linear societies and non-linear drugss

8/8/2019 Linear Societies and Non-Linear Drugss

1/11

The title of tonights talk is Linear Societies and Non-Linear Drugs, which is

something that I just had to pull out of the air when Ken finally slammed me to thewall for what I would be talking about this night many months ago. But, more and

more for me, especially with this group these things have become sort ofsummations and, I guess I hope, convivial examinations of just where we are, we

each and every one of us and then this enterprise, whatever we mean by that, in thecontext of everything else thats happening in the world, in other words thepsychedelic experience, the entheogenic experience, contextualized. And as I try to

think about what, if anything, I can bring to the party I guess its that what Im

interested in is psychedelics as a philosophical tool, and when I concretize that formyself I realized theres no claims on that part of discourse; no one wants to do this.

Academic Philosophy is done in a very formal manner, and the most exciting isincredibly stuffy, and yet I like most of you I assume have taken on board in my life

this thing called the psychedelic experience, which is then as large a portion of my

being as my sexuality, my politics, my education, it shapes everything. And yet,nowhere in the world of philosophical discourse is there any genuflection at least

overtly made to this, maybe not since Plato talked about shadows on the walls onthe cave, and so forth and so on.

What can psychedelics and the psychedelic experience bring to philosophy,and what do I mean by philosophy? By philosophy I mean, the enterprise of

discursive thinking; trying to understand what the world is and whos asking the

question. Where did the world come from? Where is it bound and whos along forthe ride?

It seems to me that we as a community have, this is sort of hard to wrap yourmind around at least for me, but we have in a sense inculcated into ourselves the

image of an underclass so that we struggle for legal coloration of our practices andour habits, but we dont struggle for intellectual legitimation of our vision. We

accept that they are somehow contextually marginal, and as I thought about that I

realized that that is a limitation on the community. That the information, which iscoming from the psychedelic experience as interpreted by Western people, is

primary evidence for the need for a major paradigm shift in the whole way thewestern mentality does business. Well what kind of evidence and what kind of shift?

Well, theres a lot of talk in our community, and there had been for manymany years about shamanism, and when we seek to legitimize ourselves through a

historical argument we reach back to shamanism and we say were part of

something which is one hundred thousand years old and worldwide and touchedthe spirit long before the shadow of the cross fell over Jerusalem, and so forth and so

on; all true. And in a way that has, I think, that tendency, which is part of the broadertendency in the Western mind to valorize and grow nostalgic over the primitive has

put a certain political cast on our stance and our position. But what we are, again

contextually, is a culture of Science, and Im speaking now of our community. Its theAlbert Hoffman and the Dave Nickles and the Sasha Shulgins, who have kept our

canoe afloat. These are men of science; its methods, its vocabulary, its culture. We


2/11

have not, though we certainly honor those people and love them as there rhetoric is

not the primary rhetoric of the larger community of psychedelic users, which tendstoward this shamanistic aboriginal nostalgia.

I feel more comfortable with the scientific end of things. I think the newscoming out of science is the most psychedelic news there is. When I go to the

Internet I go to things like science alert and the Hubble picture of the day and thissort of thing. And our community as a whole is not involved enough in incorporating

the vistas. While we struggle to legalize psychedelics, psychedelic thinking is

everywhere triumphant because the instruments built by linear science throw opendoorways on the unimaginable and the most revered and whorey-hefays of the

scientific establishment have to genuflect before this stuff. I mean, what am I talkingabout, well for example, science magazine wrote last week that the most important

scientific breakthrough of 1998 was the apparent observation and agreement upon

that observation by the astrophysical community of a cosmological constant. Thissounds like very deep physics but if I give it to you as a headline what is means is the

entire universe every atom and every empty space of it is ruled by a very weirdforce that has now been seriously known to science for precisely five months. Aforce which is apparently going to overcome gravitys tendency to collapse the

universe and to cause it to expand in a very explosive and counterintuitive andpsychedelic fashion that is the complete confoundment of the core science that

western linear thinking has built, and of course there werent riots in the streets and

electricity didnt fail but at the very pinnacles of the antennae of the evolvingcivilization there was a shudder felt in the force you may be sure.

