live at cathedral church of st

8/8/2019 Live at Cathedral Church of St

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Live at cathedral church of st.john the divine

Its great to be here! Its absolutely great to be here. I think yesterday in Manhattan was as beautiful a dayas Ive ever seen anywhere. I hope you all noticed. Its the kind of day that makes you want to just drop

acid! And walk around in the park Anyhow, Im delighted to be here. Its been awhile since Ive been in

this town.

Whats new with me? (Ill get all that calm-us-down, make-us-feel-at-home stuff behind me.) Ive moved

off the mainland; Im living in the Free and Sovereign State of Hawaii now, loving it. When the word

reaches the mainland that we want independence, I hope all of you will support that and help make it a

possibility!Before I was in Manhattan, I was in Heidelberg, Germany, for two weeks working on a film, and this is the

project thats been on my mind recently. Were doing a film called The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Its

an effort to use an incident in early 17th-century European history, right before the 30-Years War, to makea kind of propaganda film, consciously using this earlier historical episode which involved a

granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth of England and young Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia, andtheir effort to build an alchemical kingdom in central Europe, right before the 30-Years War. Its a

wonderful romantic story alchemy, magick, politics. But the purpose of it is to make a statement about

our own politics and circumstance. So thatll be coming down the pipe in awhile.

Im doing a four-city tour, talking about the plunge into novelty that we are experiencing according to me,

and the challenge of the millennium, which we will experience according to nearly everybody or at least

everybody who keeps or cares about the Western calendar. And these things are parallel.

Just a bit of background here Im the purveyor of a notion that is uniquely my own (basically, no onewanted to steal it from me!): the idea that there is a quality in the world that has been overlooked by

Science, and overlooked by Western religions, as far as thats concerned a quality which I callnovelty. (And I cribbed this from Alfred North Whitehead.) Its a very slippery concept to define

mathematically or precisely, but intuitively I think its right there on the surface; we all know what novelty

is. Novelty is density of connection. Its that which is new or never tried. Its the unusual, the statistically

improbable, the interesting. I maintain that Nature herself is a kind of distillery of novelty, that over any

swath of time what we see is a tendency to accumulate and preserve this connectedness. And this is a

quality that affects social systems, biological systems, physical systems its a law across all scales of

phenomenon that Nature tends to become more complex through time, and tends to struggle against

entropy and habit to maintain that complexity.Well, as a rap at that level, you can take it or leave it its sort of a recension of the idea of Tao. But I

went much further with it; I mathematized it, I made it into an algorithm that can be run on computers. And

what the output of this software then is, are what I call maps of novelty or maps of time. (Imdelivering this at light speed because Im trying to get somewhere.)The point being, since late February, and until the middle of next week, the theory has predicted an

enormous plunge into novelty, whatever that is. And I have been anticipating this particular dip toward the

weird for many years because it is such a dramatic one; its a test for the theory. I think when you came in

this evening you were given a card with my web site address on it. Theres extensive exhibits there you

can learn more about this than most people with lives would ever care to know, at the web site. But the

question before the house this evening is, one week or less than a week from the bottom of the novelty

trough, how are we doing? Is it simply an illusion of the psilocybin-addled minority, or is there in fact akind of concrescence underway, a kind of plunge into deeper and deeper connectivity that anticipates

somehow this much larger plunge into novelty that will inevitably accompany the calendar? (The

calendrical change at the turn of the century.)

Well, Im a patient character, so it would be my tendency to not try to sort this out until, say, after the

election. A lot of people want to second-guess the situation, or have strong opinions of their own. I got apiece of email today. (Maybe its a person thats in this room it wasnt somebody I knew.) They said,

Isnt it about time to come clean about the fact that the novelty plunge has been a huge bore? So thatstirred me, and I actually made a little list and Im not saying that weve nailed this to the barn door. But

confronted with a critic, I want to respond. So here is just a partial list off the top of my head, composed

back in the hotel an hour and a half ago of interesting and unusual things which have happened in the last

90 days, roughly, since the 25th of February.

Several new planets have been discovered around other stars. 70 Virginis, 47 Ursae Minoris, and BetaPictoris stars within 40 light years of Earth have all been discovered to have planets of Jupiter mass

or less. This has to do with new technologies being put in place. We can expect a planet a month at this


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point, and the resolution is getting finer and finer. Were very very close to the Holy Grail of the water-

heavy, oxygen-rich signature of a world like our own somewhere within 40 light years of Earth. Thats one

item. (Ill do the astronomy part first.)Ten billion new galaxies were discovered and announced. I believe it was the missing eighty percent of the

universe! That was in the last 90 days.And then though probably few of you actually noticed it, because you live in this wonderful dazzling

verticality of an arcology filled with light But for those of us who live off the grid and in rural areas, the

brightest comet since 1658, and an unpredicted one at that which is interesting, cause I could have

fudged, you know, and made it fit in the slot. But nobody knew. I saw this comet from rural Hawaii, and it

was absolutely stunning. I mean comets are one of those things guaranteed to disappoint, and this was

dazzling.So thats the astronomy section of whats happened in the last 90 days. Turning to biology, the Human

Genome Project announced its completion, years earlier than they thought they would. That is the key piece

of data about ourselves that we have never had before. Its the algebra of biology itself, now fully

elucidated, and it will mean the cure of diseases, it will mean all kinds of things will flow from that.Right at the turn from not-so-interesting to very interesting, back there at the end of February, half a dozen

atoms of antimatter were created at CERN in Switzerland. Not antiparticles, which are very humdrum and

have been around, but antimolecules of hydrogen antihydrogen and antihelium. Antimatter converts to

energy 100% in the presence of ordinary matter. If you want to fling Manhattan to Andromeda, this is the

technology you need to have! Well, remember that happened in James Blishs novel Cities in Flight do

you all remember that? The story of John Amalfi, the mayor of New York City when New York City waswell beyond the Milky Way?Another interesting point described in the Times two days ago: its now agreed by everyone that a verylarge asteroid impact 4 or 5 million years ago delivered a huge amount of organic material to the Earths

surface without destroying it in the impact. I wont bother you with the details, but what this means is

organic material which forms in deep space is delivered regularly to the surface of the Earth. This changes

entirely our picture of who we are, where we came from, and the uniqueness of life as a terrestrial

phenomenon.And finally and this is just as I say an off-the-top-of-my-head list roving the Internet I learned that

the nanotechnologists (the people who are working at the itty-bitty scale) have finally produced the

nanoassembler which they have been seeking which lays the basis for a very bizarre technology, a

technology of machines too small to see. I think weve discussed at times the phenomenon of putting

