It's real. It's not woo woo. It's

actually scientifically true at the

fundamental core of physics that all

space and all time is in some form of

simultaneous connection. I believe this

is what the human imagination is that

you have two eyes to show you local

space and then you have an organ called

the mind which doesn't protrude anywhere

on the surface of your body except

occasionally in some cases it will lodge

on a surrogate but generally the mind is

invisible

uh but it gives you non-local data

that's what the imagination is that's

non-local data. Everything in the

imagination is real somewhere somewhere

so far away in space and time that it

makes absolutely no sense to give it

another thought ever again. Don't ever

think that thought again. But know that

everything in the imagination is real.

All right. Wonderful to see so many

people turned out uh after having just

been here a scant uh year ago. I'm

delighted that they invited me back. Uh

the deal is no jokes about Camaro

raffles, no jokes about Mulivite

suppositories.

So just consider it as if it didn't

happen.

[Music]

When I think about talking to an

audience like this, I go through my

toolkit and try to say you know what is

cogent, what's meaningful, what can

bring us forward and there seem to be

it's a changing list but at the moment

what seems to be going is the old

perennial

psychedelic alteration of consciousness

for purposes of personal exploration,

social reformation, creation of a new

art, a new politic. That's one of the of

the major pieces of the puzzle. Another

major piece is uh the new communications

technologies and I mean not only the

internet but the software that allows us

each and every one of us to be

animators, filmmakers,

visually expressive people who can

produce

emotionally moving works of great depth

and beauty.

This is something that technology has

brought to us. And strangely enough, a

technology largely produced by

psychedelic heads, people like

ourselves.

I told you last year, I think when we

discussed drugs and technology that the

only difference between a computer and a

psychedelic was one was too large to

swallow.

Well, you know, great progress has been

made in 12 months. uh in another three

or four years we will be able to swallow

the computer. Some of us may never be

able to swallow it. Uh the third piece

of the puzzle which is sort of mine

alone to play with since no one else

wants to be this publicly crazy is uh

the whole business of novelty theory.

The approach of a singularity in time

that is sculpting the human and natural

world and that is so large an object in

the

intuitive sphere of human beings that it

almost has religious overtones.

And then the question for me and the

question for you I suppose is how much

of this can you take without having to

take it all? How much of these ideas can

you embibe without having to go uh the

whole distance? And the answer is, you

know, it's a personal matter for each

person to feel into their circumstance,

which means their history, both

psychedelic and non-sychedelic,

and then to feel into the projection of

their future. Do you think you are

repeating the lifestyles and algorithms

of your parents and grandparents at

infanitum back to Adam? Or do you feel

like you've stepped to the front of the

train of human evolution that you are

making yourself new every day? If we

reach too far back into the stabilizing

metaphors of the past, we get rigidity,

habit,

limitation.

If we step too quickly into the

unlimited freedom of the future, we lose

our grounding. Uh, socialism

did this over the past hundred years.

And because it abandoned any contact

with a realistic human psychology, the

best intended people ended up creating

nightmare societies. If your theory is

not true to the nature of humanness, you

will end up beating human beings like

metal on the anvil of your ideology.

And this creates great human suffering

and uh and uh

historical catastrophe.

And I maintain that our own society

suffers from an a a failure to

adequately

model and reflect the true nature of

human beings. We have ideas. We have

ideals that get in the way of realism

and immediate experience.

And when I was thinking about all of

this and how to put it into a metaphor

that would be appealing and amusing and

and lead people to look deeper into

these things, uh I began to play with

the idea of it's a religious idea. You

all have heard although probably more

often in English than in Latin the

thought in principio at verbam at

verbboaraktomest

which means in the beginning was the

word and the word was made flesh.

This is the great overarching myth of

western religion. It equally informs

Islam, Christianity, Judaism. These

three great flavors of monotheism

all accept this primary statement. In

the beginning was the word and the word

was made flesh.

What does it mean for a moment? Taken

away from the tire exugesus of the cults

that have hammered at it for so long.

What does it mean in and of itself? It

means that language

is somehow the privileged

medium of exchange between human beings

and the divine.

That the dissent of the word into flesh

makes the flesh more than flesh. Makes

the word more than the word. The union

of flesh and word launches the cosmic

drama of fall and redemption. That is

the myth of western society.

And for centuries and centuries, we've

concentrated on one end of this story of

the fall and the redemption. We have

concentrated on the fall.

But meanwhile,

through all the grimy

betrayals and bloody backsliding of

human history, the word has quietly

advanced its agenda. And I've been

thinking a lot about this recently

because in a new book I'm writing, I'm

writing a lot about spoken language

speech

and I've come to a conclusion that

typical of me is far from orthodoxy and

far from much cover provided by anybody

else's ideas on this matter. I've come

to the conclusion that language is very

old.

Thinking is very old. Communicating

is very old by glance, by gesture, by

dance, by meme, by intuition. But speech

is very recent.

It's a technological innovation

as fresh as uh the pantium chip or the

spinning wheel. It's something someone

invented somewhere. It's the most

successful technological leap forward

ever made. It's the discovery of

symbolic signification.