So, there are two much larger forces than our community that are in play interms of shaping the cultural modality and I would call them, well what would I call

them. I would call one of them science its the other one I am having trouble with.Its everything, which is not anchored in the rational. You know the twentieth

century has the most spectacular celebratory affair with the irrational since the

sixteenth century. I mean never before have so many prophets wizards, wisewomen, casters of runes, and seers of visions moved among the people plying there

wares, and part of this is brought on by the tension between the failure of theeducation system at the very moment of an inflationary expansion of knowledge so

that its very hard to be alclorant(?) in all fields and if your not current in a field then

probably your version of that field is some kind of story a myth. If you cant keep upwith quantum physics why not fall back on archangels, you know. It requires less

intellectual engagement or something like that. Discourse is fragmenting, fields of

discourse are evolving vocabulary so rapidly that the understanding of thesevocabularies is not penetrating very far beyond the core group of workers, so then

this is creating a kind of islanded systems of self reference where outside thosesystems of self reference information doesnt travel. The people who are the gene

splicers know very little about remote sensing and both of those parties know very

little about recent discoveries in astrophysics, for example. So, there is anintellectual fragmentation.


3/11

I live in Hawaii in a forest in fairly remote conditions, and so I entertain all

this in my mind all the time, and try to, my faith and I assume its the psychedelicfaith although we have had some fairly existential characters in our ranks over the

years, but the psychedelic faith it that the universe is beautiful in the Platonic senseand therefore good and true. In other words we are optimal. We are not flailing

existentialists. We are not relativists because we have a real standard tomeasure our spiritual coinage against so we are not relativists because wereembedded in relativism. Its all around us, its the air we breathe but it is not

inimical to the psychedelic community. I mean, I think the psychedelic

experience is the only authentic source of reliable contact with the numinous. Imean meditation, so forth and so on, is all very fine but it requires a leisure class

involved in philanthropic support of this kind of foolishness, where the psychedelicexperience is immediate and real. So, now Ive lost my way hear, ah yes optimism. So

I sit in Hawaii and I look at all this and I try to contextualize it and come out with a

good story because I think the best story will win. So if you can get together thebetter the best version of how it shall all come out so shall it be, and I work at this

because in the past Ive been very happy with the results between my interiorfantasy and the unfolding of historical development. I wished for lsd then ithappened, and then I dreamed of the interenet and then it happened so I should

keep at this.

I recently read a very interesting book called A Thousand Years of

Nonlinear History by Manuel De Landa, and if you get a chance you should take alook at this. He made a point which caused me to expand his point into this little

thing Im gonna tell you now, but his point was that human beings are very involved

in the movement of geological material. That as a species we move rocks around ona very large scale and of course its interesting that some of the earliest human

structures are the most physically massive and weighty, like the great pyramids. SoDe Landa made this point about our relationship with the geological stratigraphy of

the earth that cities were a kind of geological extension of the process of

crystallization carried on through the intermediation of a biological unit i.e.intelligent primates who are building these structures. I thought that was very

interesting I had never considered it before.

Ive talked about virtual reality and Ive said that its nothing new that Ur was

virtual reality and (???) was a virtual reality but done in stucco and firedsurroundings and stone and that when the medium is so intractable as stone the

epistemic assumptions that get formed about what reality is are very different then

if you can build Versailles at the click of a mouse button But nevertheless its thesame, but embedded in my reading of De Landa, Ive been thinking a lot and I talked

to you a lot last year about artificial intelligences and minds which are not human;minds which are very different from u, intelligence which is very different from us,

and while the nave are scanning the stars our appliance have become telepathic.

There is a very strange kind of intelligence being called into existence by ourselvesstrangely enough, and, and this is the connection to De Landa, this artificial

intelligence which is being called into being by human activity is made of the same


4/11

materials as Ur and (?????)). Its made of ceramics, glasses, and metals. So then I

took this on board and thought about it and I sort of come to some kind ofcyberpantheisticemersonianism. Ill give it to you as a headline and then work

backwards so that in case I forget what Im saying it wont be lost to sufferingmankind.

