levels

of complexity

and this

phenomenon

of the production

and conservation

of what I call

novelty

is not something

which goes on

only in the

biological domain

or only in

the cultural domain

or only in

the domain

of physics.

It is

a

transcategorical

impulse

in reality

meaning

it's

everywhere.

Everywhere.

The universe

was born

in a state

of great

simplicity.

There were

no atoms,

there were

no molecules,

there were

no stars,

there was only

a plasmic

ocean of

energy.

The physics

for describing

this were

very simple.

As time

passed

you could

almost imagine

complexity

crystallizing

out of

a universe

that cools.

As it cools

new properties

emerge,

what David Bohm

called

emergent properties

come out

of the

universal mix.

atomic

systems

form.

This creates

an entirely

new domain

of matter

different

from the

plasma

that preceded

it.

As the

universe

cools,

matter

aggregates

into

stars.

Stars

cook out

heavier

elements,

among them

carbon.

Carbon

sets the

stage for

four-valent

complex

polymer

chemistry

that sets

the stage

for life.

Simple

life

sets the

stage

for

complex

life.

Complex

life

sets the

stage

for

multicellular

advanced

animals,

land animals,

so forth

and so on.

You see

what the

process

is here.

It's that

each

emergent

property

becomes a

building block

for a

new set

of

phenomena.

The

concrescence

of atomic

systems

allows the

physical

world.

The

generation

of carbon

chemistry

allows the

organic

world.

The

complexification

of advanced

animals

allows the

conscious

world of

human

culture

and

civilization.

Now

interesting

to note

about this

is it's

fairly

obvious.

I don't

think we

have to

beat each

other over

the head

with it.

It's pretty

clear that

it's true

and that

it's

happening.

Yet

science

has never

joined

us in

this

perception

of the

obvious.

Science

believes

in

evolution

but

in

biological

systems

but

defines it

as a

completely

non-progressive

process

where

random

mutation

meets

natural

selection

and

out of

this

comes

an

ever

differentiating

set of

forms.

But

an

orthodox

evolutionary

biologist

will be

quick

to tell

you

mustn't

make

the

intellectual

error

of

thinking

of

this

as

progress

or

advance

or

movement

toward

a goal.

These

are all

teleological

ideas

that

science

expunged

from

its

evolutionary

theory.