That a noise meaning nothing can by

convention be given a meaning and that

that meaning will then attend that

utterance wherever it occurs in the

presence of those who have joined. in

the agreement that attaches the symbol

to the meaningless utterance. It's a

coding breakthrough. Somebody hacked

this about 35,000

years ago and immediately as forms of

media have a way of doing. It swamped

the previous methods of communication

because a it worked in the dark.

uh suddenly uh evenings were not so

boring anymore. Uh it worked in the

dark. It also the touchyfey forms of

communication were generally oneon-one

and related probably to having sex or

aggressive physical encounters. But

suddenly one voice could reach many and

many could respond.

And virtual reality was born at that

moment. Not here in the late 20th

century, but at that moment because

acoustical

environments

laden with symbolic meaning became the

name of the game. Stories is what we

call these things and they are uh the

proper use of the advanced form of media

known as human speech. It's using human

speech to create three-dimensional

scenarios that unfold and everyone is

carried along with the drama and the

wonder of it. From that beginning and a

in a series of successively accelerating

leaps, the word has made its way into

the world. Uh it's interesting that uh

straight linguists and paleolinguists

believe human language is no more than

35,000 years old. Imagine that. We

possess homo sapiens sapien skeletons

110,000 years old. People like the

person who rode with you on the bus

yesterday. People that modern. And yet

the experts tell us no one spoke until

35,000 years ago.

No one wrote until 5 or 6,000 years ago.

Reading and writing is simply a carrying

forward of the original program of

signification.

first using acoustical signals and then

some other hacker had the brilliant

idea, well if we can use sound to carry

abstract associations, why not abstract

symbols to carry abstract associations?

And writing was born. And what writing

allows is expansion of the database

because things are not dependent on the

the wetwware of human memory to survive

from generation to generation. Suddenly

the mush of brain is replaced by the

durability of wood and stone and clay

and these things then become the medium

upon which the primary database of the

culture is being carried forward. Well

the rest of the story you know and this

is not a lecture in the history of

communication. Each succeeding

refinement in communication has brought

the word deeper into its association

with the flesh until the present. And at

this moment there is a kind of a uh what

dynamicists call a cusp,

a turning of the system upon its axes.

And the word is now beginning to make

the return journey to the mysterious and

hidden source from which it descended.

In other words, spirit is now beginning

to disentangle

itself from matter. The 20th century

will be remembered as the great clash

point or the great arena of conflict

between the triumphal

positivist and rational systems that

European thought has developed over the

past 300 years and the new irrational

systems of thought which anthropology

cheerfully imported into white high

culture in the guise of repotage about

the primitive.

But this repotage about the primitive

turns out to be a kind of

oraboric conundrum. The snake taking its

tail in its mouth. In the past h 100red

years as these super technologies have

been developed in the west the smashing

of atoms the invention of of radio

television computers immunology so forth

and so on

data has been arriving about the

practices of aboriginal cultures all

over the planet that they dissolve

ordinary realities ordinary cultural

values through an interaction a symbio

iosis, a relationship to local plants

that perturb brain chemistry. And in

this domain of perturbed brain

chemistry, the cultural operating system

is wiped clean.

And something older, even for these

people, something older, more

vitalistic, more in touch with the

animal soul replaces it. Replaces the

cultural operating system. something not

determined by history and geography but

something written.

You are not naked when you take off your

clothes. You still wear your religious

assumptions, your prejudices, your

fears, your illusions, your delusions.

When you shed the cultural operating

system, then

essentially you stand naked before the

inspection of your own psyche. Desmond

Morris called it the naked ape. And it's

from that position, a position outside

the cultural operating system, that we

can begin to ask real questions about

what does it mean to be human? What kind

of circumstance are we caught in? And

what kind of structures, if any, can we

put in place to assuage the pain and

accentuate the glory and the wonder that

lurks waiting for us in this very narrow

slice of time between the birth canal

and the yawning grave.

In other words, we have to return to

first premises.

So, I've been thinking about this a lot

and at first it seemed to me only a

metaphor, this phrase, culture is your

operating system. But because I travel

around a lot and get that jolting

experience frequently of let's say

leaving London on a foggy evening and

arriving in Johannesburg 14 hours later

to a sweltering day in a city of 14

million on the brink of anarchy. I get

to change my operating system frequently

and so I notice the relativity of these

systems and some work for some things

and some for others. For instance, if

you are a positivist,

if you're running positivism 4.0,

you can't support UFOs. Positivism 4.0

does not support UFOs. If on the other

hand you're running your runa book 5.1

as your operating system uh UFOs and a

number of other things can get in

through the door. That is what we would

technically say is a more tolerant

operating system or its plugins support

special effects denied the positivist.

Well, uh, it's fun to think this way

because it shows you that you're you

don't have to be the victim of your

culture. It's not like your eye color or

your height or your gender. Uh, it's

it's fragile. It can be remade if you

wish it to be. And then the question is,

well, how do how does one um uh download

a new operating system? Well, first of

all, you have to clear some space on

your disc. Uh, the best way to do this

is probably with a pharmacological

agent. Um,

you think of some while I have a drink

of water.

[Music]

Psilocybin is an excellent disc cleaner.

uh you can put a lot of things in the

trash and have them just disappear uh

with a uh psilocybin upgrade.

Uh other pharmacological agents that

will clear your disc are uh iawaska

and of course these are gentle clearings

of the disc which take 5 6 7 hours. Uh

if you're in a hurry to dump that old

data and leap right into the new

operating system. uh click on the button

marked dimethylryptoamine.