The earths strategy for its own salvation is through machines is what it is.And, human beings are some kind of, we are the deputized spouse; we are the bride

in this alchemical rarefaction of glasses, ceramics, metals and volatile materials.

Apparently the earth is some kind of an embryonic or fetal thing and at the end of itsgestation, what is happening is that its ramifying its nervous system is appearing in

the unfolding of its morphogenesis, and as we contemplate nanotechnologies andsee ourselves working through bacteria and this sort of thing at the engineering

level, you have to be blind to not then reflect back upon the fact that in some sense

we are already working at that kind of level, at the behest of it is not clear whobecause nobody ever asked the question in quite this way before. The answer to

who, I think, is the earth, and that what lies ahead at the end of the linear tunnel ofwestern subjectivist positivist structuralist assumptions that we have beenoperating, when we hit the end of the tunnel and burst out into the larger mental

space of cosmic evolution what we are going to find is that we are partners actors ina cosmic drama that involves the earth at one polarity and machine at the other

polarity as the expression of the will of the earth toward a kind of self reflective

transcendence that is achieved through machine human biotic symbiosis and this is,you know, there will never be a headline which says this. Some people wont even

notice that its happening because these large scale processes can be described by

many metaphors at many depths, but Im telling you I think this is whats going on.

The reason I like this story is because its not a story about processes out ofcontrol. Its not a story about human guilt. Its not a story filed with we musts and

we should. Its a story, which gives honor to every part of the unfolding experience

field, in other words biology, technology, human culture, human traditional values,transcendent human disextopian value. Its a story of things on course on time and

underbudget and I assume thats how nature really operates and that we live insidesome kind of anxiety producing culture that is a necessary, I dont want to say evil,

but a necessary response to conditions of stress. There are processes which let

nuclear waste build up, urbanization, land disturbance, there are processes which ifallowed to run on indefinitely would wreck the whole system and pitch into chaos

but Confucius said no tree grows to heaven, and what he meant by that is that its

fruitless to project any process to infinity because any process projected to infinitycreates some kind oh catastrophic scenario. If no fruit flies die in six months the

earth would spin out of its orbit from the weight of fruit flies. No, I dont think thatstrue but what an image. Somebody once told me that if the earth completely

disappeared except for its nematodes that you could still see the outlines of the

continents if you were standing on the moon. I thought, now just who gathered this?


5/11

So then to bring this back around a little. Where is the psychedelic experience

in all of this? Well it used to be called or at one phase it was called consciousnessexpansion and consciousness expansion in human beings is going to become an

absolute necessity because we are summoning out of the woodwork of cybernetictechnology machines that are going to require super intelligent humans to direct

and have discourse with them. This is happening. It is already happening. I mean theInternet is this. I mean it doesnt tap you on the shoulder and remind you to brushyour teeth, but it is a partner in the understanding of the world that is Gene like,

thats the image I have when I sit down to it. It is all John Dee would have asked of

his archangelic messengers. He wanted instantaneous information on the politicalsituation on the course of Europe. He wanted information on the course of the

Drakes expedition, then on the other side of the planet.

The internet is this kind of magical intelligent prosthesis, and like I said there

wont come a dramatic moment, I think, a la lawnmower man or something like that,these things are much more seeping. The only people who in fact can see the game

move on the background of the forest pattern are psychedelic heads. You have tothink about this stuff and you have to develop vocabularies for catching it in action.This is what the game of being an intellectual is, I think; trying to see the processes

of morphological unfoldmentin action and guess the direction in which its headedbecause its inevitably headed toward greater density of information at greater

speeds, higher level integrative metaphors, visually rather then textually displayed,

transformation of such graphic and glyphic elements over time it becomes more andmore like the interface of a computer more and more like some kind of machine

environment.

I mean, we have thought, for I assume, at least a hundred thousand years

maybe much longer, but the quality of thought, you know, when it was earlyintermittent, it was thin, it was an undigested intuition, a perception slipping away

from the minds eye because media reinforcement and education and the culturation

and the passage of a hundred thousand years the voice of the mind, the logos, hasgrown stronger, but now it takes an exponential leap forward into visualization, into

manifestation through this information processing prostheisis that integrates us alland you know I can imagine a future not very far away where the expression of the

individual is lowered is muted.

