WEBVTT 01:37.840 --> 01:46.700 psychedelic compounds is that the 60s entirely lacked any awareness of shamanism or the historical 01:46.700 --> 01:54.740 role that these substances had played throughout human history and prehistory. The 60s believed 01:54.740 --> 02:01.280 they were inventing this reality for the first time. Now that we have been able to compare 02:01.280 --> 02:09.640 the psychedelic experience to the way it is done in the Amazon, in West Africa, in areas where these 02:09.640 --> 02:15.700 things have been used and understood for a long time, we now have a model. And it's the model not 02:15.700 --> 02:23.280 that you take low doses and go with your friends to a rock concert, but that you take high doses in 02:23.280 --> 02:33.740 a situation of sensory isolation, such as a quiet, dark room, and make an inward journey into the self 02:33.740 --> 02:43.280 that parallels the journey that shamans have always made to recover lost souls or to cure or to discover 02:43.280 --> 02:53.260 the whereabouts of lost objects. So in a way, psychedelic exploration has gained power respectively 02:53.260 --> 03:03.720 ability and legitimacy by discovering that its own roots were in a Paleolithic religion of great 03:03.720 --> 03:10.520 power and wide distribution. In other words, psychedelic voyaging is not something new. This 03:10.520 --> 03:18.160 is how religion was done for the first million years, not the last 2,000 years. This is really 03:18.160 --> 03:28.620 the only exception to this rule. And I agree with what you also said about how vast this domain seems to be. 03:28.620 --> 03:38.620 Serious psychedelic voyagers can agree, the further in you go to this realm, the larger it appears to be. 03:38.620 --> 04:05.620 Really, what we are doing is we are discovering the inner richness of organism. That, you know, the richness of the human world is not in owning stuff. The richness of the human world lies in being able to access what is within us. Our minds are not blank slates or merely repositories of traumatic memory. Our minds are doorways. 04:05.620 --> 04:16.720 Our minds are doorways. The borgesian library of infinite possibilities and we can choose to open these doorways in whatever sequence or fashion we wish. 04:16.720 --> 06:57.410 Which is probably the closest thing to a miracle in the natural world. It's the major neurological manifestation of difference between ourselves and other animals and primates. And it's not a physiological difference. It's a difference in behavior. 06:57.410 --> 08:10.750 That language represents the most complex behavior ever observed in any animal in certain human life. 08:10.750 --> 08:21.790 It's the major neurological manifestation of difference between ourselves and other animals and primates. 08:21.790 --> 08:26.830 And it's not a physiological difference. It's a difference in behavior. 08:27.410 --> 08:33.090 That language represents the most complex behavior ever observed in any animal. 08:33.310 --> 08:39.250 And certainly, it's the most complex thing any of us ever learns to do. 08:39.250 --> 08:46.730 We're born into what William James calls a blooming, buzzing confusion. 08:47.810 --> 09:01.670 But by the acquisition of words, we mosaic over various sectors of this blooming, buzzing confusion with words. 09:01.910 --> 09:07.830 We replace the unknown with the known through the substitution of words. 09:07.830 --> 09:23.430 And by the time a child is two or three, they have completely created a cultural mosaic of words that is interposed between them and reality. 09:23.430 --> 09:31.430 Reality from that point on is only an unconfirmed rumor brought through the medium of language. 09:32.570 --> 09:43.430 And every culture accentuates different parts of reality so that in a sense, every culture is a different reality. 09:43.430 --> 09:53.430 Language is stuff of the world, not quarks or wave packets or neutrinos, but language. 09:53.430 --> 09:57.430 But language. Everything is made of language. 09:57.430 --> 10:04.430 All the constructs of science are actually interlocking constructs of syntax. 10:04.430 --> 10:14.430 Well, so that's ordinary language, which seems to define reality through a kind of process of lying about it. 10:14.430 --> 10:32.430 For instance, by creating subject-object distinctions, which are in fact not true to the matter, but somehow operationally necessary for us to navigate in the kind of lower dimensional space that we inhabit. 10:32.430 --> 10:40.870 Then there is the phenomenon of non-ordinary visible language. 10:40.870 --> 10:43.870 And this is very interesting to me. 10:43.870 --> 10:57.870 This is where technology, virtual reality, cybernetics, human-machine interfacing can actually make an impact and explore a frontier. 10:57.870 --> 11:17.870 Visual language is a transformation of the physiological impulse towards syntax into a final product, speech, which is not heard with the ears, but beheld with the eyes. 11:17.870 --> 11:26.870 And it's very interesting that all our metaphors of clarity of speech are visual metaphors. 11:26.870 --> 11:31.870 We say, I see what you mean. He spoke clearly. 11:31.870 --> 11:42.870 This means that at the organismic level, we associate a higher signal clarity with visual input. 11:42.870 --> 11:58.870 And on DMT and other tryptamine psychedelics, you actually experience the field of language, both heard and self-generated as something that is visibly beheld. 11:58.870 --> 12:14.870 It's almost as though the project of communication becomes high-speed sculpture in a conceptual dimension made of light and intentionality. 12:14.870 --> 12:44.250 Well, this would remain a kind of esoteric performance on the part of shamans at the height of intoxication if it were not for the fact that electronics eaters make it possible for us to actually create records of these higher linguistic modalities. 