Uh a compressed disc eraser will

immediately be downloaded unsted been

hexed implemented installed run and uh

and you will find yourself with an

entirely different head. Um,

now shamans have always

known, though they may not have used the

kind of language I'm using here, shamans

have always known this trick.

What trick? It has two facets. First of

all, that culture is an operating

system. That's all it is. And that the

operating system can be wiped out and

replaced by something else. So in

essentially what's going on among

shamans and those who resort to them uh

for curing and and counseling and so

forth is somebody's running a slightly

more advanced operating system than the

customer. Uh the the shaman is in

possession of certain facts about

plants, about animals, about healing,

about human psychology, about the local

geography, about mojo of many different

sorts. that the client is not aware of.

The client is running culture light. The

shaman paid for the registered and

licensed version of the software and uh

is running a much heavier version of the

software than the client. I think we

should all aspire to make this upgrade.

Uh it's very important that you have all

the bells and whistles. uh on your

operating system. Otherwise, somebody is

going to be able to get a leg up uh on

you.

Well, what's wrong with the operating

system that we have? Uh consumer

capitalism 5.0 or whatever it is. Well,

it's dumb.

Uh

it's retro.

It's very non-competitive.

It's messy. It wastes the environment.

It wastes human resources. Uh, it's

inefficient. It runs on stereotypes. It

runs on a low sampling rate, which is

what creates stereotypes. Low sample

rates uh make uh everybody appear alike

when in fact the glory is in everyone's

differences. Uh and the current

operating system uh is flawed.

It actually has bugs in it uh that

generate contradictions. Contradictions

such as we're cutting the earth from

beneath our own feet. We're poisoning

the atmosphere that we breathe. This is

not intelligent behavior. This is a

culture with a bug and its operating

system that's making it produce erratic,

dysfunctional, malfunctional behavior.

Time to call the tech.

And who are the techs? The shamans are

the techs.

Well, so I think you get the idea. Uh

very important to upgrade your operating

system by dumping obsolete cultural sub

routines. They are simply taking up disk

space. They are not advancing uh you in

any way. whatsoever.

Now,

a very large group of people who

followed this advice and rebuilt their

operating systems in the 1960s

went on then to build this most amazing

of all cultural artifacts, the internet.

The internet is light at the end of the

tunnel. I don't care if it's being used

to pedal pornography. I don't care if

it's being trivialized in a thousand

ways. Anything can be trivialized.

The important point is that it is

leveling the playing field of global

society. It is creating de facto an

entirely new set of political realities.

None of the constipated oligarchic

structures that are resisting this were

ever asked. Their greed betrayed them

into investing in this in the first

place without ever fully grasping what

the implications of it were for their

larger agenda. The internet basically

means you can now be as as free as you

are motivated to be, as free as you dare

to be. Tim Liry years ago, it was

something he used to say that never got

quoted as much as turn on, tune in, drop

out, but it seemed to me it it was maybe

better advice. And he used to say, "Find

the others.

Find the others."

Well, you know, if you're a gay kid in

Fargo, North Dakota, if you're a

masculine enthusiast in Winnipeg, if

you're a student of alchemy and moose

jaw, community is pretty much out of

reach uh for you or it was until the

coming of the internet. And the internet

introduces everybody, no matter how

weird, no matter how marginalized, no

matter how peculiar, to the fact that

there are others like you. There are

others like you. Find the others. Make

common cause. uh realize that uh it's

the deals you cut and the friends you

make that determine where you're going

to be standing when the flash hits. I

mean, that's just obvious. And by you

see, the cultural game is a game of

uniformitarianism.

[Music]

Cultural myths are that we are all

alike. We Americans

each created equal. I mean, if you can

believe that at an operational level,

then I have some bridges I would like to

sell you. Uh it it's a necessary truth

to do political business. But it is not

the truth. The truth is that you are not

created equal with yourself from day to

day. Leave alone any comparison with

anybody else. You are not the person you

were yesterday nor the person you will

be next week. What is an observation

like that uh what shadow does it cast in

a world of all people are created equal?

Uh these are clashes of operating

systems. There's an axiom in one all

created equal and an axiom in the other

each divergent. These things can't be

parsed. They can't be brought together.

So culture plays a game of

simplification.

If you can make people think alike, they

will buy alike. They will worship alike.

And if you know politics demands it,

they will kill alike.

So the uniformitarian agenda of culture

is not an agenda friendly to you or to

me or to any other individual. And if

you start out from that point of view,

you will soon realize

that culture is not your friend.

Now this is not exactly PC to say what

with everybody running around recovering

their Latvian roots and their Irishness

and their this whatever culture is not

your friend. If you define yourself as a

member of a group

of any group,

know that that is a gross simplification

and that everything about you that is

interesting and unique is betrayed by

defining yourself in that way. Uh, you

know, most racism is practiced by people

of the race

that they are making racial judgments

about. White people have far more racial

opinions about white people than any

other racial group because that's where

they spend their time. These gross

simplifications

betray humanity, betray uniqueness, make

sane politics impossible. What we have

to do is get back to

the reality of the flesh, the reality of

the individual

identity. This is how we come packaged.