So

biological

process

is not

seen

as

progressive

and

yet

what

I'm

saying

to

you

this

evening

is

that

not

only

is

biology

progressive

but

it

emerges

out

of

an

antecedent

progressive

process

the

evolution

of

physical

matter

and

the

physical

universe

of

stars

and

so

forth

and

it

in

the

form

of

culture

language

human

beings

the

creation

of

material

culture

the

elaboration

of the

arts

and

sciences

so forth

and so

on

okay

that's

I think

fairly

obvious

and yet

science

by denying

it

gives us

no arrow

of purpose

in the

felt

world

of human

existence

when you go

to the

universities

and you

ask

what is

history

you will

be told

it's a

trendlessly

fluctuating

process

well this

is

fascinating

if

it's

a

trendlessly

fluctuating

process

it is

the

only

process

ever

behaved

ever

observed

to

behave

in

that

fashion

processes

by their

very

nature

have

an

innate

predictability

so

that's

the

first

thing

that

I

think

science

and

the

worldview

derivative

of it

has

overlooked

that

from

the

very

birth

of

the

universe

there

was

a

progressive

advance

into

complexity

that

built

on

previously

achieved

levels

and

adumbrated

those

levels

brought

them

to

still

a

deeper

expression

of

novelty

and

complexification

until

we

arrive

at

this

moment

in

this

city

and

I

submit

to

you

this

is

the

most

complex

moment

in

the

most

complex

place

in

the

universe

to

date

because

we

have

the

physical

world

the

natural

world

the

your

basic

human

world

your

basic

post

industrial

human

world

the

world

of

electronic

human

integration

the

world

of

post

modernity

we

are

living

we

are

the

inheritors

of

all

the

complexity

that

preceded

us

okay

so

then

that

brings

me

to

the

second

point

empowering

optimism

of a

fairly

radical

sort

and

again

I

appeal

to

your

observational

intelligence

nothing

is going

to be

asserted

that

runs

counter

to

intuition

but

what

is

asserted

runs

counter

to

the

description

of

reality

that

we're

getting

from

science

the

second

point

relates

to

the

first

it

is

this

not

only

has

novelty

conserved

itself

and

built

on

what

has been

achieved

in

the

past

to

move

toward

the

future

but

and

of

the

two

points

this

is

the

more

important

each

stage

of

advancement

into

novelty

into

complexity

into

concrescence

has

proceeded

more

quickly

than

the

phase

which

preceded

did

the

universe

is

in a

state

of

asymptotic

acceleration

of

some

sort

and

this

has been

completely

ignored

not

ignored

denied

by

science

I mean

science

says

that

everything

interesting

happened

at the

beginning

of the

birth

of the

universe

in

a

few

very

short

eras

a

number

of

physical

states

came

and

went

a

number

of

sets

of

physical

laws

superseded

each

other

but

after

a

few

minutes

the

universe

settled

in

to a

steady

cooling

along

the

lines

which

we

see

around

us

and

then

science

says

that

at

some

unimaginably

distant

point

in the

future

the

stars

will

burn

out

and

tropic

heat

death

will

set

in

all

structure

will

dissipate

and

the

whole

thing

will

sort

of

evaporate

away

like

an

Alka-Seltzer

tablet

to

maintain

that

kind

of

an

entropic

view

of the

universe

you

have

to

completely

ignore

the

importance

of

biology

now

it

so

happens

that

we

live

around

a

very

stable

star

that

probably

has

a

life

span

of

seven

or

eight

billion

years

but

this

has

given

us

a

false

sense

of

the

stability

and

the

enduringness

of

matter

the

lives

of

most

stars

are

on

the

order

of

half

a

billion

to

on

this

small

planet

for

a

billion

and

a

half

years

as

a

process

with

inert

tenacity

life

is as

persistent

as the

stars

themselves

in fact

more

so

now

we know

that stars

are simply

large

nuclear

furnaces

which

eventually

use up

all

their

fuel

and

run

down

but

what

life

is

we're

not

at

all

sure

hardly

to

speak

of

intelligence

life

and

intelligence

are

the

wild

cards

in

the

universal

deck

we

now

aspire

to a

planetary

civilization

to

the

electronic

storage

of

information

for

eons

and

we

have

only

been

at

this

global

cultural

game

for

about

years

it's

very

clear

to

me

at

least

that

life

is

a

process

as

important

in shaping

the

eventual

destiny

of the

universe

as

physics

or

chemistry

and

that

intelligence

also

plays

a

role

there

well

if

you

have

a

universe

that

is

building

on

achieved

novelty

and

building

faster

and

faster

then you

have

a

universe

which

is

consuming

its

share

of time

if you

will

a universe

which is

building

toward

its

conclusive

denouement

much

faster

than

the

entities

the

beings

embedded

in it

might

suppose

and

I

said

that

in order

to hope

you have

to dump

the whole

scientific

view

of the

universe

you also

have to

take

your own

humanness

much more

seriously

as a way

to let us

escape

from moral

obligation

to ourselves

and each

other

science

proclaimed

the

ephemerality

of the

human

experience

that we

arose on

a minor

planet

around

an

uninteresting

star

in a

typical

galaxy

we are

no more

than animals

we will

have our

moment

we will

sputter out

we will

leave a

greasy

trace

in the

shales

and that

will be

it

and therefore

talking about

higher values

love

ethical

obligation

and so

forth

is thought

to be

terribly

old

half

I take

an entirely

different

view

harking

