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speaker and a fascinating thinker but he's also an ethnobotanist, and he and his wife Kathleen McKenna have quite a project, um, they have on the big island of Hawaii, a project which involves saving as many species of rainforest plants as possible, and they traveled all around the world and Kathleen McKenna and Dennis McKenna, Terence's brother, have traveled all around the world saving different species, particularly psychoactive plants but other plants as well, medicinal plants, and this is work that absolutely needs to be done 'cos as you know the rainforest is disappearing at such an incredibly rapid clip, so they are doing very serious work, Terence also does some rather amazing work with computers and will all kind of computer programs, um, so he's not just an enthusiast of a certain lifestyle
exercise in looking at my method rather than as a serious proposition. In other words I don't believe what I'm saying, nor do I suggest that you believe it. It's more like a toy made out of ideas and language. OK, so with that caveat, um, here's sort of the notion. The uh, traveling soliton of improbability announced itself in the confines of my mind and I watched this wave of improbability, uh, travel through space and time until it collided with the earth and at that point the immaculate conception occurred. However, because parity has to be conserved in all higher physics, uh, these extremely improbable events have the curious property of actually splitting the spacetime continuum. It's as though the event is so improbable that it can only carry half the universe with it into the domain of its undergoing the formality of what Whitehead calls "actually occurring." OK? So, at the moment of the immaculate conception where there had been one universe suddenly there were two: the one we're living in in which the immaculate conception occurred and a great religious leader appeared and founded a religion and so forth, and another world in which this never happened at all. And I thought to myself, "how strange."
no one has ever imagined the consequences of a Christ-less world, no one has ever followed that thought through as an intellectual exercise, probably because you get burned at the stake for it, I don't know ,but we'll see. But I thought it was very interesting, if Christ had never existed, what would have been lost, and I don't ask this speciously, obviously no genetic line of descent would have been lost, because Christ had no children unless you belong to the tiny faction of French occultists who believe that Charles de(?) and you know all about that, let's leave that aside. I believe that, you know, no genetic line of transmission is then absent , what would have been absent had Christ never existed
would have been the idea of Christianity, so then under the guidance and production values of psilocybin I began to watch these two time streams diverge from each other, and in one time stream I see the rise of christian iconoclasts, the suppression of the pagan mysteries , the destruction of the Greek Academies , the suppression of Roman science, mechanics, and this sort of things, the rise of the Dark Ages as the Christian eschatology takes hold in Europe. In the other time stream what I observed is no suppression of the pagan mysteries
, no suppression of Greco-Roman science, and it's very interesting that the great unsung feminine hero of mathematics, Hypatia, who was stoned to death by Christians in World One , our world, and, even though she was on the brink of the discovery of the calculus, had Hypatia been allowed to complete her work, mathematical discoveries that weren't made until the time of Newton would have been made in the 4th century AD. In World Two I saw this actually happening, I saw the forward progress of Greek science and mechanics , I saw progress in ship building and navigation, and by a date which we could arbitrarily set at let's say 600, let's make it 700 AD in World Two, ship building and navigation had progressed to the point that the Greco-Roman civilisation was able to launch expeditions to discover the New World. In World Two the New World was contacted not in the middle of the 15th century but in the middle of the 7th century and the Mayan civilisation which had been destroyed by its own inner contradictions by the time the Conquistadors arrived in World One was at its flourishing height, in time stream two, around 750 AD , when Roman ships pulled into the Bay of Tampic(?) and then in this psilocybin movie of dual false histories I actually saw a Roman Emperor arrive on a diplomatic mission to be present at the coronation of three flint knives the he called in 741 AD of our era, 'Cecil B. DeMille, eat you heart out- (the audience laughs) Well, I think you begin to get the idea. In World One the postponement of the discovery of the New World and the expression of Christian values creates a stultified beer and wool society that nobody seems to enjoy very much, in World Two a fantastic psychedelic civilisation which we can call the Greco-Mayan efflorescence, as European civilisation and Mayan civilisation pour themselves together , the mathematics of the Romans , the calendrics of the Maya, the science of Greece, the psychedelics of the rainforest of the New World , so forth and so on . A tremendous civilisation arose in World Two that by our year 1200 is able to land on the moon. While in our world the streets of Paris are being widened to allow the stone, the building stone for the construction of Notre Dame to reach the site on the Isle in the Seine. So you see one world is progressing much faster than the other, now this confluence of psychedelics with Neoplatonic philosophy and also certain contributions made