10,000 steam engines on a chip; more steam engines can be put on a one-centimeter chip than were

operating in England in 1850, at the height of the age of steam.Well, so what are we to conclude from all this? Novelty apparently doesnt come in the form of politics,

wars, revolutions, upheavals that was the change of another era. In the present era, what change seems

to mean, or where it seems to be concentrated, is in technology, and in science. All these scientific

discoveries I mentioned are the result of the application of advanced technologies: signal processing

technologies and this sort of thing. Its as though the acceleration into novelty is now very much a

phenomenon of our technical productions, our machines, our interconnectivity. And its interesting wehave now the Internet; we are familiar with the inner network of our own emotions, associations, this sort

of thing; and we are becoming more and more aware of the interpenetrating network that connects all life

back into the biosphere, back into the dynamics of the Gaian matrix of oceans and rivers and biological

recycling of materials. So I submit that, at this point, if you dont think we are experiencing an incredible

plunge into novelty, you have an uphill case to defend.Im not suggesting that this pace of breakneck change will continue indefinitely. It wont. In every period

of time, if examined at sufficient resolution, you see that novelty is retarded or obstructed by another force,a force more akin to resistance of some sort. And I name this habit. So on all scales, process in your

own life, in the life of the nation, in the life of the species and the life of the planet a struggle between

habit and novelty. Habit and novelty: what novelty builds up and offers up as unusual and improbable, the

forces of entropy and of habit and of business as usual attempt to pull down. But as I say, the good news is

that over time, these things that retard novelty must yield. And the interesting thing about this idea is that it

lays the basis for an ethic. Because it takes the phenomenon of ourselves our sprawling cities, our

uncontrolled technologies, our dreams, our fears and it places them at the very center of the drama. Weare no longer existentially-marginalized observers. History is no longer some kind of hideous mistake.

Rather, everything is seen to serve this advance into novelty.


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Well then of course the obvious question to ask is, Where is it all leading? I mean, how novel can things

become, and how rapidly, before we become unrecognizable to ourselves? Well the answer is, not much.

Working from a mathematical point of view and its going out on a limb to do so, because many

squirrels occupy this particular part of the park nevertheless Ive been willing to go out on a limb andextrapolate these processes forward and say: somewhere beyond 2012, reality as we know it is taken off the

menu. And Ive been saying this since 1971, and the only model I had was the boundary-dissolvingchallenge of the psychedelic experience. And I still think that, in some sense, history is an invoking of that

its a slow-moving psychedelic experience of some sort that builds to some kind of revelatory

crescendo, almost like an individuation process in the Jungian model not of a single person, but of an

entire culture or a species.

We are in the grip of some kind of an attractor, and when we look back at history, we can have a sense, Ithink, that we have never been here before. But we are so accustomed to causal thought, that we assume we

have beenpushedhere, pushed here by historical necessity, by bad political decisions, by the vicissitudes of

evolution (cultural and otherwise). I dont think so. I think we have been pulledhere, that we are under the

aegis of a kind of an attractor. Some people would call it a destiny, but what it is is a dream that is pulling

us deeper and deeper into the adventure of existential becoming. And faster and faster thats the otherthing. Deeper and deeper, faster and faster, so that the rate of change that people were accustomed to before

the Industrial Revolution, for example we can barely conceive of such slow-moving, stately, meta-stable

societies. On the other hand, within the 20th Century, the acceleration has been even more intense, and

continues to accelerate.

Well, people think its an illusion, or its a subjective perception that is best saved for their therapist. No,what you see is true: it is happening. The denial of it, I think, comes from the fact that its very hard for

people to imagine transformation without catastrophe, because thats the only kind weve ever known.

Societies build up wealth and stability and a model of themselves, and then plague, invaders, crop

failures, something happens Catastrophe. But I sense, I think, an incredible opportunity for positivetransformation, that the tools that have been given into our hands now make it possible for us to discover

who and what we really are. And I think since de Sade people have thought it would be a fairly rough ride.I dont think so. I think thats a form of cultural paranoia that keeps us from exploring what our politics

could be.

It happens that Im named after a Roman dramatist, a very minor character who wrote these sort of foppish

little social comedies that didnt amount to much but one quote comes down from this guy, Terence.

And he said, I am a human being, and therefore nothing human is alien to me. And Ive sort of taken thatas my banner. Im an anarchist. Being an anarchist means youre not afraid of your fellow man. All the

political theories that come out of Thomas Hobbes and the paranoid school are about controlling theperceived inherent evil in human beings. Well, I think if you perceive it and assume it, and set society up as

basically a series of checks and balances against the assumed bestial nature of your fellow human beings,

youre going to have a nightmare. And this is the legacy of the Post-Enlightenment meditation on how

human beings should behave.One of the reasons I love to come to New York is because it convinces me that the future works. The future

is going to be very much like thepresent, here. Very large parts of the world are undergoing