back to

the

renaissance

humanists

with a

vengeance

and I

think

that

human

beings

on this

planet

and the

kind of

society

that we

live in

is an

enunciation

of the

approaching

ascent

into

higher

levels

of

novelty

nothing

is

unannounced

nothing

comes

unexpectedly

if you

know how

to read

the

signs

and

for

a very

very

long

time

the

human

species

has been

knitting

itself

together

claiming

technologies

which allow

the manipulation

of energy

letting its

population

run

uncontrolled

to force

an ever

expanding

cultural

and technological

frontier

the presence

of ourselves

on this planet

is the

major

evidence

that a

transcendental

process

of some

sort

is underway

here

if this were a

planet

of

chipmunks

glaciers

butterflies

and caribou

herds

Darwinian

evolution

with a

few

twiddles

would be

perfectly

adequate

to explain

what is

going on

here

but

an

acceleration

of

process

in a

limited

domain

of

biology

beginning

about a

million

years

ago

indicates

to me

that we

are now

entering

the

short

epochs

meaning

these

periods

in which

the

evolution

of

novelty

occurs

so

rapidly

that

transitions

from one

domain

to another

actually

can be

noted

within the

lifetime

of

single

human

beings

it's

an

enormous

act

of

intellectual

acrobatics

to

deny

that

we

appear

to be

sailing

toward

catastrophe

at a

thousand

miles

an

hour

with

nobody

able

to

figure

out

where

the

break

is

I

believe

governments

scientific

industrial

democracies

are simply

now

managing

the

terror

of

apocalypse

because

they

have

no

clue

as

to

how

to

halt

direct

manage

or

control

the

processes

that

they

have

set

in

motion

population

growth

extraction

of

minerals

toxification

of the

environment

the

raising

of

middle

class

expectations

in the

hearts

of

billions

of

impoverished

people

in the

third

world

the

institutions

which

created

this

situation

have

no

notion

as to

how

to

direct

and

control

it

this

is

why

we're

not

getting

any

kind

of

leadership

from

the

top

why

everything

is

managed

toward

a

steady

state

meanwhile

technology

which is

the

downloading

of

human

ideas

into

the

domain

of

matter

is

proceeding

unabated

around

the

clock

I mean

we have

hardware

for which

we have

not yet

written

software

because

we have

no idea

how to

take

advantage

of

the

machines

that

have

already

been

put

in

place

there

is

no

one

planning

the

evolution

of

our

integration

into

our

technology

you

are

free

to

write

any

kind

of

software

you

like

no

one

can

foresee

then

the

consequences

all of this technological development software wetware hardware being stirred

together the planet has shrunk to a single informational point the passing

of every day every week brings us closer and closer to a kind of informational

tangentiality with each other well I believe following the victim but

nothing is unannounced that we can from what is happening to us now extrapolate

toward this adventure in transformational novelty that is now looming

ahead of us with such presence that it casts an enormous shadow over the

three-dimensional landscape of historical becoming and we as moderns are very

conflicted about this because the only vocabulary we have to deal with something

like this is the vocabulary of discredited religion before the rise of science

before the rise of technology when when religions presided over a much more

slow-moving and easily managed world great thinkers of all persuasion through

meditation and divine inspiration whatever saw that man's journey was a journey from

the demonic to the divine and that history was somehow the stage of human

redemption that view died with the rise of secular capitalism and industrial

democracy and yet here in this at the height of the trajectory of the enterprise of

science and materialism news comes from the rainforest from the aboriginal peoples of the world that there

are technologies of a different sort that have been in place since at least the

last ice age these are neuro technologies quasi symbiotic relationships with plants

pharmacological approaches to manipulating human memory aspiration aesthetic concerns so forth and so on

these psychedelic intimations have been presented to us as the naive suppositions of

primitives the landscape of the union unconscious chaotic events happening in the human brain mind system so forth and so on these are all reductionist

explanation I believe that what these psychedelic states are are actually a sense to a higher order

of information and by a sense I mean the word in the dimensional

context as a mathematical idea that here we are deployed in a three-dimensional matrix the past fades into

unknowability the future fades into unknowability and only the crudest and least interesting of process

processes like the rising of the sun and the tides can be propagated into the future

future with confidence what shamans see in contrast to this is a hyper-dimensional universe of information

they see the past the origin and they see the goal

the culmination the place where they're the ouroboric snake takes its tail in its mouth

we who are locked in linear history don't have this perspective and what we have in

instead is immense anxiety immense anxiety about the future we map the unknowable future onto the presumed

experience of our own death and vice versa and we build up a universe that is characterized by

by existential abysses the unknown future the inevitability of death and its and the impossibility

of intellectually assimilating what that means shamanism isn't like this shamanism is a fractal point

