WEBVTT 00:32.910 --> 01:03.310 A very important part of life, which has been ignored by science, and because this is a scientific society we're locked inside of, we've gotten a distorted view of it. 01:03.310 --> 01:25.950 And that is, there's a quality to reality that everybody can feel, everybody experiences, we all know it, and yet we get no reinforcement for its existence from the models that our culture venerates. 01:25.950 --> 01:32.950 And what I want to talk about is what I call novelty, or the appetite for... 01:33.310 --> 01:48.870 for complexity that permeates nature, that is in fact as fundamental a law of nature, if not more fundamental, than the laws of thermodynamics themselves. 01:48.870 --> 02:03.290 And this is the idea that nature loves complexity, and wherever it achieves complexity, in a membrane, in the center of a cell, 02:03.310 --> 02:22.310 in a star, in an organism, in a breeding population of animals or plants, wherever it achieves complexity, it seeks to preserve it, and it seeks to use it as a platform for further complexity. 02:22.310 --> 02:32.310 This is what the universe is, it's a complexity-generating engine of some sort, on all levels. 02:33.310 --> 02:42.310 Not only in biology, but in physics, if you look backward in time, the universe becomes more simple. 02:42.310 --> 02:46.310 A million years ago, there was no human civilization. 02:46.310 --> 02:51.310 A hundred million years ago, there were very few mammals. 02:51.310 --> 02:58.310 A billion years ago, life had yet to emerge onto the land. 02:58.310 --> 03:01.310 Five billion years ago, the planet itself was there. 03:01.310 --> 03:02.310 Five billion years ago, the planet itself was there. 03:02.310 --> 03:03.310 Five billion years ago, the planet itself was there. 03:03.310 --> 03:06.310 Five billion years ago, life was in the process of condensing. 03:06.310 --> 03:21.310 If you go back to the domain of the Big Bang, you find a world, a universe of pure electron plasmas, not even atomic systems, still less, molecular systems, all that lies in the future. 03:21.310 --> 03:32.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it complexifies, it becomes more novel. 03:32.310 --> 03:33.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it complexifies, it becomes more novel. 03:33.310 --> 03:34.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it becomes more novel. 03:34.310 --> 03:35.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it becomes more novel. 03:35.310 --> 03:36.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it becomes more novel. 03:36.310 --> 03:37.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it becomes more novel. 03:37.310 --> 03:38.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it becomes more novel. 03:38.310 --> 03:39.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it becomes more novel. 03:39.310 --> 03:40.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it becomes more novel. 03:40.310 --> 03:41.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it becomes more novel. 03:41.310 --> 03:42.310 So in a sense, as the universe ages, as it cools, it becomes more novel. 03:42.310 --> 03:54.310 Complexity on this planet is, finds its compressence in animal life, still more in ourselves. 03:54.310 --> 04:09.310 The reason I mention this is because the scientific model of reality tells you that we are the chance-created witnesses of an essentially valueless universe. 04:09.310 --> 04:14.310 Chance. Chance and necessity. This is the chance of science. 04:14.310 --> 04:27.310 But looking at the record, it appears nature favors organization, favors complexity, and therefore favors ourselves. 04:27.310 --> 04:38.310 Because we represent animal complexity plus culture, plus phonetic alphabets, plus high technology. 04:38.310 --> 04:39.310 So, 04:39.310 --> 04:51.310 the universe has put all of its eggs, or at least the processes of evolution on this planet, have placed all their bets in the human world. 04:51.310 --> 05:08.310 But this raises the stakes, makes the situation far less existential, and makes what we do with our human freedom a matter of great import. 05:08.310 --> 05:09.310 It turns out, 05:09.310 --> 05:10.310 we count. 05:10.310 --> 05:13.310 We are more than witnesses. 05:13.310 --> 05:16.310 We are more than victims. 05:16.310 --> 05:25.310 We are, in fact, co-creators of this universal tendency to complexification. 05:25.310 --> 05:36.310 And in the psychedelic experience, we see the culmination of this process, a kind of anticipation of ultimate complexity, 05:36.310 --> 05:38.310 where information is holographic. 05:38.310 --> 05:46.310 Information is holographically embedded, and all things become possible. 05:46.310 --> 05:51.310 All things are now possible in the human world. 