Uh a race, that's an abstraction. These

days, you have to have three years of

genetics under your belt to give a

satisfactory definition of the word if

we're really going to go to the math on

it. I mean, it's an it's an it's an

abstraction of modern science. It's a

notion so far removed from anything you

and I come in contact with that we

should just junk it. What we need to

celebrate is the individual. It's have

you not noticed I certainly have that

every historical change you can think of

in fact any change you can think of

forget about human beings any change in

any system that you can think of is

always ultimately traceable to one unit

in the system undergoing a phase state

change of some sort. No group. There are

no group decisions. Those things come

later. The genius of creativity and of

initiation of activity always lies uh

with the individual. And it's very

interesting that this is what the

psychedelics address. They address us

uniquely as individuals. You can sit

next to somebody who drank from the same

bottle you did and be perfectly

confident that their experience has very

little congruency

uh with your own.

Well, so then if we if we um let the

scales of cultural values fall from our

eyes and try not to look at the world

through the eyes of science or democracy

or capitalism

or Christianity,

what

what is there beyond ideology?

What are the facts of the matter?

as I see it, uh, the most visible facts

on the on the surface of things, on the

surface of being, I see

the law of increasing complexity.

Things have gotten more complicated

through time.

I I have never met anyone who could

successfully argue against this. That

doesn't mean it's true, but it means

that it may be, as Vickenstein used to

say, true enough.

True enough that as you approach the

present moment in the only area of the

universe which we have accurate data

about, which is this planet, things have

things become more complicated.

Uh, a million years ago, there were no

human civilizations. A thousand years

ago, there were no machines to speak of.

A hundred years ago there was no

communication infrastructure to speak

of. 10 years ago there was no internet.

18 months ago there was no Java. Uh

things are complexifying, intensifying,

moving together. This is the universal

drama that is reaching culmination in

our lifetimes

because and I offer this don't believe

me for God's sake don't believe anybody

just take this stuff in and then measure

it against your own experience. The

second extracultural fact that I've been

able to discern,

the first being things get more

complicated as you approach the present

and the second being that process of

complexification is occurring faster and

faster. The early universe was very slow

moving. It took a long time for things

to cool down and life to begin its

agonizing

march out of the slime into animal form,

meeting extinction and catastrophe and

setback after setback, but always

picking itself up literally out of the

mud and moving forward. Well, as life

left the ocean, the pace of evolution

quickened. As life radiated across the

land, uh, the number of of fila

multiplied, the number of species

multiplied. Finally, a million years

ago, pick a number, a million and a half

years ago,

the higher primates begin to use tools.

Fire enters the picture. And just as an

aside, isn't it interesting how long

people used tools and fire before spoken

language enters the picture? I mean, we

possess tools

a million years old, human tools,

language 35,000 years old. When I was in

South Africa last year, I was in this

place that reminded me of like the four

corners area around Moab, Utah. It was

like nothing like I had expected South

Africa to be. And when I wasn't

teaching, I would wander the dry aoyos

and hunt for human tools. And there was

an archaeologist staying in the bar or

in the hotel there. And we would drink

in the evening in the bar. And I would

lay my day find out on the bar. And he

would sort it into piles. He'd say,

"Nothing in this pile is less than

165,000 years old. Everything in this

pile is from human tools we're talking

about."

Now I've lost my thread because I was so

thrilled with my sidebar. I think I can

get it back. Ah yeah, here it is. Here

it is. And they say ptheads can't

here it is. The the second obvious fact

which haunts the postcultural viewpoint

is this acceleration

of change. And I've sort of built my

career on this because I'm a rationalist

but I feel the emotional power of this

thing. We are in we are caught in a

basin of attraction to use a

mathematical term. In other words, we

are under the influence of something

which is pulling us into the future or

into novelty if you want to put it that

way at a faster and faster rate. So

problems which are presented in the

following terms. If we don't do

something in 500 years we will run out

of this that or the other. or if we

don't do something in a thousand years

this or that will happen. These are

meaningless

statistics because the uh acceleration

into novelty is rewriting the rules now

every 18 months. Uh we we are descending

now into a well of novelty such that

more change is now occurring in a single

human lifetime than incurred in the

previous 10,000 years of human history.

We are approaching at a faster and

faster rate something unthinkable.

Something which is sculpting us in its

image. Something which shamans have

always

known was there. Though they may not

have used the metaphor of ahead of us in

time. That's a western download of where

it is because you could just as well say

it's in heaven or behind us in time or

everywhere or nowhere. The point is

we're about to arrive in its presence

and uh it is shaping us to prepare us

for the arrival. It is making us more

and more in its image. This is not a new

process. This began a long long time ago

but it's now reaching its culmination.

And I said a few minutes ago, the

internet is light at the end of the

tunnel. The internet is the beginning of

a nervous system that is knitting not

only all human beings but all life

together, all information together

because you know there already is an

internet. It's called the integrated

ecosystem of planet 3. It runs on

pherommones. It runs on weather systems,

ocean tides, touric currents moving in

the earth, uh thousands of methods.