of view what fractals are are structures that have their subsets embedded in them subsets embedded in them

so the course of the history of an entire people can be known by looking at the history of an individual or a family

all subsets refer to levels above and below them this is entirely different from the kind of linear history that we get in a hierarchical scientific society

it is more characteristic of experience and this is a very important point because the two phenomena that I tried to call your attention to that argue for hope are the self-evident accumulation of novelty and the self-evident acceleration of that accumulation of novelty

well now notice the phrase self-evident these are not things that you have to study advanced mathematics to perceive these are not things revealed to the holders of advanced degrees this is stuff that one can tell by feeling into the world

the structure of linear society has disempowered the individual we are all now we have bought the the habesian notion that we are social atoms in a vaster machine than ourselves with a greater purpose than we can know

this is actually hogwash as you move away from the human individual the consciousness about what is happening becomes more and more low-grade and amoeba like

you have the consciousness of the Giuliani administration the consciousness of the American government

you see as you as you widen the van it becomes more and more primitive more and more simply a matter of stimulus and response but you the supposed irrelevant atom at the center of this process make very subtle judgments

take in information of all sorts compare contrast way understand seek evidence

this is the subtlest thinking that's going on but we don't reclaim our own mind

we look for institutional guidance and yet it was institutions that guided us to this moment

so the character then of this next advance into novelty

is it from my point of view now easily discerned

it is a boundary dissolution this is what is happening

this is why great wealth and great poverty must come to terms with each other

it's why the first world and the third world must come to terms with each other

it's why gays and straights must come to terms with each other

boundary dissolution is what is happening

and this is been going on for a long time

but it affected our peripheral technologies first

almost without us noticing it

we've gone from a world where information moved at the speed of a horse's gallop to a world where all information is cotangent

space is only an illusion of the plebes

everyone else with their computer networks and their connections knows that the world has become a kind of virtual point

and yet still we maintain the most toxic of all the fictions to come out of the dominator experience

the fiction of the individual ego

this maintenance of the fiction of the ego is what is exacerbating a smooth transition into a new world order

because people have one foot in the dematerialized collectivist virtual feeling toned experience based future

but they also have one foot in the computer

I'm sorry in the consumer fetish

objectified

constipated

linear

acquisitive

class conscious sex conscious race conscious past

and each one of us

is a union

of these opposites

each one of us is trying to make some kind

of a

alloy

of our hideously dysfunctional cultural past

and

the incredibly compelling

yet frightening

dimensionless

boundaryless

polymorphic

polyamorous

future

and

to my mind then

the role that psychedelics play in all this

is critical

because they are catalysts

for change

if you are not moving as fast as the general wave of novelty

psychedelics will bring you up to speed

society will go from being utterly incomprehensible and horrifying to simply being horrifying

if you are up to speed and you with the with the cultural wave and you then avail yourself of psychedelics

you become a force for spreading calm spreading understanding because make no mistake about it as we close distance

with the transcendental object at the end of time there is going to be a lot of vibration accumulate on the superstructures of the social airfoil

if the airfoil cannot be redesigned in flight as we approach this barrier we will be ripped to pieces

this is it you know HG Wells said in 1905 history is a race between education and catastrophe and it is going to be a photo finish

you know if we end up a smear through the shale and nature concludes that intelligence is something never again to put into the hopper

then it will be an enormous tragedy because we didn't go down without a struggle

we have the technologies the ideology the compassion for each other and caring world

we are not a lost cause yet

but we may end up a lost cause and people then say well what should be done

you know the Tolstoyan question what then should be done

well I came up through the whole Berkeley thing in the 60s and all that and I'm very wary

of hortatory political prescriptions

for what should be done

I mean we saw that the best impulses in Marxism turn into the most horrifyingly regimented and totalitarian societies

goodwill is not enough

so what is to be done

I think the answer to this is not only nothing

but considerably less than nothing

and what I mean by that is that the real solutions to our problems lie in a series of negatives

do not believe

ideology has poisoned this planet

ideology is bankrupt

it's a skin game

it's a shell game

it's only for Marx

and Marx

it's

it is beneath your dignity as a body

to get mixed up in ideology

I mean after all where is it writ large that talking monkeys should understand the nature of being anyway