12:44.250 --> 13:00.250 In other words, it's possible to imagine a virtual reality that was driven by a speech-operated synthesizer where the various parts of ordinary speech, adjectives, modifiers, subjects, and objects, 13:00.250 --> 13:18.590 were interpreted by the scientific, by the cybernetic environment as topological manifolds of various shapes so that speech would then generate a visibly beheld, 13:18.590 --> 13:39.530 it's possible to imagine a future world where in marriage, in other words, in areas where communication, clear communication, clear expression of intentionality was very important, 13:39.530 --> 13:55.530 that people would actually go into the virtual reality to use the virtual language because its capacity for conveying intent would be much greater than ordinary spoken language. 13:55.530 --> 14:17.740 In other words, it's not for nothing that Plato connected up the notion of the good, the true, and ultimately the beautiful three concepts is the primary concept because it is visibly beheld. 14:17.740 --> 14:39.120 This is the great convincing power of the psychedelic experience that it ultimately appeals to us through the sense that we value most, that we existentially relate to as the most authentic, and that is the visual. 14:39.120 --> 14:57.120 Visible language is a kind of telepathy, because you see, if I make a statement in visual language, and then you and I regard my statement, we are somehow in the act of regarding made one, 14:57.120 --> 15:17.120 because meaning is not being created out of interiorized dictionaries, which we each consult in the privacy of our own mind, but rather meaning is a visible manifold in the public domain. 15:17.120 --> 15:27.120 meaning goes public, and the differences between people then decline toward being insignificant. 15:27.120 --> 17:06.750 It's a kind of final art galleries of the imagination. 17:06.750 --> 17:23.690 You know, we won't build skyscrapers 120 stories high, we'll build them as high as we want. 17:23.690 --> 18:22.440 Uh, roof height will no longer be in gravity, as will all the stuff of the psychedelic shamans have always known this. 18:22.440 --> 19:41.520 Now the psychedelic underground art can mean this goal. 19:41.520 --> 20:57.160 Extraction of cephalopods live in it. 20:57.160 --> 21:44.210 Now many people know that octopi can change color, but they think this is not at all colors in a very large repertoire of stars. 21:44.210 --> 21:52.210 Or of stripes, dots, blushes, traveling shades, and tonal shifts. 21:52.210 --> 21:57.210 It's because this is, for them, a channel of linguistic communication. 21:57.210 --> 22:08.720 In other words, they don't transduce their linguistic intentionality into small mouth noises like we do. 22:08.720 --> 22:17.720 Small mouth noises which then move as sound across space in the form of vibrations of the air. 22:17.720 --> 22:25.720 Rather, they actually change their appearance in accordance with their linguistic intent. 22:25.720 --> 22:32.720 What this boils down to is, they physically become their meaning. 22:32.720 --> 22:48.720 And one octopus observing another is watching the unfolding of internalized neurological states within the organism being reflected in color changes on the surface of the skin. 22:48.720 --> 23:02.720 Now these octopi not only can change their color, because they're soft bodied creatures, they can also change the texture of their surface from smooth to rugose and folded. 23:02.720 --> 23:14.720 They can also, because they are soft bodied, fold and unfold and reveal and conceal very rapidly different parts of their body. 23:14.720 --> 23:26.720 So they are capable of a visual dance of communication that is an extremely dense kind of visual signal. 23:26.720 --> 23:46.720 And in the so-called benthic octopi, the species that have evolved in very deep water where very little light reaches, they have evolved light-emitting phosphorescent organs, some of them with membranes like eyelids over them, 23:46.720 --> 24:02.720 so that even in the darkness of the abyssal depths of the ocean, they can carry out this dance of light, self-enfoldment, color change, and surface texture that is their linguistic style. 24:02.720 --> 24:18.720 In fact, the only way an octopus can experience a private thought is to release a cloud of ink into the water into it, which it can retreat briefly and hide its mental nakedness from its followers. 24:18.720 --> 25:25.830 This kind of biologically intrinsic wiring into the potential of language is something that we may be able to achieve. 25:25.830 --> 25:37.830 What psychedelics do is they dissolve cultural conditioning. Cultural conditioning is like software, but beneath the software is the hardware of brain and organism. 25:37.830 --> 25:50.830 And by dissolving the cultural conditioning to speak English, German, Swahili, or whatever, then one returns to this ursprach, this primal language of the animal body, 25:50.830 --> 26:00.830 and can explore the real dimension of feeling that a culture has a tendency to cut us off from. 26:00.830 --> 26:24.320 Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors of movement. 26:24.320 --> 26:41.420 The child is enthralled, and then the mother comes into the room, and that's a bird, baby, that's a bird. 26:41.420 --> 26:53.420 Instantly, the complex wave of the angel, peacock, iridescent, transformative mystery is collapsed into the word. 26:53.420 --> 27:08.800 The child learns that this is a bird, and by the time we're five or six years old, all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. 27:08.800 --> 27:32.970 This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of disempowered legacy and birthright of the organism. 27:32.970 --> 27:50.620 If I was not yet, I will be the chiesten deepening side of the animal body. 27:50.620 --> 27:54.620 This is theックlified procedure and that of the relationship as a B Terrorist. 27:54.620 --> 28:28.920 That's it, I'm outta here!