okay now i i will talk a little bit about um what i've learned from psychedelics
i feel self-conscious doing it but on the other hand wouldn't it be stupid for me to talk about
what you've learned from psychedelics that would add presumption to the sins already
uh arrayed here there are different models about what's how what the psychedelic experience is
here's a couple building on western psychotherapy as elaborated by freud and jung
one view of what psychedelics are is it's the part of your mind that you'd rather not do business with
it's the memories of childhood neglect or abuse it's uh repressed kinky fantasies it's in other
words the the freudian idea of the unconscious that somehow these are drugs which dissolve the
boundary between conscious and unconscious mind and then you can do accelerated psychotherapy
because resistances have been pharmacologically overcome that's one model it's good as far as it
goes it just doesn't go far enough then there's another model which i would call the traditional
or shamanic model and it says uh the cosmos is a series of levels and these levels are connected by
um um um vertical routes of access which can be thought of as simply flights through space
or magical trees or magical ladders anyway there's an an image of ascent and ordinary people exist on
only one of these levels but a shaman is not an ordinary person a shaman is a superhuman person who has
the power of animal allies behind them and they can go up and down in these elevators that move between
levels and they can therefore recover lost souls see uh social hanky-panky theft and adultery
see the causes behind that see the causes behind disease so forth and so on that's would be the
traditional one that what i have concluded after 25 years of fiddling with this is that both of those
ideas have a certain something to recommend them but that they don't go far enough and that we get more
to the meat of this if we leave off psychological the first explanation or sociological the second
explanation and actually go for something a little more uh formal to wit a mathematical model of what
shamanism is and what i mean by that is let's think about what shamans do they cure disease and another way of
putting that is they have a remarkable facility for choosing patients who will recover they predict weather
they're very important they tell where uh game has gone the movement of game and they seem to have an
an paranormal ability to look into questions as i mentioned who's sleeping with who who stole the chicken
uh who you know social uh transgressions are an open book to them well thinking about this from a
mathematician's point of view a an all-encompassing explanation that would explain how all these magical feats are done
is simply to suppose that the shaman is somehow able to project his consciousness his or her consciousness
into a higher dimension not metaphorically as in sylvester stallone has many dimensions
not metaphorically but literally as in one dimension two dimensions three dimensions and four because
if you could move into the fourth dimension the meant the dimension orthogonal to newtonian space-time
seeing what the weather is going to be next week is as easy as seeing what the weather is now
seeing where the game went is as easy as seeing where the game are knowing who stole the chicken is simply
defined by looking to see who stole the chicken and i have noticed that all of biology not simply shamanism
within the context of human society but all of biology is in a sense a conquest of dimensionality
that as we ascend the phylogeny of organic life what animals are are a strategy for conquering
space-time and complex animals do it better than simpler animals and we do it better than any complex animal
and we 20th century people do it better than any people in any previous century because we can bind data
in so many ways that they couldn't electronically on film on tape so forth and so on so the the progress of organic life
is deeper and deeper into dimensional conquest well from that point of view then the shaman begin to look
like the advance guard of a new kind of human being a human being that is as advanced over where we are
as we are advanced over uh people a million years ago because we have uh you know very elaborate strategies
for coding the past it's a dimensional conquest so that's part of what i've learned about psychedelics and i could
have left it there but i never do i uh always want to bring more in under the umbrella of whatever metaphor
it is that's being pushed and what i have discerned is uh that time is actually speeding up
that the universe is not what physics tells us it is physics tells us that the universe is an a physical
system an entropic system that was born in immense energy and chaos and will run down with a bang i mean
with a whimper not a bang run down into heat entropy and dissipation uh the psychedelic data on this is
completely different the psychedelic data says what that model left out was biology and mind now biology you
might imagine is a fairly ephemeral recent fragile phenomenon it is not the average star in this galaxy
gutters out after about 700 million years not our star we happen to have the good fortune to be around a very
stable slow burning star but there has been biology on this planet at least two billion years three times
the average life of a star so biology is not some johnny come lately epiphenomena biology
is a phenomenon more persistent than the life of the stars themselves and uh biology is not a static thing
i mean a star evolving now is not greatly different from a star evolving a billion years ago biology
doesn't work that way biology constantly changes the context in which evolution occurs the way i have
downloaded this into a phrase is the universe is the biological universe at least is a novelty conserving
engine upon simple molecules are built complex molecules upon complex molecules are built complex polymers
upon complex polymers comes dna out of dna comes the whole machinery of the cell
cell out of cells comes simple uh aggregate colony animals like hydra and that sort of thing out of that true animals
out of that ever more complex animals organs of locomotion organs of sight organs of smell complex
mental machinery for the coordinating of data in time and space this is the whole story of the advancement of life and in our species it reaches its culmination