so belief is an incredible cop-out on intellectual truth-seeking

because belief precludes believing in its opposite

and so this is a self limitation

you've become your own cop

and the ideologies of the 20th century are so shoddy and hobbled together

or toxic to human values

they're not worth believing in anyway

so deconditioning ourselves from belief

some people call it cynicism

I call it good sense

I'm not a cynical person

but I know shit from Shinola

and I don't expect people who don't

to get a lot of respect from the rest of us

I mean what does it mean if you're an optimist

and that means you can't proclaim the difference between boot polish and excreta

it's ridiculous

okay

don't believe

the next thing which comes out of that and is an even stronger prohibition

don't follow

following is a tasteless position to find yourself in

pets follow

vice presidents follow

and bad acts follow

so you know why follow

all of all of these gurus

geishas roshis and rishis

are simply flim flam artists

they've had thousands of years to get these cons together

and run them on you

believe me I know I'm a recovering catholic

you have to fight your way free of belief

and then do not follow

do not follow

it's an obsolete tasteless thing

and there's no human dignity in it whatsoever

then

a harder one

a more radical one

the one that might get me shot

do not

in some profoundly metaphysical sense

consume

do not consume

for obvious reasons

and then not

so obvious reasons

the obvious reasons are

that the fetish

for objects

made of matter

is wrecking the planet

if everybody on earth

had

what the people in the front row

here have

there wouldn't be

enough

metal glass

plastic

and petroleum

in the planet

to provide that kind of lifestyle

to the billions of people

who now aspire

none of this stuff

brings happiness

anyway

I recently had the experience

of having my 75 Ford Granada

blow up on me

in the middle of the night

and so

I had to buy a new car

so I went down a year

and up a brand

and I got a 74 BMW

and it cost me two grand

and I guarantee you

once you have the little thing

on the steering wheel

the Quaternity sign

you don't need the $90,000 model

what we should all do

is buy antiques

don't consume anything

which hasn't already been made

it's a lot of shit that's been made

it's all over the place

I see it in Manhattan

going for a bundle

if

if we

what we need to do

you see

is re

tool our values

so that

what is new

is

odious

tasteless

de classe

embarrassing

and not to be found

in the better home

the older things are

the better they are

here's a 50 year old chair

fine

here's a 500 year old chair

how much better

we need to cease to consume

and I'm somewhat facetious

in suggesting that we all become

aficionados of Chippendale furniture

and that sort of thing

that isn't the plan either

but the endless fetishism

for consumer objects

is wrecking the planet

and then finally

well no not finally

there's one after this

but another negative

and this is a slightly more

difficult to follow

requires a little

cogitation

it's insidious

we shouldn't watch

watching is some kind of

voyeuristic

sadomasochistic peculiarity

that we are permitting

ourselves

because we think

there are too many of us

to do

but I don't think this is true

I think watching

is an incredibly disempowering

thing

millions of people

live

half awake

larval

lives

watching

six and a half hours

of TV

a day

and as long as they

stay in their homes

you know

shopping

by phone

and fax

everybody

is happy

but they participate

not at all

in the society

they're the marks

and they consume

they consume

the media

the entertainment

the clothes

the styles

the brands

they are the morons

who are keeping

this system

running

and I assume

that largely

the people here

tonight are not

we're the people

who grind out

all this stuff

I mean

I feel I do this

I write books

I produce ideas

they are

grist for the marketplace

Harper and Bantam

don't care what I'm saying

what they care about

is how the books

are selling

you know

product number 3245

a sub f

how is it doing

in the marketplace

do not watch

because when you're watching

you're not

at the center of things

largely what I'm talking about here

is reclaiming experience

reclaiming experience

this is what's been taken from us

this is why the new music and dance culture

is so important

this is why drug culture

is so important

this is why the celebration of sexual minorities

is so important

this is all about

coming to grips with who you really are

and how you really feel

and then experiencing it

you know

you are not owned

it is not he or she or them or it

that you belong to

and we have been told

that we have to fit in

we have to make sense

this is not true

we are creating a world

that celebrates diversity

that celebrates the uniqueness of every person

the complexification of our species

is a process directly dependent

on the complexity that we each bring to the process

the diversity that is spreading through society

is a concomitant to the boundary dissolution

and I really believe that

that science's inability to make sense