It that way because our cultural

tradition is one of reductionism, tear

things apart, break them into their

subordinate units, break those into

still smaller units. Well, when you have

a theory of reality like that, what you

end up with is all the pieces spread out

and no car and nowhere to go. Uh,

but nature has always operated as an

integrated system of communication and

the internet is in a sense nothing more

than a human aping of a natural system

already in place. If we could do it

through pherommones, light, mycelium,

and electromagnetic pulses through the

earth, we wouldn't be stringing copper

and cable and fiber optic. Those things

are simply um historical artifacts of

the moment. What lies ahead on the

internet? What lies ahead I think for us

and this is the last point I really want

to make

and then we can talk about all this is

you know I have been a true resistor of

the alien penetration of human

civilization because I just saw no

evidence for it. But the the chant that

they are coming has now grown so loud

that I feel like one sort of has to ask

oneself, well short of just 100%

skepticism, what the hell is going on

with this alien pipe? And I think that

the problem is one of modeling and

intelligence. There is an alien. We are

in the cultural process of meeting this

alien. But they do not come in thousand

ton burillium ships from Zanbu Ganubi to

trade high technology for human fetal

tissue. I mean that if you that's an

intelligence test, folks. Uh that's not

how it works. uh our own hysteria

makes it very difficult for us to deal

with the presence of the alien and the

alien knows that that's why it has

disguised itself as a psychedelic

experience I think uh

where you know how in all those 50s be

science fiction movies the there was

always this theme of the landing area

and I saw But in Mars attacks too, there

must be a landing zone. Somehow we must

let them know that we welcome them by

building a landing area. And the Nazka

plane has been claimed and on and on and

on. I think that the alien is a creature

of pure information.

It's purely information. It's non-local.

It comes out of the bell non-locality

part of the universe that exists

distributed through hyperspace. The

alien is real but it is only made of

information and therefore the only

dimension in which it can be encountered

is a dimension of pure information.

Fortunately,

we are building a dimension of pure

information.

Providentially, we have named it the

net.

The net is a net for catching the alien

mind.

How will it come? Will it descend upon

our websites in a flash of light? I

don't think so. How it will come is

hacked through human fingers.

The alien is real but it is within us.

It can only communicate information and

that information has to be made real in

this world by human coders.

So if we were to set out light-heartedly

to build a virtual reality as alien as

we could make it, I maintain that 3/4 of

the way our hair would be standing on

end because we would realize we are not

inventing this. We are discovering it.

You know Michangelo said uh the form is

in the block of marble. What I do is I

take away the part that is unnecessary

and reveal the human torso within the

block of marble. In the same way, the

alien is already within us, but we must

model it. We must call it forth into a

dimension of potential dialogue. And I

think that ultimately this is what high

techch society can bring to the shamanic

equation. Uh shamans have been dealing

with spirits, entities, powers for more

than a 100,000 years. But it has always

been on a onetoone basis. one human

being at a time went up Mount Si to talk

to the fire on the mountain. But with

virtual reality, we have a technology

that allows us to show each other our

dreams

and yes, our hallucinations.

And as we begin to show each other the

contents of our own heads, and as we

begin to explore the alien niagraas of

beauty that pour through your

consciousness under the influence of

some of these substances, we are going

to discover that we are not what we

thought we were. That the monkey flesh

is penetrated by something,

dare I say it, divine.

or at least alien, transplanetary, and

beyond the power of human comprehension.

I don't know if we're talking about God

Almighty here. I don't know if we're

talking about the God who hung the stars

like lamps in heaven, as Milton says.

That seems a tall order. Maybe what

we're talking about is the god of

biology.

Uh something has happened to this

planet. It has become infected with an

informationational

call it virus, call it force, call it

being that is using matter and yes using

our flesh and our thoughts to bootstrap

itself to higher and higher levels. And

now the prosthesis of machinery and the

possibility of an artificial

intelligence raises the real option of

producing

of actually

midwifing the birth of an entirely new

not species but order of biological and

intelligence

in existence. The human machine symbiot

is upon us. I mean, it's been with us

for a while since the first wheel was

carved, since the first stick was

sharpened. But that was all very simple

stuff. Now, it's clear that we are in

partnership with an other mind which

comes to us through our machineries and

through the biosphere. Wherever we press

beyond the thin curtain of rationalist

culture, we discover the incredibly

rich, erotic, scary, promising presence

of this intelligent other which beckons

us out of history and says, you know,

the galaxy lies waiting. A galaxy of

galaxies

lie waiting. Lose the encumbrances of

three-dimensional space. Return with the

word to its higher and hidden source.

And at that point, you will discover the

alchemical

uh uh uh paraclete

will be given unto you. the alchemical

dispensation

will be given. And as James Joyce said,

man will be durable.

What did he mean? He he meant that we

will lose the limitations of physical

and three-dimensional space. That we are

destined to become mental creatures.

People say, "Well, isn't this a terrible

thing? What about this, that, and the

other? All the things you're worrying

about, we turned our back on 25,000

years ago. We have been marching through

this virtual reality of our own creation

for the entire duration of what is

called human history.

Now, uh

is there a political implication to all

of this? I think the political

implication is a a personal one. We all

must try to understand what is

happening. We need to try to understand

what is happening. And in my humble

opinion, ideology is only going to get

in your way. Nobody understands what is

happening. Not Buddhists, not

Christians, not government scientists,

not you know, no one understands

what is happening. So forget ideologies.

They betray, they limit, they lead

astray. Just deal with the raw data and

trust yourself.

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what

if they are? What good is their

understanding doing you? People who walk

around saying, "Well, I don't understand

quantum physics, but somewhere somebody

understands it." That's not a very

helpful attitude toward preserving the

insights of quantum physics. Inform

yourself. What does inform yourself

mean? It means a transcend and mistrust

ideology.

