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.