of human beings in the world

as part of nature

to make sense of art

love

hate

aspiration

fear

the failure to make sense of this

is the failure to come to terms

with the transcendental aspect of reality

we are the best evidence there is

that something extraordinarily unusual is happening on this planet

and that it's not something which will go on for millions of years

it began about 20,000 years ago

it's a self-advancing self-expanding self-defining process

and it takes no prisoners

you know

there is no going back

from the momentum

that history has imparted

to the human imagination

there is only a going forward

into what is called a forward escape

through art

through design

through management and integration

that we have to push the art pedal

to the floor

we have never designed our society

we have never managed our societies

or our lives

we have never tried to make what we were

serve an aesthetic agenda

and that's why we've created a mess

in the absence of an aesthetic agenda

what we've created is an animal house

on a global scale

so now it's time to pay the piper

and just in closing

the catalyst now is a combination of technologies

solid-state technologies and pharmacology

the world that we are leaving behind

the world that failed us

was a world of ideologies and mechanical technologies

and the ideologies one by one are going down the tubes

Marxism Freudianism fascism

they one by one will be discredited

they cannot sustain

and the mechanical technologies cannot be sustained

they pollute they dehumanize

they wreck the planet

what is coming into place

is a world where drugs replace ideology

that's why drugs are so terrifying

to those who oppose them

that's why they say

you want to escape

you want to take drugs to escape

that's right

you want to escape

you want to escape fascism

communism socialism

existentialism

phenomenology

positivism

all of this stuff

you want to escape

ideology

into the felt presence of the body

which means drugs and sex

and syncopated music

and

and parallel to this development

and happening in different sectors of society

is the hard wiring of our imagination

the building of databases that we can access instantaneously

that make the human past co-present with the now

the boundary dissolution that I'm talking about

includes the division between past present and future

this is what it means to end Newtonian time

it means that the past the present and the future

become a co-extensive domain

where everyone then awakens to the fact

which was always there to be observed

that there is not simply one past

there is nothing called the past

I have a past

you have a past

it's not the same past

consequently the futures we are going to are different

we create our own realities

as a species

and as an individual

and so what we are passing through here

in the now

in this lecture

in the 20th century

is a moment of community

a gam as Melville would say

a gam is where two sailing ships

two whaling ships meet at sea

that's what we have here

a gam a moment of dialogue

and then we will each go back to our own private Idaho's

but the thing to take back

to those private Idaho's

is the awareness

that human history secures

the central importance of human beings

we are part of a universal adventure

what happens to us

decrees the fate of a vast set

of universal processes and circumstances

we are not ephemeral

irrelevant

to each other

or to the greater whole

this is the truth of psychedelics

that aboriginal societies have always known

and it's the truth that we had to sacrifice

in order to make the prodigal journey into matter

but the prodigal journey into matter

has now been concluded

we found the top quark

we've shut down the super collider

now we need to go back to the problems of the human soul

and there isn't much time

but the tools that have been put into our hands

are the most powerful tools there have ever been

the Gaian connection into the vegetable mind of the planet

that we are trying to mirror and hard wire on a human scale

nature is full of interest and affection for humanity

it's up to us to discover that humanity in ourselves

because we have gone so sour along the rational path

and connect it up with the bunch with the rest of nature

this is a process which is happening

but it's a birth

it can go with ease

because we help it from this side

or it can be traumatic

because we resist

and as McLuhan said

insist on driving the automobile of history

using only the rear view mirror

that's no way to proceed

we need to wake up

smell the coffee

turn on the lights

get loaded

and to direct the human future

toward a mirroring of aspirations

such that we are pleased then

to turn the enterprise over to those who follow us

we'll take a brief break

brief like fifteen minutes

I'll sign books

I'll only do signatures because of the shortness of the break.

Circulate around.

We'll come back and do a half an hour or so of Q&A.

Thank you very, very much for coming out to me.

It's nice to see you.

Ideas like that states spontaneously perturb themselves

to higher states of order,

that order within a system is conserved, so forth and so on.