Manhattanization, and if Manhattanization is not a positive process, then theyre descending into a hell. But

what I see is an incredible victory of pluralism, of tolerance, of multiplicity. Its got to be that way: we

cannot have our little private xenophobic agendas, our historical grudges, our gender obsessions. All these

things which divide us and set us apart from ourselves, I think, are legacies of a previous and now obsolete

set of technologies. And this is one of the things that I want to talk about this evening.Since this is the world capitol of media (and probably wont be for long, because there will be no world

capitol of media its spreading everywhere) I think its worth talking about what media is, what it hasdone to us, what it can be, and how it relates to this effort to try and birth a new kind of humanness out of

our present dilemma. In this part of the rap very Im McLuhanistic in my approach. I think we never

understand the impact of a technology until its too late. And you could almost go further and say you

never understand the impact of a technology until it is already obsolete.For the past 300 years or so, Western civilization has been ruled or held together by the phenomenon of

what is called mass media It begins with newspapers and of course leads into the much more penetrating

and global electronic forms of media such as network television and so forth and so on. The interesting

thing about these forms of media is that they are all tabloid.Allof them. Imagine a newspaper such as the

most venerable newspaper in this town: it is designed, because it is a commercial enterprise, to be read by


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millions and millions of people. Its a cultural slight of hand on our part to not realize that no one should

reada newspaper designed to be read by millions and millions of people that that trivializes and

commonalizes information beyond the point of recognition or relevancy. These forms of mass media that

were familiar with are what are called one-to-many forms of media. An editor, a talk show host, a

somebody is dispersed to consumers who have no ability to feed back, or only very unsatisfying ones

like through letters to the editor or something, which is ajoke. So one-to-many communication has createda hierarchy of values. It has created, in fact and McLuhan made this point the very notion of the

public is a print-created idea. There was no public before there was large-scale print. Information was

held by privileged classes, held very closely.

In the present evolving situation, the new forms of media and by that I mean specifically the Net, the

Web in all its manifestations is an any-to-any form of communication. One person can communicate tothousands, thousands can send email to one person who somehow earns their ire or desire, or any variation

on this can be worked. And the incredible pluralizing of lifestyles and the richness that has come recently to

high-tech industrial societies is a consequence of the breakdown of these print maintained and created

stereotypes which have everyone marching around in uniforms suits, mostly! That now is finished. So it

leads then to the question, where do we put our own lives in all of this? And I think that the answer and this comes out of a long involvement with psychedelics and with the Imageper se (and for me the

psychedelics were always the way to get into the realm of the images) the obligation on all of us, I think,

is to use this medium, these new forms of media, and produce art, furiously. Thats what its all for. Thats

what liberation really means: it isnt permission tojog. Its permission to create!

The obligation that rests upon everybody in this room and the poorest and most twisted among us stillprobably falls in the upper 5% percent of people on this Earth in terms of opportunity, disposable income,

access to resources, so forth and so on the way to redeem this exclusivity is to push the art pedal to the

floor. And Im trying to do this with my web site. Im very keen on these new technologies because I dont

see them as they stand today thats exciting enough but I see them as what they could be. And myidea, with a high-speed, semi-virtual sort of environment online, is that this is an environment in which you

can display the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul, your aspirations. We are not these shavenmonkeys that we appear to be. Thats thesurface, and beneath it lies the most complex organ of the human

body, which is the mind-body interface. The experience, the ideas, the understanding of each of us is

unique, but somehow useless to the community unless expressed. And we have become consumers to such

a degree that we have sold our own uniqueness down the river.

And so I believe that the humanizing of the future lies in a tremendously rich kind of symbiosis between anature-based psychedelic archaism in the presence of the fastest and finest information technology that we

can get our hands on. Already these technologies have put an end to the marginalization of bohemian andother forms of subculture. What these technologies do is they remove the hegemony of values and

substitute instead a more realistic mix of possibilities all kinds of possibilities. Whatever your agenda is,

whatever your political position, your sexual politics, your taste in art and literature and music whateveris on your mind, if you really care about it, you should wish to communicate it. And the communications

tools that have been set before you are immensely powerful at this point.So then the question becomes, What is to be communicated? Is there a coherentzeitgeist? Or is there just

to be an efflorescence of individually-driven creativity? Well this individually-driven creativity thing is a

very late-arriving notion of what an artist is. An artist is essentially a magician, and a pipeline for the

Logos, for the Demiurge, the Overmind, this hovering, generalized kind ofWorld Soul that is downloading

its intent into history in the form of love affairs, revolutions, inventions, ideas, so forth and so on. And so

for that kind of an inspired artistic output, there has to be a connection in to this Logos, to this Demiurgos.

And other than depending on being born a genius which very few of us can do the only effective and

dependable way that I know to do that is through a relationship to the psychedelic experience. I sayexperience; I thought of saying plants because certainly there are psychedelic experiences not basedon plants. But I find the plant experiences most compelling, because I think somehow we are at our mostfulfilled when we have a heart connection to Nature, to the living world. And this doesnt mean that you

have to camp out in rainforests, or something like that. I mean, have you noticed? Your mind is embedded

in the living world: your body meets you everywhere you go, and is as complex and astonishing and as

capable of horrifying you as any Amazon rainforest. Connection to Nature. Without that you get

Existentialism, and worse. You get art whoring itself to the interior decoration conspiracy, or something

like that. I mean, not that people dont need chachkas, Im not saying that! But there are higher purposes to

be served here.


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So, a return, then, to the psychedelic experience. How radical is that? Is that a return to tradition? Is that a

break with tradition? Is this an advocacy of some kind of narcoleptic dystopia a la Brave New World? You

have to find out for yourself.But one of the things that is finished with the death of mass media and the rise of the psychedelic Net,one of the things that is finished with them forever is ideology. Ideology is poisonous. Its not that there are

goodideologies and badideologies ALL ideology is poisonous. Because to have an ideological position

assumes that you understand the nature of reality.How likely is that? How likely is that? And, in the