Go for direct experience.

What do you think when you face the

waterfall? What do you think when you

have sex? What do you think when you

take psilocybin? Everything else is

unconfirmable rumor, useless, probably

lies. So liberate yourself from the

illusion of culture. Take responsibility

for what you think and what you do. And

then the other political implication

toward community is

a lot of people are going to be very

anxious because change

raises anxiety in people. And people who

have limited opportunities to educate

themselves because of cultural

culturally inflicted abuse are scared

because they can sense that everything

familiar is giving way but they don't

want to embrace the unimaginable.

These people need to be reassured. They

need to be reassured by example and by

hearing optimistic

and reasonable rhetoric about the

future. Selling the future as an eight

alarm fire which is how the media does

it uh only makes a sane future

impossible.

So we need a responsible

approach to thinking about the future

and it means taking personal

responsibility for your drug taking for

the ideas the means that you push into

society and for the images that we share

among ourselves. You know, one of the

great truisms of the new age is that

images can heal. But I've never heard

anybody discuss the obvious contra

implication, which is images can make

you sick and you are constantly

bombarded with images which disempower,

divide, confuse and and and make crazy

basically. So I think the reason

psychedelics are such political dynamite

in any culture is because they dissolve

cultural assumptions. The scales fall

from people's eyes and they say, "Does

this make sense? Does my job make sense?

Does my relationship make sense to my

significant other, to my government, to

my children, to my environment? Do these

relationships make sense?" And of

course, the answer for most people in

high-tech society is no. We've been

compromised. We've been deluded. We've

been sold a massive pottage. The way out

then is personal responsibility, new

operating systems downloaded from

outside of culture, which means from the

deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants.

And then a commitment to community and a

motto of to the future without fear.

Without fear.

Thank you very much.

Well, so much for a promise to breed

brief. Uh, you know, you just wind the

guy up and point him and, uh, off he

goes. The robot who preaches freedom,

questions, challenge, anything, anybody.

Yeah, you. Well, yeah, it's a tricky

question because what's being maximized

as things come together is novelty.

And so then we have to have a discussion

about what is novelty. To my mind, an

explosion

takes a complicated situation and

reduces or as mathematicians would say,

flattens its dimensionality.

uh uh an art gallery or a beautiful home

is far more interesting before an

explosion than after. So I don't see how

an uh some kind of catastrophe would

entirely fulfill the bill. On the other

hand, a partial catastrophe

of some sort because I believe primates

are at their best when cornered and we

don't we aren't cornered yet. I mean we

talk about how we're cornered. People

say this is the end of the world. This

ain't the end of the world. This is the

long garden party before the end of the

world with strolling musicians and

superbly catered food and women in

diiaous gowns and high toned

conversation. Wait till you see the end

of the world. It isn't about deciding to

come up to Austin to attend the whole

life expo. Let me tell you. So, uh, uh,

yes.

Yes. I should repeat questions.

Different part of the room. Back here,

white shirt. You, sir,

this guy. Yeah.

>> I lost your language.

Heat. Heat.

Heat. Heat.

Yes. You eloquently represent the

position that language was invented in

order to lie,

right? Well, that's what the second guy

who got a hold of it, I'm sure, probably

did with it. Uh

you're you're right that I have an

incredible enthusiasm for verbal speech,

but it's only because it's easy for me

to do. If if I didn't do this, I'd have

to find honest work. Um however,

I have I am aware or yeah, I'm very

aware of the limitations of language and

one of the things I've talked about a

lot is what I call visible language. You

use the example of telepathy that if we

were in telepathic communication, how

could I lie? Because you would perceive

my my intent. Uh the key to making

language more true is to make it more

visual.

Uh now that can't just take the form of

a bigger vocabulary and more colorful

metaphors like people will say when he

spoke he painted a picture or uh

listening to him was like watching a

movie. I think ordinary speech goes

through a series of stages from

articulate to eloquent to poetic to

demagogic.

And demagogic is where you want to be

careful uh because then you can turn,

you know, essentially Hitler turned

history on its head with speeches. He

just could really deliver a stem winder.

Uh I've been fascinated by the fact that

in the Amazon under the influence of

Iawasa

uh people sing songs

but they see the song they sing and when

you hear people talking about it

afterwards people will say after

listening to a song you know I loved the

part with the olive drab and the chrome

but I thought when he got into the

magenta and yellow stripe thing. It was

just too much. Well, this is a critique

of a song. And then when you take Iawasa

with these people, you discover to your

amazement that

is a blue ribbon a foot across that

descends from floor to ceiling and has a

yellow center and then

puts knobs in the ribbon. and you can

start singing and building, modeling,

animating in three dimensions with

sound. Well, I maintain that our

insistence technologically on pushing

our media toward ever more immediate

sensation. So that if we have

photography, it's black and white, we

demand color. If it's color, we demand

motion. If it's motion, we demand sound.