Yes, fractal mathematics is an intellectual revolution,

the magnitude of which has not yet been fully appreciated, I think.

It's a very, very big deal.

It's just that so much is happening in our world

that it's very hard for us to know

what are the real epical turning points

and what is just flim-flam and high-pola.

But the power of fractal mathematics

has carried the human mind to a whole new level.

You know, mathematics was not thought to be a natural science

by its practitioners until very recently.

It was thought to be an abstract undertaking.

But it turns out its most abstract constructions

have a curious congruency over population growth,

the organization of species in a rainforest,

so forth and so on.

Yes, there is.

The cultural change that is coming is not superficial.

It's not simply about club, dance styles, fashion, sexual mores.

It's about all that.

But when it's all over,

the mathematics will be different,

the physics will be different,

everything will be different.

This is a major shift in cultural values.

You had a question.

Do you still want to do it?

Number five.

Oh, number five.

I don't think I really gave it its worth.

Basically, number five is do not multiply.

Replace yourself, but do not multiply.

You know, go forth and multiply.

No, go forth and lightly subtract.

It's a better way to do it.

I mean, I have taught,

I don't want to get into it tonight,

but I've talked at other times about

how if every woman would have just one child,

the population of the earth would fall by half in 40 years,

and how the women in the high-tech industrial democracies

are the most likely to get this message

because they're educated, global, concerned citizens.

And it is their children

who are destroying the resource base of the world

because a child born to a woman on the Upper East Side or Berkeley

consumes between 800 and 1,000 times more resources

than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh.

And, you know, when I talked earlier,

I referred to managing and designing societies.

One of the things I think we need to talk about

that has not yet come out of the sexual redefinition debate

is I think that this whole thing about

how do we feminize society

and women are not getting their fair shake

and what do we do about white male dominators and all that

and how do we make men more like women and so forth and so on.

This is all somewhat cockamamie

in terms of the idea that we need to feminize men.

We don't need to feminize men.

We need to feminize society.

And the obvious way to do that

is return to paleolithic sexual ratios,

which were probably about 70-30 women to men

rather than 50-50.

The effort to maintain a sexual balance of 50-50

is some kind of monogamite plot

and it maintains male dominance

and a generally masculine character

to the enterprise of civilization.

But if women were 70% of the population,

that would quite naturally correct itself.

Over here.

If your strategy,

I've thought of this strategy too,

of course,

I think any artist does.

What do I think of Kurt Cobain's suicide?

What is the question?

What do I think of Kurt Cobain's suicide?

And the answer is,

as a strategy for advancing your career,

I think you should wait

until you're a little bit deeper into your career.

Anyway, it was my humble opinion

that Primus did it better.

And anyway, I like coils,

so let me off the hook here.

I'm a house guy

and I wish those people luck,

but you're more likely to find me

listening to World Without Walls.

Yeah, well, intuition refers back to this,

I made mention of nothing comes unannounced.

That's intuition.

But the rational mind has a real ability

to slough off the intuition.

The intuition never shouts,

it never grabs you by the lapels.

It just says,

hmm, maybe that airplane looks a little funny.

And then you don't get on it

and it blows up.

So intuition is basically a function of listening.

And since it's very hard for people to listen,

especially dominator types

or opinionated types,

I think the key to intuition

is to listen.

It's just like, you know,

the key to nature

is to look, I think.

I read a wonderful quote last week,

I think it was Goethe,

said,

thinking is better than knowing,

but looking is best of all.

And I think that's a very psychedelic perception.

Knowing is the worst of all.

Knowing is a huge drag

and it's a chimera anyway.

Nobody knows anything.

Don't let them kid you.

I mean, we're monkeys here.

Let's not lose sight of that.

Yeah.

When I say we should stop consuming,

I don't for a moment suppose

that we're going to live in a world

where no consumption takes place.

I mean, or we're going to live in a world

where population growth

is instantly halted.

There are more than one,

there's more than one way

to force novelty out of a system.

And simply repetitiously breeding,

that's a habitual activity.

And it does force a certain kind of novelty,

but it's a novelty born of desperation.

My notion is that you get much more novelty

out of a system.