Twentieth Century, if we have not learned the bankruptcy of ideology, then I dont know what it would

take. We have on the Right the stunning example of German National Socialism. We have on the Left the

stunning example of Soviet Communism. And then all the blathering and wasted time and crap that went

on in all the spectrum in between.This ties into a larger issue which Im interested in and this is another way of saying ideology is

bankrupt: Culture Is Not Your Friend. Culture is not your friend, no matterwhatyour culture is. And this

is sort of not a Politically Correct thing to say, because in the present ambiance (sort of, those who haventgotten the word,) theres a lot of attention to recovering our ethnic roots and to expressing our unique

ethnicity, and so forth and so on I thinkthats the beginningof understanding. But all terms that stressethnicity are words applied togroups of people. Have you ever noticed that? Have you ever noticed that

youre not a group of people, youre a person? So you may be Jewish, you may be Black, you may be

this, you may be that but there is no obligation to take upon yourself the generalized quality of these things,

because the generalized qualities belong to thousands of people examined at a time. If you misunderstand

that you become a caricature. You act outyour ethnicity as a caricature.So culture is not your friend, ideology is not your friend Whos your friend? Well, to my mind, the felt

presence of immediate experience is the surest dimension, the surest guide that you can possibly have. The

feltpresence of immediate experience. Feeling is primary. All ratiocination and intellectualization and

analysis is secondary, and comes out of culture. No matter what your culture is, it has answers. Culturesthinks up answers. So a child asks its mother a question, like, Where do we go when we die? or, Why

does Daddy go to work? Cultural answers are always provided, but nobody knows the realanswers to

these questions thats outside of culture. So coming to terms and fully expressing your culture is like a

stage in development. And then beyond that lies the aspiration of the felt presence of immediate

experience, and its implications. Its a very hard thing to deal with and to do when you are poisoned with

ideology. And ideologies are very difficult to deconstruct and rid yourself of through a simple talking

therapy of some sort, through simply trying to work it out. The best antidote for ideology is to raise theintensity of the felt presence of experience to such excruciating levels that it simply vaporizes ideological

illusion. And this is what psychedelics are for, I think.And it also explains (if youve ever wondered) the incredible phobia of these things on the part of theestablishment, the incredibly deep alarm that these things trigger in people. You know, Tim Leary once

said of LSD, its a compound that occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who dont take it.Thats how powerful these things are! And the reason is, they are a direct challenge to the myth of the tribe

whateverthe myth is: Fascist, Democrat, Socialist, Communist everybody can get together on the

idea that psychedelics are somehow dangerous and antisocial and pose some kind of threat to the body

politic. Thats because all these ideologies, from the psychedelic point of view, are seen in all their

limitations and foolishness, and their historical assumptions and theirnaivet writ large across them.

Ideology is a fools game. Or its a scoundrels game. Because scoundrels use ideology to control fools.

And nobody wants to be caught in that situation.We have two routes to the felt presence of immediate experience beyond the ordinary. Basically: the

psychedelic experience and the sexual experience. And if they could make sex illegal, they would you

know they would! It alarms them profoundly! They wish people began from the waste up! But theres justnothin they can do about it! And in the case of psychedelics they wish people began from the head down!

Well, this tells you, I think, that culture is not your friend. It doesnt mean you have to flee from it, it

doesnt mean you have to become a critic of it, in any noticeable or astonishing way, it just means you have

to smarten up. In Hawaii they have a saying. They say be akamai. It means, just be smart. And what it

means to me is, it means pay attention. Pay attention to what is going on around you.My method, my style, has always been to be open-minded, to be critical, to be rational, but to seek the

weird. And to seek it seriously. Now if you seek the weird without a critical intelligence, it will find you

faster than you can lock your apartment behind you! The number of squirrelly ideas on the market these

days is truly alarming. I coined a phrase (I hope), the balkanization of epistemology. This is what were


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dealing with now. You understand what I mean? It means people cant tell shit from shinola, but they

wanna talk about it, a lot! This is a place where you have to bring to bear what are called razors, logical

razors. One is: hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity. Another is: equations should not be

multiplied without necessity. Razors always seek what is called the principle of parsimony. In other words,keep it simple, stupid. The simplest explanation is always to be preferred first. If is found inadequate then

ratchet it up. One notch. Not twenty notches, one notch. Then we see if that works. You may think this issome kind of down-prescription for reducing the world to a fairly predictable and mundane place. It isnt atall. Its a way to rapidly filter out a lot of nonsense. But the truly weird and the truly true can survive

this process. It doesnt do any damage to them, and you will then find them intact.

And I can only testify to my own experience. Ive looked into a number of things, and found most

inadequate for what I was interested in. What I was interested in was, I wanted to be astonished. I thinkastonishment is a very rare emotion. I wanted to be astounded. I remember when I was a little kid, there

was a science fiction magazine,Astounding Tales, and I would just look at the cover and I would think,

What kind of emotion is it to be astounded? Well Ive only found it on DMT, I have to tell you. I dont

know maybe Im a Well, no, I was astounded by Jerusalem, I was astounded by the Mosque of Omar,

thereve been maybe five or six other moments in my life when true astonishment broke through. But thepsychedelic experience intensely brought to focus is made of pure astonishment. And I find that feeling to

be a kind of maximizing of everything that I aspire to, enjoy Its a combination of intellectual pleasure,

surprise, amazement at ones presence before such a thing. And I invite all of you to seek the weird, and to

put it to the test, and to force those who would purvey various paths to the mystery to deliver. You know?

Its notsubtle. Thats the one thing you have to understand. Its not about looking into somebodys eyesand getting the whammy, its not about some intuitive knowing, its not some vague Its about beggingfor mercy because they are rotating andbalancing the wheels of your after-death vehicle having taken you

prisoner in your own apartment! Thats my idea of an encounter with the incredible. God knows, the worst

thing you can say about any drug is that itssubtle! Deliver us from subtle drugs, please!Well, I mentioned this balkanization of epistemology thing because my own theory tells me that as [tape

stops]in the presence of the Mystery. Nobody knows what life is dont let anybody kid you. And nobody

knows its limits or its constraints. And to the degree that you assume these things are known, you

marginalize yourself. You become a spectator, and a consumer, and a dupe, and a placeholder in this great

opera. Thats not what any of us want, I think. I think what we want to do is seize this moment, between

birth and God knows what, to make a difference. To make a difference. Sometimes people say to me, wellthis thing youre on about the novelty and the concrescence it all sounds very automatic. Whats the

political implications of this? Are we just riding along on the back of the dog, and there is no politicalimplication? No, I dont think so. I think the political implication is to understand the situation. The

essence of political clarity lies in a correct assessment of the situation. What is to be done? What serves?