If it's sound and motion, we want 3D. We

it's that we trust our eyes and the

natural

uh domain of communication is visual for

human beings. We're like octopi in that

way. So really language needs to evolve

toward the visual. And that's why I'm

very keen for technically dense

prosthetic environments where every time

you say the word and a yellow

three-dimensional triangle appears in

the air. Every time you say or an orange

ball appears, a computer is listening to

what you're saying and giving a

geometric accompaniment to speech. I

think that there are forms of telepathy

that we can evolve through the use of

drugs and computerass assisted

technologies that will allow us to see

each other's dreams. In spite of your

correct assessment that I'm keen for the

spoken word, I spent all summer learning

modeling and three-dimensional animation

programs from my son

because I want to animate. I want to

model. I see things on my trips that I

have never been able to English, but

that if I were a fully competent modeler

and animator, I would just say, "Check

it out." And I'm going to do that. And

and I urge you to do that. I mean, it's

a funny thing to be told, you want to

spiritually advance, study

3D animation, but these are the

frontiers of communication. We have an

obligation to make our language more

immediate. It is the most godlike thing

we do. If you're looking for the

thumbrint of Almighty God on the

biological organization of this planet,

it is human language. It is a miracle. I

don't give a hoot what the dolphins and

the honeybees are out there in the woods

doing. It ain't like Milton. It ain't

even like Bob Dylan. Uh it ain't even as

good as this. I'm willing to say. Uh,

no. Human human communication is what we

are and it will lead us to be a

symbiotic species if we if we put the

pedal to the metal. that for people like

yourselves who I assume to be no matter

how you finagled your way in here this

afternoon part of the upper 3% of the

ruling elite on this planet there is a

real obligation to use privilege to uh

communicate and to make art I think this

is what if the good life has any purpose

other than to drink beer and watch TV

it's to produce art this is how you make

a payback into the community. And art is

ambiguous. Your art may say things to

people other than yourself that it would

never say to you. But that's how we make

the community richer. That's how we

enlarge the dimensions of the human soul

by by making art.

Yeah.

[Applause]

[Music]

Stand up and yell.

[Music]

[Music]

Louder.

You said, "Do you take psilocybin and

see self transforming machine else?" No.

[Music]

Yeah.

The question is, when you encounter the

self-t transforming machine elves in

hyperspace,

do you think that's a reflection of

ourselves or do you think it's an alien

or I mean I'm paraphrasing, but it's

something like that.

It's it's tricky because we are not what

we think we are. Uh

I I I maybe I didn't spend enough time

on this alien thing. Uh I referred to

non-local domains of information. This

has to do with this idea in quantum

physics that there is uh something

called bell non-locality

that all particles that were ever

associated

remain associated in some mysterious way

no matter how far apart in time and

space they have drifted. Well, according

to the big bang, all particles were once

closely associated. at the at the moment

of the big bang everything was in a

space less than the diameter of the

proton or some piddling distance like

that. Uh well, so then this was an idea

that was just thought so outlandish that

there could be this instantaneous

dimension of connectivity that it was

dismissed from quantum physics in favor

of an acceptance of a somewhat less

outlandish but equally challenging

notion which was the Heisenberg

uncertainty principle and that's how it

was left for about 40 years and but

there were thought experiments that

people talked about that could test for

this bell non-locality. Well, eventually

these apparatus were actually built and

these experiments were performed. And

what do you know, Joe? Bell non-locality

can be demonstrated the same way any

other physical phenomenon can be

demonstrated given a sufficiently

prepared laboratory situation. It's

real. It's not woo woo. It's actually

scientifically true at the fundamental

core of physics that all space and all

time is in some form of simultaneous

connection. Now, it gets a little dicey

if you ask questions like, can we use

this to get and send information? And I

don't want to go into that because I

think I already have the answer. No

matter how good the arguments against

it, I believe this is what the human

imagination is.

that you have two eyes to show you local

space and then you have an organ called

the mind which doesn't protrude anywhere

on the surface of your body except

occasionally in some cases it will lodge

on a surrogate but generally the mind is

invisible

uh but it gives you non-local data

that's what the imagination is that's

non-local data everything in the

Imagination is real somewhere somewhere

so far away in space and time that it

makes absolutely no sense to give it

another thought ever again. Don't ever

think that thought again. But know that

everything in the imagination is real.

So it's ridiculous to speak of my

imagination or the human imagining.

There is just the imagination. But see,

if all information is there, 99.999%

of that information is not intended for

human beings and makes no sense

whatsoever to us. It's basically static.

It's either above or below our cognitive

power to organize and so it is

meaningless. But 0.00001% 01%

of this non-local data is enough like

local data that we can make metaphoric

bridges to it and say well it was like

this and it was sort of like this and it

was a kind of this and it reminded me of

something else and that's the stuff of

the imagination and to the degree that

you can accept alien data without

freaking out. You can go deeper into the

imagination. I have a friend who says of

psilocybin mushrooms, every time I take

it, my goal is to stand more. And he

doesn't mean stand more in terms of

dosage. He means stand more in terms of

content because it can always raise the

bar higher than you can jump. I mean,

I've had dialogues with it where after

hours of dancing mice and personal

revelations and kind of a sense of

familiarity, I've said to it, "Well, but

what are you really? Show me what you

are for yourself." Well, my god. The

temperature in the room begins to fall

towards zero. Black draperies rise.

There's an organ tone that shakes the

earth. And after about 30 seconds, I

say, "Hey, enough of what you are for

yourself. Let's go back to the dancing

mice." And uh the little candies rolling

in the dark and uh you know, it it knows

that you have a limited capacity to

absorb its alieness. That's why we have

what's called human history. Human

history is the process of spending more.