If every person is valued,

if every person has leisure time

and opportunity for education

and this sort of thing,

the ingression into novelty

doesn't necessarily mean

an endless expansion

of an inventory of available tchotchkes.

It means a vertical integration

of all of these possibilities.

So I think we are going to elaborate

more technologies,

more connections.

There are going to be all kinds

of unusual configurations generated.

But to simply suppose

that we have to continue

in the direction we've been going,

I think is a mistake.

Capitalism is not

a human-friendly meme.

I mean, capitalism

will sell the ground

right out from under

where you're standing.

It has developed

a rapacious appetite

for its own survival

at the expense of human beings.

Some memes do this.

I mean, fascism was a meme

so virulent to the human agenda

that major outbreaks of it,

the whole planet halted

what it was doing

and stomped it out.

And now we have residual outbreaks

here and there.

But in terms of the aggression

into novelty,

it isn't a matter of human decision.

It's happening around the clock.

It's unstoppable.

The cultural experience

is becoming more and more psychedelic

as it becomes more and more

translinear and post-Newtonian.

Literally, society is entering

into a kind of hyperspace

or cyberspace,

some people call it.

I think of cyberspace

as the literalization of hyperspace.

One is the platonic goal,

the other is the human artifact

that seeks to realize that goal.

But definitely the cascade of novelty

has now reached such an intensity

that you have to be very lumpen indeed,

I think,

not to see it happening,

especially if you live in a town

like this one,

for crying out loud.

This is the concrescence

of the concrescence here.

One more,

and then we'll call it quits,

here on the aisle.

The last book?

Well, yeah,

he died a few years ago.

I'm not familiar with that book.

I'm familiar with the major works,

Understanding Media,

Gutenberg Galaxy.

What is your question?

I haven't read it,

so I can't comment.

Such a dud for me to wuss out.

I'll take one more question.

Yeah, here.

Well,

what I actually imagine

is a confluence of the two.

The question basically was

compare and contrast

evolving cyber technology

with shamanic technology,

compare and contrast drugs

and computers.

Are these things in parallel?

Are they complementary?

Are they opposed?

What are they?

I think that computers

are drugs too large

to swallow, essentially.

And that what we will see

in the future is

computers much more like drugs

and drugs much more like computers.

We are going to see drugs

that are information-based drugs.

So if you want to study Hegel,

you will take Hegelene.

We're going to see drugs

which are self-limiting

in their effects.

I mean, imagine, for instance,

a form of heroin

that it works 10 times

and then it never works again

for you in your life.

This is possible.

There are drugs which will,

I mean,

I think this is an interesting frontier.

Drugs which only work for a while.

So there's no possibility

of distorted or addictive lifestyles

because it works for three months

and then it stops working

and nobody spends money

on something that doesn't work.

We're going to see

the whole serotonin pathway

redesigned

through the trans-Prozac drugs.

We're going to see psychedelic states

simulated in virtual reality.

We're going to see the breakdown

of three-dimensional space

versus the machine space.

And all of these things are

essentially psychedelic effects.

It's only this Newtonian emphasis

on product and ego

and body locus

that makes us see the drugs

as somehow locked in the molecules.

The entire experience of human history

is a psychedelic experience.

And we're now in that place

deep in the second hour

where it all comes together.

The integration of some kind of unity

out of the multiplicity of phenomena

is now in reach.

We are literally hardwiring

the human unconscious.

The human unconscious

is ceasing to exist.

It's becoming a smaller and smaller domain

as it is transferred over

into the hardwiring

of the cultural database.

We cannot become the species

we want to be

with an unconscious mind.

That's an artifact

of the monkey phase

that has no place

in a global civilization.

And the making conscious

of the unconscious

is the combined task

of cybernetics

and pharmacology.

And I trust

that everything is on track

and moving forward.

It seems to me

the adventure is underway.

I don't see myself

as predicting something

that will happen.

I've become a narrator

of a phenomenon

in progress.

if you understand

what to look for.

Granted,

it will become more intense

in subsequent episodes,

but all the pieces

are now in play.

The challenge of postmodernity,

the challenge of the psychedelic,

millenarian, eschatonic world

is the challenge

of our own daily lives

and relationships.

It is here.

All right,

and I'm out of here.

So, thank you.