05:51.310 --> 06:03.000 Reductionist biologists have said of life itself, it's a kind of iridescence on matter. 06:03.000 --> 06:10.000 Other people say mind, conscious mind, is a kind of iridescence on biology. 06:10.000 --> 06:23.000 These are all sort of ways to dismiss what we experience as most fascinating and most beautiful. 06:23.000 --> 06:33.000 You know, Plato linked the idea of the good, the true, and the beautiful. 06:33.000 --> 06:37.000 But it's hard to tell what is good. 06:37.000 --> 06:39.000 And it's hard to tell what is true. 06:39.000 --> 06:45.000 But it's not hard to tell what is beautiful. 06:45.000 --> 06:59.000 So if you follow beauty, I think you can be pretty clear that you're not going to fall too far from the path of righteousness. 06:59.000 --> 07:04.000 That's sort of what the psychedelic path is. 07:04.000 --> 07:08.000 It's the demand that things be more beautiful. 07:08.000 --> 07:11.000 More strange. 07:11.000 --> 07:16.000 More astonishing than they've ever been before. 07:16.000 --> 07:27.020 As we approach this evening, the world not only becomes more complex, but it moves faster and faster. 07:27.020 --> 07:29.020 You know the cliches. 07:29.020 --> 07:33.020 More change in the last 25 years than in the previous hundred. 07:33.020 --> 07:37.020 More change in the last hundred than in the last thousand. 07:37.020 --> 07:39.020 In the last thousand, ten thousand. 07:40.020 --> 07:47.020 Who can look at this process and assume it will ever stop? 07:47.020 --> 07:54.020 But who has looked at this process and asked themselves what will happen if it doesn't stop? 07:54.020 --> 08:00.020 Because if there has been more change in the last 20 years than in the previous hundred, 08:00.020 --> 08:05.020 then in the next five there will be more change than in the last thousand. 08:05.020 --> 08:10.020 And eventually you get to the notion of a universe. 08:10.020 --> 08:21.020 That undergoes half of its evolutionary unfolding in the last hour and 35 minutes of its existence. 08:21.020 --> 08:26.020 This is in fact the kind of universe we are living in. 08:26.020 --> 08:35.020 What we have been told is that a process is pushed from behind by causal necessity. 08:35.020 --> 08:38.020 Like a row of falling dominoes. 08:38.020 --> 08:41.020 Cause precedes effect. 08:41.020 --> 08:45.020 This is half the story. 08:45.020 --> 08:53.020 Half of what you see going on is simply the unfolding of causal necessity. 08:53.020 --> 09:06.020 But at a deeper level, the future is not simply empty space-time into which we are expanding. 09:06.020 --> 09:11.020 The future is pulling us toward itself. 09:11.020 --> 09:17.020 There is what I call the transcendental object at the end of time. 09:17.020 --> 09:22.020 Or the eschaton, which means the last thing. 09:22.020 --> 09:27.020 The last thing is like an enormous subtractor. 09:27.020 --> 09:33.020 Which is pulling first biology and then human history. 09:33.020 --> 09:35.020 And then the 20th century. 09:35.020 --> 09:38.020 And all of our lives embedded in it. 09:38.020 --> 09:46.020 Pulling us deeper and deeper into a relationship of self-reflection with it. 09:46.020 --> 09:53.020 In other words, we are being shaped by something literally unimaginable. 09:53.020 --> 09:56.020 That lies ahead of us in time. 09:56.020 --> 10:04.020 That three, four million years ago gently took hold of the African primate line. 10:04.020 --> 10:06.020 And began to sculpt it. 10:06.020 --> 10:11.020 And move it along certain developmental pathways. 10:11.020 --> 10:17.020 All toward self-reflection of this thing. 10:17.020 --> 10:25.020 And now we are cosmic moments away from encountering this thing. 10:25.020 --> 10:30.020 This is what the excitement of shamanism worldwide is now. 10:30.020 --> 10:33.020 Shamans are people who can see 10:33.020 --> 10:35.020 the end. 10:35.020 --> 10:36.020 In some sense. 10:36.020 --> 10:39.020 Not that the end is predetermined. 10:39.020 --> 10:44.020 When you look into the future you don't see something like the past. 10:44.020 --> 10:46.020 Except that it hasn't happened. 10:46.020 --> 10:53.020 When you look into the future you see a storm of space-time vectors and probability matrices 10:53.020 --> 10:59.020 that have not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring. 10:59.020 --> 11:02.020 That's the business of the present moment. 11:02.020 --> 11:10.020 To collapse that hyper-dimensional set of space-time vectors into a here and a now. 11:10.020 --> 11:15.020 With a causal identity and a vector toward the future. 11:15.020 --> 11:24.020 But we are now so close to this transcendental object that has molded the entire destiny of this planet. 11:24.020 --> 11:27.020 We are now so close to it. 11:27.020 --> 11:31.020 That all you have to do is smoke a bomber. 