This is the most individualistic, individual worshipping century the century

just ending that we have ever known, and its great accomplishments, its great works

of art were all accomplished by individuals and of political such as the third reich, soforth and so on. Also highly motivated individuals rose above the massive. Im not

sure we can afford the luxury of that kind of expeditionistic individualism in thefuture, and I think that its not that we are talking about a restriction of human

rights, we are taking about a transformation of human drive. The states of

integration and collectivity that will be sold as public utilities in the next century areanticipated now by group psychedelic experiences, ayahuasca sessions, this sort of

thing, and the dichotomy, I think I made this clear when I talked about the earth and


6/11

machines, the dichotomy of the natural and the artificial is an obsession the

twentieth century, hence cancelled now. In fact a whole bunch of things arecancelled.

We were talking at home about how Roger Schadic(?) in his History ofDaDa(??) said , The twentieth century couldnt wait to be born. It was born in 1888

at the death of Victor Hugo, and then I said, well so if it was born in 1888 when didthe twentieth century end, and I think it ended in 1992; it expired early with the

birth of the World Wide Web. What defined all that modernity was mass media.

Mass media shaped that whole psychology and it is now archaic; its not archaic itsobsolete. Its wonderful that the phrase twentieth century is beginning to have that

wonderful brown gravy Edwardian tone that used to be reserved for the term 19thcentury meaning those terribly stuffy and confused and rather silly people who just

didnt quite get it right but were doing he best they could, muddling through and

thank god they gave way to us the people of the 21rst century.

Well some notes about this planetary intelligence and how all that works. Ive

been reading different people this year, maybe you can tell, and one of the peopleIve been reading is Greg Eagan who Ive talked about last year, but now Ive read

more. Now Ive read Diaspherus?, and the ones where he makes no effortwhatsoever to explain it to you unless youve already done your homework. And

then Jonathan today in his lecture talked about DNA a little bit and frame slippage

and all of that and it reminded me of it.

The thing that Im coming to from my psychedelic experience and my life

experience and the whole ball of wax, is, I said for many many years that the worldis made of language. That was just sort of one of my bumper stickers, but I think that

that carries some of the flavor of what I wanna say there, but that theres more to it

than that. Its that everything is code. Everything is code in the sense that hackersmean when they say that they write code. When Sasha stands up and waves his

arms and draws what he calls the dirty pictures. He initiates you into a code, avocabulary with very defined rules and quick to learn, and then they are like tinker

toys, once you know the rules of the connectivity then you can sit down like a child

and begin to stick these things together, well what would this be like, and whatwould this be like, and does god allow this or does this break the rules and so forth.

The DNA is like that. Human language is like that. Human body language is like that.Machines communicate like this; in fact, this is a bridge which connects us. This is

the great overarching bridge which will connect us to the machines, that they like us

are commanded by language

And so this realization that everything is code and code is moving on many

levels is I think, more primary than the perception for example that things are madeof space time matter and energy thats one level below code. The code codes for

space, time, matter and energy. Its much more like were in a simulacrum, somekind of machine environment and in fact I like that idea because Ive always sensed,

and psychedelics have always intensified this intuition in me, that the universe is a

puzzle, life is a problem to be solved, its a conundrum, its not what it appears to be


7/11

there are doors, there are locks and keys, there are levels, and if you get it right

somehow it will give way to something extremely unexpected. DMT is a perfectexample of that and of course at the molecular level it literalizes that metaphor. The

DMT is the molecular key, the extraneous object introduced into the front door ofthe synaptic receptor, and then you can plunder the palace for five minutes.

If the world is code then it can be hacked in other words it neednt stand stillin quite the same way that it stands still in your mind if you believe in something

called the laws of physics. It permits magic because it says behind the laws of

physics is a deeper level, and if you can reach that deeper level you can makechanges there. This leads onto something that I wanted to say abut an earlier theme

when I was talking about the legitimation of the communitys intuition. Somethingthat we always kick around at these things or I always bring it up in some form is

where do the hallucinations come from?