What is dragging the boat, and what is actually carrying us forward? And I maintain that its a very

complicated situation.Its troubling to me that in our community of dissidents, its very hard for people to see the commonality of

connection, difficult for ecologists and feminists and radical media people and psychedelic people to make

common cause. And yet, to my mind, these things are just facets of the same agenda. There will be no

feminizing of culture without psychedelics. There will be no psychedelic revolution without a gender

consciousness revolution. And so forth and so on. It all is of a piece. By allowing ourselves to be divided

and linearly broken into old-style political factions, were in a sense disempowered.You know its a curious thing in the 20th Century, its a paradox, a coincidentia oppositorum: it is the most

radically innovative and event-driven of centuries, and yet large portions of the world, during much of the

20th Century, have been enormously culturally constipated. And I think of our own culture. Around 1970,there was such terror of the future in this culture, that it was essentially canceled. And that there was this

retro thing for 20 years, 25 years the same art, the same fashion, the same personalities, the same issues,

over and over again. Meanwhile, the cosmic clock is ticking, and what it means is the pressure is building

behind the dam. And I really feel that in the last three months we will in the future look back and

understand that the dam broke in this period. This is when the density of connection on the Internet, the

cosmic nature of our circumstance I mentioned this cohesion of the youth/music/drug/mediaculture Enough factors are in prominent trajectory now that I, at any rate, unaided by anything stronger

than a little cannabis, can see the end of the tunnel. I see now how it will all work, how we can get from

here to there with no miracles, no new technology, no drug yet to be designed we have it all. We have it


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all now in place. We need a little more bandwidth, we need a little more slack, we need a little more DMT

circulating around! The pieces are in place! And if each one of us were basically to convey this

information to someone who didnt know it, we would very quickly multiply this understanding until it

became the consensus.People dont intrinsically fear the future. They fear it because theyve beenprogrammedto fear it. And

theyre programmed to fear it because the institutions that lead us are clueless. I mean, they think talking

about capital gains tax is revolutionary! Ladies and gentlemen, I think there will be more eggs broken than

thatbefore we straighten this whole situation out. We now have the potential to transform matter into

energy with 100% efficiency, we have the power to read our own genetic code, and alter it, we have the

power to connect ourselves together, we have the power to search our cultural database accumulated over

50,000 years, instantly, from any point on the globe, by ordinary people. We have the benefits of theanthropologist, the biochemist, the botanist, the neurologist, who have delivered substances into our

pharmacopoeia that allow us to alter consciousness, explore consciousness. The end result of all of these

tools is the rebuilding of the human self-image. Ive talked at times about what I call turning the human

being inside-out. We want to see the Soul. We want to concretize the soul. We each carry within ourselves

a fragment of something which wants to be put together again. But it cannot be put together in the presentambience of strife, science, hegemony, male dominance, consumerism bad television terrible haircuts

all the rest of it! It cannot be put together in that environment. But it can be put together in the

dimension of virtual collectivity and community that we are building. It wants to come together.In a sense were like these animals that, generation after generation, they never manifest their mature form.

These are like certain kinds of lungfish theyre fish and they have fish babies that have fish babies thathave fish babies Then comes a season when the water dries up, and they dont have fish babies, they

develop lungs and crawl out onto the land, have a different kind of offspring. And this is what is happening

to us. The little warm pool of historical foolishness in which we have been paddling around that little

amniotic ocean of self-congratulatory denial is now dried up. And its basically a case of fish or cut bait. Ifeel ready. I feel were ready. I feel we have the tools, and the geniuses, the people, and the dreams, and the

allies to now make a move. And a huge amount of it rests on young people. My generation, people whoborn after World War II and came through the 60s, laid a certain kind of groundwork, but we didntunderstand enough about what the enterprise was. It was impossible to understand it in one decade, the

nature of the enterprise. Weve now had 30 years, and a new generation has the benefit of that experience

and the benefit of the new technology. And the benefit of the deeper confusion of the establishment. And

all of these factors, I think, mean that the long-awaited paradigm shift is now a matter of individual and

collective decision coming out of the artistic and scientific community. And thats us.

So the time is now, the tools are here. We can use the turn of the millennium as a kind of flog on thedissipation of print-created values. This isnt going to happen tomorrow or next week it lies beyond the

turn of the century. Until then, the cultural agenda will be under the control of the institutions that control it

today. But they, I believe, dont realize how profoundly terminal for their enterprise the year 2000 is goingto be. And beyond the turn of the century if we have laid the groundwork, and kept the faith, and built

the networks, and gained the experience theyll be ready to talk turkey. We will build the world that we

sense in our dreams. I mean, where we are headed is into the Imagination. Its where weve always been

headed. Thats what telling stories around the campfire is all about. But now the Imagination beckons. It

more than beckons, it reaches out its hand to lead us into an astonishingnew world Meet me there!

Thank you very much!

Q & AOkay, well this is the part of these things that I actually enjoy the most, which is an opportunity for

feedback. It really bums me that, no matter how I cut the cake, its a middle-aged white guy up on stage,

pontificating were talking about one-to-many, heres a one-to-many exercise. So this is the chance toredress the balance, and this is where I usually have the most fun and learn things. So anybody who has a

question, it doesnt have to hold to tonights topic whatever that was. Feel free. I give long answers, so

get your licks in early.Q1: Good evening, Terence. I had a very enjoyable time listening to you. It seems to me that in your vision

of the future there is a dichotomy of Nature and Technology, one that is effectively aimed at destroying

itself. Id like you to address that issue on two different levels for me. Practically, are the resources that we

have available to us today the ones that we have left enough to be able to power this technology to

2012? It takes 40,000 pounds of materials to scrunch down into one 4-pound laptop computer, in terms of


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petroleum, raw minerals Thats one thing I need to question; I dont know if thats going to be possible.