And it's now we've sort of come to the

short and curly part of the process

where they're just around the corner. I

mean, all you have to do is smoke a

doobie, look out at the evening sky,

have a dream, talk to a friend, and the

alien is very very it its trailing aura

or its leading aura, I guess. It's its

leading aura has now intersected uh

human psychology. But cheerful stories

of space brothers and scary silly

stories of featal trading high

technology freaks in lead with the

government. Hey, it's so much bigger

than that. It's so big that it has

disguised itself as an alien invasion to

keep from really alarming us with what

it really is.

How are we doing here? Couple more

questions. Uh

>> if you could come to the microphone so

the tape recorders

>> a lady. Yes. Would you like to come up

and uh we'll get you on tape.

I was just wondering what uh you thought

about the possibility of um

as we become more aware of what we're

doing to the environment and the

responsibility of those industrialized

nations that are consuming more than

their share that uh when we if we could

get on an equal playing field and those

uh underdeveloped countries that have a

great deal of the resources that they're

using up to basically pay their national

debts. Uh if they could receive

technology so that they can be on an

equal playing field on the internet etc.

in exchange for our consumption

that uh it might be an interesting uh

evolution in terms of

>> well I I think it's happening in other

words uh some people have objected that

the internet and computers are an

elitist technology in the hands of a

bunch of white folks. uh to some degree

that's true. But on the other hand, if

the automobile had followed the same

curve of cost benefit that the computer

has followed in its development, then

the average automobile today would cost

uh a buck and a half and it would go a

100,000 miles on 10 cents worth of gas.

That's the kind of bang for your buck

you're getting from the modern PC

compared to where it was 35 years ago.

No technology in history has had its

costs fall so quickly. And there is no

reason to think that those costs will

level off. If a good PC today is $1,400,

there's no reason why in 5 years it

shouldn't be $140. And there's no reason

why in 10 years it shouldn't be $14 and

be worn on your thumbnail. This can all

uh be done. All all these prices are

artificially inflated. The other thing

about the internet is it is going

wireless.

Uh and as it goes wireless, it goes

totally global. If I can just brag for a

minute and make an example of myself. I

have a wireless connection to the

internet. At first, I got a wireless

connection because I couldn't get any

other kind cuz I lived way up on a

volcano. But now, my wireless connection

is 1 megabyte.

That's 45 times faster than 288. The

poor people down on copper, they can't

do better than 56 because the

infrastructure already exists and

therefore limits the bandwidth by going

outside the infrastructure. This sounds

like a reprise of my talk. By going

outside the infrastructure and building

a loan from ground up, I suddenly find

myself looking down the gun barrel of a

T1 connection. And it is heaven itself,

let me tell you. And the people who sold

it to me, and there must be dozens of

other companies, are bent on conquering

the world, meaning putting everybody who

wants to be online for pennies in the

next five to six years. And you know if

you live in Manhattan or even Austin,

what is the internet? It's another

diversion. It's another piece of

entertainment. It But what is it like in

Somalia, in seells, in Bangalore? What

kind of impact does it have there? It it

it is you talk about a culture

dissolving effect based on psychedelics.

How about a culture dissolving effect

based on access uh to the internet? And

people say, "Well, Western values will

swamp all others." Uh, certainly to some

degree that is true, but did that just

begin yesterday?

Isn't that what the bloody business has

been about for 500 miserable years ever

since the barbarian Cortez arrived in

Mexico? I think so. Well, don't get me

off on that.

Uh, uh, one last question. Who's just

burning?

Anybody burning? There's somebody

burning.

So, where do you think we're going to be

on December 22nd, 2012?

All together.

All together.

It's a nice answer.

Here's another one.

Why have only one answer?

Uh, it's too early to tell. In other

words, asking that question in 1997 is

like asking a man looking east at 1:00

a.m. what he thinks the sunrise will be

like. It's just too early. The sun lies

over the event horizon of the planet. In

other words, we can't see around the

corner yet. In terms of our cultural

analogous cultural development, right

now we've reached approximately the year

1,000 AD. And between now and 2012

at an incredibly accelerated rate, we

have to do a number of things. Discover

the new world, invent the calculus, have

the Renaissance, then have the

Reformation, then have the industrial

reformation, then have the 20th century.

All that has to be squeezed into the

next 14 years. Uh the real outlines of

what is tearing toward us will probably

be uh the province of squirrels and

visionaries like myself until around

2004 and five. And by that time

it will be clear to everyone what is on

the end of every fork as William

Burroughs once said. In other words, it

it It will be clear that history has

been cancelled. It will be clear that

there is no human future except through

hyperspaceial breakthrough. We will all

be walking around on an internet that is

90% VRMLbased and hence

three-dimensional and interactive. And

uh nanotechnology will beginning be

beginning to deliver its goods to

society. new forms of propulsion system

are going to move the outer planets to

within a few weeks travel so forth and

so on. Uh so uh we cannot at this moment

know the true nature of the escaton

because at this moment if we knew the

true nature of the escaton it would

shatter our cultural assumptions and our

individual understanding completely. We

have a lot of heavy lifting to do.

There's a lot of self-education,

hard tripping, and heroic dosing that

needs to be done before we can meet the

escaton on a level playing field. Be

there or be square. Thank you.