11:31.020 --> 11:33.020 Close your eyes. 11:33.020 --> 11:36.020 Take a walk in the bush. 11:36.020 --> 11:38.020 Sit on the beach. 11:38.020 --> 11:40.020 Pay attention to your dreams. 11:40.020 --> 11:43.020 Watch your mind after orgasm. 11:43.020 --> 11:46.020 And you will see this thing. 11:46.020 --> 11:49.020 Peeping around the edges. 11:49.020 --> 11:51.020 Creeping in at the side. 11:51.020 --> 11:57.020 I mean, was it Williams Wordsworth who called it intimations of immortality? 11:57.020 --> 11:59.020 Something like that. 11:59.020 --> 12:00.020 Um. 12:00.020 --> 12:05.020 We are not simply the victims of our past. 12:05.020 --> 12:14.020 This is the false truth of materialism and positivism. 12:14.020 --> 12:23.020 We are locked in an extremely mysterious relationship with something in another dimension. 12:23.020 --> 12:28.020 A dimension which, for want of a better word, we call the future. 12:28.020 --> 12:29.020 But in fact. 12:29.020 --> 12:35.020 This other dimension completely surrounds and encloses human history. 12:35.020 --> 12:37.020 This is what shamanism is about. 12:37.020 --> 12:43.020 Shamanism is where people step out of cultural time. 12:43.020 --> 12:49.020 Into what Marseilliat called Emilio Tempore. 12:49.020 --> 12:50.020 The time before. 12:50.020 --> 12:51.020 The sacred time. 12:51.020 --> 12:53.020 The paradigmatic time. 12:53.020 --> 12:55.020 Dream time, we call it down here. 12:55.020 --> 12:58.020 It's the time which surrounds the smaller. 12:58.020 --> 13:04.020 The smaller time of historical unfolding. 13:04.020 --> 13:11.550 What's unnatural? 13:11.550 --> 13:17.550 Nothing is unnatural except some things are less intelligent than others. 13:22.300 --> 13:24.300 Everything has a design. 13:24.300 --> 13:29.300 But elegance of design is still of worthwhile value. 13:29.300 --> 13:31.300 Nature. 13:31.300 --> 13:35.300 The interesting thing about nature is the risks that she's willing to take. 13:35.300 --> 13:40.300 Like if you ask yourself, what does nature do best on this planet? 13:40.300 --> 13:46.300 The surprising answer is it produces extinct species. 13:46.300 --> 13:52.300 95% of all life that ever existed on this earth is extinct. 13:52.300 --> 13:55.300 That's what happens to life. 13:55.300 --> 14:03.300 What nature has been interested in is passing on complexification of form from species to species. 14:03.300 --> 14:07.300 Genera to genera over very long periods of time. 14:07.300 --> 14:13.300 And the fact that nature will tolerate our own dear selves as a part of the natural order 14:13.300 --> 14:18.300 indicates that nature is a far more reckless gambler than we are. 14:18.300 --> 14:23.300 Our impulse is to deny ourselves, hold back. 14:23.300 --> 14:31.300 Nature's impulse, apparently, is to put the pedal of creativity to the metal by taking a primate 14:31.300 --> 14:32.300 and pushing it to the ground. 14:32.300 --> 14:34.300 Pushing it to the wall. 14:34.300 --> 14:36.300 Boxing it in. 14:36.300 --> 14:38.300 Raising the pressure. 14:38.300 --> 14:43.300 And watching the entire planet bubble its way toward metamorphosis. 14:43.300 --> 14:56.220 Psychedelics is to throw you back on your own experience. 14:56.220 --> 14:58.220 It is not an ideology. 14:58.220 --> 15:00.220 It is an experience. 15:00.220 --> 15:04.220 It may spawn this or that ideological interpretation. 15:04.220 --> 15:05.220 Marxists have something to say. 15:05.220 --> 15:07.220 Freudians have something to say. 15:07.220 --> 15:08.220 But it's not. 15:08.220 --> 15:09.220 It's theirs. 15:09.220 --> 15:10.220 It's yours. 15:10.220 --> 15:14.220 It belongs to the animal body. 15:14.220 --> 15:17.220 And why it's so important? 15:17.220 --> 15:26.220 Why it's so important is because it is a pipeline back to the greater order of nature, 15:26.220 --> 15:29.220 which I call the Gaian mind. 15:29.220 --> 15:37.220 It is the pipeline back toward a dynamic, a way of doing things that is profoundly, 15:37.220 --> 15:43.220 profoundly natural, profoundly appropriate. 15:43.220 --> 15:51.220 This is why it was possible for human beings to live on this planet for 100,000, 200,000 years, 15:51.220 --> 15:56.220 possessing language, theater, humor, so on and so on, everything we have, 15:56.220 --> 15:58.220 but not fucking up. 15:58.220 --> 16:06.220 Because they were embedded in, communicating with, aware of, and able to receive instruction from, 16:06.220 --> 16:08.220 the Gaian intentionality. 16:08.220 --> 16:15.820 The mushroom once said to me, I mean, maybe the mushroom, maybe the mushroom likes to 16:15.820 --> 16:22.820 sit on its backside, but the mushroom once said to me, if it ain't simple, you haven't 16:22.820 --> 16:24.820 thought about it long enough.