Secondly, philosophically, if we have to exploit nature to achieve our ends where does that leave us if we

are trying to go back to nature? Thats where the dichotomy for me lies. And as a brief corollary to those

two points, I wondered how you reconcile the fact that the great majority of people and, obviously, species

on this planet, arent going to have access to the technology that were speaking of today.TM: So two questions and a corollary for a pot smoker like me[garbled]! So basically the question is,

how can we deliver this to everybody without extracting all the glass, metal, and so forth, in the planet?

Well, one answer is nanotechnology, miniaturization. If we could actually bring that on line, even in a

modest form, the standing crop of materials already extracted from the earth would be sufficient to

maintain the technology. Were very long on heavy metals and materials now, and very short on creative

engineering uses of those things.I guess I should describe how I live a little bit, because Im trying to live what Im talking about. So heres

how it comes out, as an example. I live in Hawaii. I live up a four-wheel-drive road that is very miserable

and difficult. There are no power lines in, there are no telephone lines. The sun generates the electricity. Ireach the Internet wirelessly (and now at low speed, but soon at high speed). I can push back from my desk

and walk in the forest, or go online and adjust my web site which is on the Levity server here in Manhattan.To me this is how it should be. The office culture is probably a major raison detre for the existence of

modern cities. Theres no reason now for office culture to be maintained. And once corporations realize

this, I think they will break it down. Theres no reason now for most people to commute. One of the

dilemmas of my own life is, I like being a player in the culture and I like having people read my books and

so forth, but I dont like climbing on 747s and crossing nine time zones to give a speech. So, my hope isthat telepresence and these kinds of things will have an impact.The other thing is and I didnt talk that much about it in the talk consumerism is much overdone, I

mean to the level ofpathology. People, somehow and this is a place where media comes in somehow,

media needs to make it unhip to have a lot of stuff. And this is a tall order for media because its mediasjob tosellstuff, and the more stuff that sells the more successful it is. But the selling of this stuff will

eventually lead to what youre talking about: the complete devastation of the environment, the complete

impoverishment of everybody. So, again, the only thing I know that can address this disparity of wealth,

and convince people without things that they are rich, are psychedelics. Once you realize that you have

more art in your head than theyre auctioning over at Christies, you feel much better about things! So

acquiring things as a substitute for authentic being needs to be denounced for the neurotic behavior that it is

no matter how good yourtaste! Presently we tend to behave as though, if you acquire things that aretacky, thats terrible, but if you acquire things that are [affectedly] exquisite, thats wonderful. No, its

just a relative kind of terrible. True aristocrats live with nothing, I think. I had a professor of Chinesephilosophy and language once, and he had lived in Peking for 20 years and he had been all over the world.

And he invited me to have dinner at his house one time. I thought, Wow, Ill get to see some kind of great

art collection. Im sure this guy just has great stuff! He had nothing. That was because he was a Taoist

scholar. We should do similarly!Q2: Well I sort of feel badly about putting the question like this, but: listening to the sweep over thought

going around the radar screen tonight, I couldnt help but notice that UFOs were gone. What happened to

the UFOs?

TM: The squirrels abducted them!!Well, you want me to say something about UFOs, or something about something?Q2: Well you used to say, you know, UFOs were like (in a 1983 tape I guess) sparks from the unconsciousflying back from the end of time and all that. And it just seemed to be completely missing from the picture

its a curiosity as to why its missing.TM

: Okay, well heres why. First of all, I stand by everything I said. Something strange haunts the skies ofEarth. I have seen it, other people have seen it, but there are two parallel phenomenon. There are the UFOs,

and there are those who believe in the UFOs. And as emphasis moves from one to the other, the discussion

becomes so hopelessly squirrelly, that I just cant participate in it. I have encountered DMT creatures, I

have encountered aliens; I have neverhad an unscheduled proctological examination in my home at 3 in the

morning by people who hail from Zeta Reticuli!Im glad you brought this up. This is a good place to test all these razors I was talking about, this

balkanization of epistemology. I was really talking around this issue. Heres my take on the entireabduction phenomenon. For some reason possibly food additives, but much more likely, a lot of

television and movies but for some reason, a small percentage of people here at the end of the Twentieth


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Century have lost the ability to distinguish between memory and dream. And as Ross Perot says, End of

story! Thats whats happening. Imagine a person in an archaic society. The most dramatic narrative event

is an old shaman telling a story around the campfire. And its always the traditional stories of the culture,

the known stories. Well then imagine one of us. We have watched 50,000 half-hour sitcoms in our lives.We have watched thousands of movies, more than we could ever remember watching. Thats all in there.

And if believe Freud, Jung, or anybody else whos thought about the unconscious, you know that theunconscious can use that material to create scenarios of pathology or individuation. So if someone tells astory about an abduction, the first thing to ask are hard questions. And the quality of research being done on

these abductions is ludicrous; the people who are sent to investigate these things end up being attorneys for

the people making these claims! I just find it utterly underwhelming in the evidence department. It also

irritates my sense of theAlien. The Alien isso alien that it cannot be reduced to something as preposterous

as silver flannel pajamas, large eyes, and an interest in studying your rear end. The Alien is truly alien!I dont know what to make of this breakdown of rational discourse on this issue. But its not coming from

the psychedelic community. The psychedelic community is far more sophisticated than the alien

community. I said to Whitley Streiber, I said, If you had to tell this story, and preface it by saying youd

taken 5 grams of psilocybin, you couldnt have given it to your grandmother. So it has to do withdifferent approaches to evidence, and different aesthetics, I think. So Im all keen for the UFOs, but very

keen to divide away all the silliness. I think were approaching a time where it might be reasonable

gently, kindly, and with a smile on our faces to denounce just plain foolishness. Theres a lot of absolute

foolishness

[Voice from crowd:] Remember Terence!TM: [laughs] Im not sure you want to say more?

Voice: Well nothing new is alien to you. To call it foolishness is to judge it, right?TM: To call it foolishness is to judge it. Well I didnt say dont judge. I thought what I was saying is,

make distinctions. You have to judge. Youre going to be presented with and endless smorgasbord of

ideological options. Where do you go Mormonism, Scientology, the Hassids, the Zennies, the Buddhas?