We arrived late last night from a 24 hour trip from Hawaii that was just hell

or as much hell as modern airlines can legally inflict upon you, and you know, we got

stoned, so we were laying there, and it always happens when youre cut off fromcannabis for long periods like that you turn to it its ten times as strong and the

hallucinations were exquisite. Ive been looking at hallucinations now for thirtysome years, and I looked at these last night and thought, if some would ask me what

were they like what would I have to say? And I thought, indescribable, indescribable.

I looked and looked, I could look to my hearts content, and they were indescribable.So we always come around to this question, where do the hallucinations come from?

I suppose the unconscious reductionist among us, and I dont mean that theyre

unconscious I mean that they unconsciously use reductionism probably assume thatits some kind of like iteration thing that bits and pieces of everything youve ever

seen are rolling in some kind of neurological kaleidoscope that has been rolling forever and produce some kind of download of drifting imagery, but theres a problem

with that. This stuff is too coherent, it means too much, its too emotionally charged.

We have never really rallied as a group to try and locate in our combined opinionsthe one or several sources of these images.

I think that this is legitimate perception of thoughts, places, things, times, andobjects that either have existed somewhere in the universe or do exist or have

existed in the minds of beings somewhere, sometime, in the universe. In otherwords, we have to begin to take seriously the consequences of generalizations like

quantum connectivity. Its one thing to bask in the overarching metaphor, which

says that everything is connected to everything else. Its quite another thing to say,and so then what are the consequences, for me, of this? The answer seems to me to

be that the inside of our imagination, the inside of our heads really is the most vastfrontier imaginable, and we must leave it for future generations, or maybe not

generations, but future evolutionary biologists to figure out why an animal nervous

system would evolve a propensity for accessing bell non-local data, in other words,quantum mechanically accessible data at a different level of the physics of things.

There must be a reason, and in the same way that the problem of speciation posed a


8/11

problem for ninteenth century biology this can pose a problem to our thinking

without it sinking our intellectual enterprise. It is for some more sophisticatedfuture group of thinkers to understand why this is so.

What we have to grapple with is that it is so, that you have the Hubbletelescope inside of you. You have inside of you an informational gathering

instrument that can give you good intelligence about things so immeasurablydistant from this point that to state it in numbers and units is meaningless. Its just

elsewhere; the elsewhere of the absolute infinite of the plenum of the imagination in

which apparently beings rise and fall like plankton in the sea, and of course thepsychedelics are the naturally evolved nanomachinery of the Gaianmatrix that knits

together this cosmic ecology, this system of living relationships. I am not impatientwith the idea of extraterrestrial life or intelligence just its pop regurgitation, but I

think probably planets like the earth are alive and conscious, and they use the

technologies that the species native to them evolve to cast images out into the largeruniverse, that the dialogue among cosmic minds is a dialogue among entire

planetary ecosystems. It cant be trivialized into some take me to your leaderscenario, still less can it validate the unscheduled visit of pro bono proctologistsfrom nearby star systems.

One other thought in assessing this year in science, I talked about Omega the

cosmological constant, and that is really incredible; in fact let me do a personal

breast-beating thing and point out to you that this thing that they have come upon,Omega the cosmological constant, you know fifty years or so ago Einstein called it

the biggest blunder I ever made because he played with the necessity of this thing to

keep the universe from falling in on itself and then he decided that it was anunnecessary construct and that It lead to such weird conclusions that it had to be

gotten rid of, and so that was all very well and good, until, these recentmeasurements of the distances of certain supernova carried out independently by

several teams of astrophysicists brought the news that the universe is expanding

faster than the laws of physics allow, and when they looked at how much faster theyrealized that it called the cosmological constant back into existence.

There are a couple of things about this cosmological constant that are verycounterintuitive. The first is that it acts on empty space. It does not require matter

to manifest. It is a property of space itself. The second thing is, its a repulsive forcethats growing stronger and stronger. Forces dont grow stronger and stronger.