and it crosses over into a new domain where change no longer occurs in the in the atomic
and biological machinery of existence it begins to take place in this world which we call mental
it's called epigenetic change change change which cannot be traced back to mutation of the arrangements of molecules inside long chain polymers
but change taking place in syntactical structures that are linguistically based and people have probably
been using language with considerable facility for probably fifty thousand years possibly more
uh in our own time we have created ever more elaborate languages ever more elaborate technologies for
transforming storing and retrieving language so that we are actually on the brink i mean of being able to give
every single one of you the complete cultural inventory the complete database of human beings experience on this planet
that's what these data highways and networks are all about the nervous system is being hardwired
but what i wanted to draw your attention to about this is it is not only an advance deeper and deeper into novelty
but it's an advance which in which each successive stage occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it
so you know once you get the big bang then nothing much happens for a long long time i mean there's
plasma streaming through the universe the universe is slowly cooling but that's the most dramatic complex process in the universe
this cooling then after a certain point more complex processes come in complexification begins to build and as it builds it begins to happen
faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and the great puzzle in the biological record is the suddenness of our own emergence
of our emergence human emergence out of primate out of the primate line it happened with enormous suddenness
uh lumholtz calls it the most explosive reorganization of a major organ of a higher animal
in the entire fossil record and that's you know and great embarrassment to the theory of evolution
because this is the organ which generated the theory of evolution we're not talking an appendix or an eyebrow
here we're talking the very organ which generated i think that we are not that we have taken far too much
responsibility for what is happening and that what we took to be a staircase we were climbing is actually an
up escalator and if you will stop climbing you will notice that it does not impede your upward progress
because the ground you're standing on is moving you toward the goal and i i think that uh this idea
which may be the proof that i'm bonkers requires a fairly radical reorganization of consciousness because
what i'm saying is the universe was not born in a fiery explosion from which it has been being blasted outward ever since
the universe is not being pushed like that from behind the universe is being pulled from the future
toward a goal that is as inevitable as a ball as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release
it up near the rim you know if you do that the marble will roll down the side of the bowl down down down
and eventually it will come to rest in the lowest energy state which is the bottom of the bowl that's
precisely my model of human history and the now bear in mind what the competition is peddling the
competition is peddling the idea that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment for no reason
now whatever you think about that notice that it's the limit case for credulity
do you understand what i mean i mean if you believe if you can believe that i it's hard for me to imagine
what you would balk at if we were to sit down and say let's see who can think of the most unlikely
thing that could possibly happen i submit to you nobody could top the big bang it is the improbability of
improbabilities it is the improbability it is the mother of all improbabilities right there so i'm suggesting
something different i'm suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that exists ahead
of us in time and that our ever accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity
and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very very close to the attractor all western religions have
insisted that god would come tangential to history but they all lose their nerve when you ask when which
is the only interesting question about that hypothesis i mean if it's not now then what the hell difference
does it make it's just pissing in the wind as far as i can see uh i think that the very real social crisis
that is upon us the crisis of population of resource depletion of atmospheric degradation of epidemic
disease all these crises indicate that we are now down to the short epochs
of this process of universal ingression into novelty and that in fact
it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of a human future there is no human future
it's inconceivable given where we are today that to speak of the human world a thousand years from now
or five hundred years from now it is literally it either doesn't exist or it's beyond our power of
imagining it isn't simply going to be non-polluting cars and smaller hi-fi speakers i mean that's an idiot's
notion yeah clearer tv pictures uh and stuff it isn't like that at all i mentioned this this morning
how when you look at only one line of technological development automobiles or computers it looks like
you can rationally anticipate what's going to happen but when you realize that there are thousands
of these lines of these lines of development all transforming themselves all moving towards some
kind of omega point then you realize that we're in the grip of what i call a concrescence and i maintain
that you don't have to believe me on this you can see it from here you just have to climb a high hill
there's one it's called psilocybin there's one it's called ayahuasca the view from the tops of these hills
is of the concrescence it lies now closer to us than the johnson administration for god's sake in time
and uh uh you know i have an elaborate mathematical theory to back this up which you should gratefully
learn you are not going to be flayed with this afternoon but i think it's going to be very become
more and more important for people to delinearize their view of time decondition yourself from the lie
of history uh after all you know uh if if time were space history would be a spider web
so bear that in mind