Where do you put your faith? Youre going to be constantly called upon to make this call. Now you dont

have to make sense to me; you dont have to use my criteria. But you should use some criteria which you

can rationally defend. The problem with the UFO community, I think, is that they are too credulous, and

consequently there is too large a body of evidence left claiming that it should be taken seriously. There issomething bizarre going on at the edge of language, at the edge of collective attention unusual

anomalies haunt the epistemic enterprise like ghosts. But people who come forth to proclaim what this is

havent taken the depth of the mystery. I mean what it is is the Cosmic Giggle, and theyre not going to nail

that to the barn door; thats its nature, that its mercurial, shifting beyond your reach. It changes as youbehold it.

Q2: Thank you, I wont bring it up again! [laughter]

TM: I didnt mean to beat up on you, IYes?Q3: Hi. I got your software, and I started to read the book, and I gotta ask you: How come a descentinto

novelty? Is it that easy to get to novelty?

TM: You mean why not an ascent?

Q3: Why not an ascent? And can you say more about the context of North Whitehead, and the period of

time were in right now?TM: Okay. First of all, why a descent into novelty rather than an ascent? It was my thing to do as I wanted

to do it, and it seemed to me the way I thought of time was I thought of it like a river. And so I thought

of it as flowing toward its lowest level. And I thought of history as a river and Eternity as the ocean. So

naturally history flows downhill to reach Eternity. I also like the fact that when the descent in elevation is

rapid, the river runs faster, and when the landscape is almost flat, the river broadens out and meanders. So itwas to preserve this idea of time as a fluid. The other reason is a mathematical reason. It has to do with the

fact that if we have novelty moving downward, then the maximum of novelty is zero. If we have novelty

moving upward, the maximum of novelty is just some very large number, and thats not very appealing.

Now you said to talk a little bit more about this time were passing through. Well, one thing I didnt

mention in the talk (because it takes for granted that youve studied my thing, which is a lot to presume) there are resonances in my theory. Its not simply that its either novelty or habit. There are resonances

between one time and another time. And the time we are in right now is a very strong resonance to the

middle Tenth Century. In a sense, we are emerging from the Dark Ages. Its not good to push the analogy

too hard, because many times are intersecting. But in ordinary theory of history or theory of causality, the


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most important moment before this one is the moment immediately preceding this one. My thing says

something different. It says no, each moment in time is a kind of interference pattern made up of other

times, some near, some far. Their relationship is not linear. And thats why we suddenly get a burst of

Egyptian-style furniture, or suddenly a lot of talk about Judy Blake, or suddenly a remake of the story ofAeschylus Fashion, or the ebb and flow of mass obsession, is based on feeling the zeitgeist, and the

zeitgeist carries these messages from many times and many places. And there was a third part?Q3: I wanted to know more about Alfred North Whitehead and how the IChingand everything got

together.TM: Well, people think of Alfred North Whitehead as a somewhat obscure and stuffy guy, just because he

was English and it was the 1920s and guess he didnt do a lot of bong rips or something. But if you read

Process and Reality I strongly urge you to read this book. Its not easy, but you dont need a Sanskrit

dictionary, and you dont need to take up residence down at the ashram and sweep up Whitehead has a

language that he speaks, and he talks offeelings as the primary datum of reality. And he talks about time as

moving towards what he calls concrescence. And he talks about complex systems such as an organizationor a human being as a nexus of actual occasions. Well I just find his vocabulary, his way of thinking

about things, and his mathematical rigorto be tremendously appealing. If you take Whitehead to youbreast, you dont have to hang your head in front of anybody, because his mathematics is impeccable. He is

one of the great mathematical thinkers of the Twentieth Century. So it is a very solid foundation that will

support a very psychedelic view of how reality works.

Q3: Thank you.

TM: Thank you.Q4: I want to know if you believe in the paranormal abilities of humans, and if so, if you think that can

lead to the ultimate wireless communication.TM: Yes, absolutely. I dont have any inside track on this. But I said my method was to search the weird

and then to pay attention, and I have seen maybe for a minute out of my 50 years of existence I have

seen people do paranormal things. What it was, was it was my brother, reading my mind not what I was

thinking, but something that had happened to me 14 months ago that he had never been told. No one had

ever been told. And in a condition of quite advanced psychic discombobulation, he just spieled this story. I

was so impressed, I went to psychiatrists and people who spend time in back wards, locked wards, because

I thought, That must be where this stuff goes on. And some people said yes and some people said no.

Apparently schizophrenics are not nearly as interesting as I had hoped they would be.But Im not ready to give up on this. First of all, how many psychiatrist residents have ever seen an

unmedicatedschizophrenic? None, I submit to you. I was in the Amazon basin when my brother went

around the bend, and medical health care delivery was out of the question. How many people deal, in theTwentieth Century, with schizophrenia naked? What it seemed to me to be was a kind of it was almost

like its a disease of spacetime itself. You walk into a nexus and thenyoure tweaked, and you see too

much, you say too much. And its very hard to get you squeezed back down into what they call a coping

mode. And thats all most psychiatrys about; it doesnt ask philosophical questions. Theyre trying to get

you back on the street, back at your job, performing the necessary social function.So yeah, I think that the obvious tool for studying paranormal abilities in human beings are psychedelics.

Thats the only time Ive ever seen anything like this go down. And yet this is not done. Its impossible to

get permission to give psychedelics to people with [any] other experimental protocol than to see whetherthey live through it let alone get permission to flip cards or do other, more advanced, kinds of tests for

paranormal ability. This is another place where culture is not your friend. Culture tells you what is possible.For instance, Ive been with cultures where people could smell water, and it was a life and death deal. Well,

is that a paranormal ability? Ive been in cultures where people claim that when they wanted ayahuasca,

they would listen, and then they would hear the vine calling, and then they would go and get it. In theirculture this was how you did it; it was not paranormal. In our culture theres no way to explain that. So I

think language imprisons us, and then what is human becomes exotic in some cases. Thank you.Q5: Is the point of visual art to be put on the Internet now? Im a painter, and I drove an hour and a half to

the area, and I dont have access to the Internet. Recently somebody wanted me to make a copy of my

paintings specifically so it could be put on the Internet, and I tried to do it, and it didnt work. And Im

wondering if I need to adapt?