They grow weaker and weaker, gravity grows weaker, light grows weaker,

everything grows weaker. This force as time progresses gets stronger and stronger.That means when you project it out toward billions of years into the future, it

becomes the dominant force. It overcomes gravity, the strong force, the weak force,it overcomes all the forces, it becomes the dominant force. The other thing about it

is. Is that it becomes stronger, not on an even slope, but asymptotically. Now, this

produces something very much like what Ive been yacking about since 1971, thenovelty wave, the so-called timewave. It to grows stronger and stronger through

time, and it to has this kind of built in asymptotic acceleration where it experiences


9/11


10/11

neighborhood, or you can join the Amish and till rye in Pennsylvania. Actually I

think you cant do that because something s happened to the earth, but someHamish(?)possibility is still available.

Well, this is not like the sort of thing the other faculty members will betalking to you about which is an intense and primarily important download of the

homework, the chemistry, the botany, the behavioral impact, the archeology, theethnography of these substances. I asked myself all the time, How are we different

from other people? Are we morally superior? Are we smarter? Are we richer? Are

we kinder to the people we meet? And actually the longer I look the less I can tell.There are extraordinary examples of all of these things in and outside of our

community and extraordinary nudniks and jerks inside and outside our community.But we have in our hands tools that I think if people were correctly presented with

them and understood, without hype and hysteria and hyperbole, what this

psychedelic enterprise is about that we would win them to our cause because ourcause is the human cause-the cause of thinking and communicating and building and

bringing into existence new forms of beauty, new possibilities for being. This can bedone without psychedelics certainly, but with psychedelics it is accelerated, and ithas a feeling, not only of immediacy, but of, the only way I can put it is, correctness.

It isnt the lonely neurotic artist thrashing towards some kind of self-

reflection. Its the firm guiding hand of a great mind, the logos, the earth; I am not

sure, but a greater mind. True art truly is truly inspired. The muse I dont think wasmore real for Homer than it is or each and every one of us when were in the

presence of the mushroom or Ayahuasca or DMT or LSD or something like that.

I suppose I will go to the grave with life as mysterious to me as I found it

when I came consciousness around six or seven, but I think life is whatever it is, its

an opportunity of some sort and the things I have been most grateful for were thethings that I met at the frontiers of knowledge, of sexual experience, of psychedelic

experience, knowing, feeling, and being one with being are how I would categorizethat break down.

So, I think the future is bound to be very confusing and demanding for mostpeople and there are many claims on each of us and our intellectual loyalties and

where we put our energy- should we tolerate relativism, should we be MahanaBuddhists, whats are position on the (???), how do you relate to Monica, all these

things. I feel, actually, like the thing that I always dreamed of in my early youth was

a miracle. I didnt particularly like (???) book In Search of the Miraculous but I love

the title, and I used to just chant it as a mantra. In search of the miraculous, just one,I knew the rules, just one is enough because one secures the possibility of an

infinitude of miracles whether youve observed them or not. Well, now Im 52 andIve seen four or five, which is four more than necessary to make me a lifetime

optimist, but the recurrent, the enduring miracle, however its achieved, is thepsychedelic rush, that giddying moment when all bets are off, all boundaries

dissolve, the machinery of language fails, the adjectival wheel wells burst into flame,

and then you achieve orbital velocity and are in the presence of the thing.


11/11

I cannot believe that that is not solitary experience. Youve heard me say

many times how itchy it makes me feel to think that somebody could go from birthto the grave without having that experience. They can make of it what they want,

they can denounce it, they can deify it, but one should have it because its one of theprimary compasses of being, and its larger than the historical context.

The point of this talk tonight was to talk about linearity and idea systems andthe nonlinear impact of these drugs, and the way they break down media bias, but

all these intellectual ideas exist in the light of the sun of this unspeakable primary

experience and we can draw it, paint it, sculpt it, act it, dance it, drum it, and nevertake anything away from it, never define it, never occlude it. It is a miracle. Its like

having a presence of a deity. Its very hard for me to open myself up at any givenmoment to the full implications of how fortunate I am, and how good life is in the

shadow of this particular tree.

linear societies and non-linear drugss

Documents