TM: Well, its a stretch for all of us. A year ago, I had no web site, I didnt know what HTML was, I hadno scanner I just had the belief that web sites were an important thing. Now I do my own programming,

I maintain the web site here in Manhattan from Hawaii. Youre going to have to accept the fact that youre


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going to have to learn a bunch of new stuff. At first a person my age resents that. Now that Im into it, I

havent had this much fun since the 1960s, I havent learned so much stuff! So what kind of stuff do you

learn? Do you just learn the software youre the slave to commercialism, in some sense? I dont see it

that way. Photoshop teaches you about light. The 3D rendering programs teach you about space. Theanimation programs teach you about motion. And believe me, its not simple. When youre in a 3D

rendering program, of the sort that gives you, simultaneously, three views, from three different angles, ofthe object which youre sculpting a stupid person cannot coordinate all that data! And I started outunable to coordinate all that data. And then you learn, Oh, its like I have three eyes, viewing it from three

different positions, and if I just relax into this, I can grok it. So I think we are all going to go back to

school, big time, and between myself and the open grave I see no end to learning. Learning, learning,

learning.The tools are so powerful. Yes, pictorial art, hung on the walls of galleries (which I am certainly friendly

toward, always visit as many galleries as I can, wherever I go, and have been interested in this my whole

intellectual life) still is incredibly rarefied and removed from the lives of most people. And you are,

somehow, handmaiden to the interior decoration industries. So I think most artists dream of a deeper

communication and a wider audience. I mean its fine to be collected by a dozen people, but I dont thinkthat would be satisfaction before the throne of Eternity. The real satisfaction is in influencing. If you care

enough about your vision to paint it, you must surely want it then to influence people. And the Net is

simply the way thats to be done now.Q5: My worry is just that theres something lost in the medium, because its not a direct experience of the

medium.TM: Well, something is lost. Something is lost in reproduction the same something, probably. But I find

the clear scans on the Net to be at least as satisfying as four-color printing. I dont think thats the problem.

Q5: Thank you.

Q6: [Comment about the importance of affirming the future.]Q7: [Starts with a plug for party the following night.] My question relates to an earlier question, the UFO

thing. I noticed on the poster something that you were quoted as saying, that we are in a symbiotic

relationship with an entity thats disguising itself as an alien invasion. You already addressed this a little

bit, but Id like to hear more about this.TM: The quote was that we have a symbiotic relationship with something which has disguised itself as an

alien invasion so as not to alarm us. What I meant by that was that an alien invasion is a myth of our

culture. Since the 50s weve had the example ofThe Day the Earth Stood Stilland When Worlds Collide

right on up through that television series which I didnt see, where they changed all the Nazis to aliens and

then it was a huge success. So alien invasion is a piece of our cultural toolbox, but thats not whatshappening. Whats happening is something less easy to name than alien invader is reaching out toward

us. It could be the Gaian Mind, it could be the Oversoul of humanity I dont think it comes from the

distant stars it knows us too well, and loves us too much. It could come from the dead. Now thats what

I mean by something weirder than an alien invasion. An alien invasion compared to a collective mass

contact by the dear departed is pretty mundane stuff.So, whatever this thing is, it keeps itself masked. Ive literally had the experience on mushrooms of saying

to it, Show me what you are, for yourself. Well, its like theres this enormous organ chord, the

temperature falls, black velvet curtains are raised and after about 20 seconds of that, Im saying, Thats

enough of what you are for yourself! Lets go back to the dancing mice So what I mean is that our

journey through time, our historical journey to this moment, has not be unaccompanied. We have alwaysbeen accompanied by this thing. The Demiurgos some people just throw down their cards and call it

God and be done with it. Im not ready for that, because I dont think its the God who hung the stars like

lamps in Heaven, as Milton said. Its not thatGod. If it is a god, its the god of Biology. And I dont haveany problem with that.

I think that the reason people took psychedelics, and the reason psychedelics had such an impact on earlyhuman society, was, not because they dissolved sexual boundaries, not because they increased hunting

skills, not because they did all those things which they diddo but, because they brought us into

communication with this invisible, all-pervading Mind, that essentially civilization is a denial of that Mind.

You stop herding your cattle across the plains, you stop having orgies, you stop taking boundary-dissolving

substances, and what do you do? You build walls. You herd everybody inside. And then you appoint a god-king. Then you tell everybody else to take orders from this guy. And what this is, is a pathology, a denial

that we are part and parcel of the greater intent of planetary biology. So now the planet is so slammed to the


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wall by the untrammeled practice of history, that the Gaian murmuring grows louder. It grows much louder.

[tape ends][The following is based on my brief notes of the last few questions.]

Q7 asks about the idea that we are approaching a shift to a higher molecular vibrational frequency, if we

are heading into another dimension.

TM doesnt give much weight to the vibrational frequency theory, but does believe we will make some sort

of dimensional transition.Q8 states that he is manic depressive, and is constantly creating his own reality. Since being released from

a mental hospital, he has been successfully managing his own life. He wonders whether taking psychedelics

might be ill-advised for him.TM agrees that it must come down to individual judgment, and that there are some people whose

boundaries are best left undissolved.Q9 mentions that she has just come from Colorado, where she learned that an abundance of clean air and

sunlight can be every bit as visionary as DMT. She worries that people living in New York are badly

deprived of such resources/experiences.

TM responds with a mushroom vision he once had, in which he saw Manhattan island, as it stands today,

except with ivy and other plants covering all the buildings. He advocates this vision, saying this wouldprovide an ample supply of oxygen, and would generally naturalize the urban environment. He recalls

being in Berlin soon after the legalization of marijuana, and seeing green shoots rising from window boxes

all down the streets.

live at cathedral church of st

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