made by the further fusion of this civilization with the Tsung dynasty some centuries later in World Two created a tremendously sophisticated civilization that because of the presence of psychedelics in its repertoire of cultural machinery it is able to produce a psychology centuries in advance of anything which we possess today and as these psychologists shaman technicians of the civilization that is the heir of the Greco-Mayan efflorescence pursued their explorations of psychedelic hyperspace they made an amazing discovery, a discovery which shook the foundations of their world, they discovered us, they discovered the presence of the split in the time stream, they understood what happened because their best people at the deepest level of trance were coming in contact with the dreams of psychotics warehoused in the american hospitals in World One and they began to build an image of our situation, well then at a period of time which corresponds roughly to our 1900 a great theoretician arose in World Two, who said our physics has led us to believe that thermonuclear chain reactions in either continuum will leak hard radiation across the temporal barrier and they said that the implications of this are so disturbing that we have to carry out an experiment to see if that's true, so in our year 1906 in World Two an experiment was carried out and a thermonuclear detonation was allowed to take place and the dreams of psychotics in World One were studied for months to see if there was any record of a catastrophe taking place and when the dreams of people in the Siberian region were studied, they picked up evidence of the Tunguska explosion which as you probably know was this mysterious explosion that took place in 1906, it was either mini black hole collided with the earth or a piece of antimatter it's a very unusual event more than a simple asteroidal impact, from that point on the psychologists of the Greco-Mayan inflorescence[sic] had a tremendous interest in us and our world, because they realized that we were preparing a very large atomic arsenal, unaware that the detonation on this arsenal would do serious damage to their world, and by 1950 when we possessed hydrogen weapons, Earth in World Two is the administrative center of eleven star systems, so it is the home world to an incipient galactic civilization, and they are perfectly aware that in what they think of as 'the time slums', barbarian races, unaware of the nature of space time, are preparing thermonuclear weapons completely oblivious to the effect that this will have on innocents in other continua. This to my mind explains the weird confluence of attention upon the date 2012, you know we find in the Mayan calendar that the entire Mayan calendrical machinery is hinged on December 22nd 2012 AD, recently a group of Hasidic rabbis decoded the first five books of the Bible to the
to the conclusion that a world transforming event will occur in 2012 AD, my work on the I Ching shows that it contains an algorithmic fractal wave that points toward the collapse of the state vectors of Newtonian space-time, sometime in December of 2012, well what's going on here, well I think that we are very artfully caged, we are being manipulated from a higher dimension toward the expectation of the flowing together of the previously separated time streams, and that what lies ahead is an apocalyptic transformation, a completely mind-boggling recasting of everything we've ever known or thought, but it may not require the agency of god almighty or even friendly extraterrestrials, it may be that, you know, I've spent time in the Amazon, so I'm aware that when you're on the river sometimes the river parts and you never even know it, because it's so big and what you think it's the opposite shore is actually an island in the middle of the stream and this is what we have been experiencing since the immaculate conception, I call it the prodigal time stream, a rivulet broke away the ordinary on flowing flux of the universe and this is the fall into history, you know, this is the strange source of our neurosis, is that we have been cut off from authentic being by the unfortunate collision of the soliton of improbability with the womb of Mary, what to do about it, well, technicians are working on the other side of the wall, to try and bring it down, help is on the way, and the promise is contained in the 2012 date. I think that we can imagine the following scenario: you open an area on both planets Earth One and Earth Two , let's say an area roughly the size of the Ukraine and if you go to that part of the Earth, you can walk through to the other place, and so it's a kind of pick-up, it's a kind of opening of the doorway between the worlds to let the poor lost cousins, that's us, climb back on the main thrust of forward moving civilization, now I don't believe that raff, I just think that it's very interesting because it answers so many questions, not that it doesn't raise a few in the course of answering them, but what it shows it's the plasticity of thoughts, the power of the human imagination to create a myth that explains our predicament, I mean if the story I just told you were to be true, 20 years after the flowing together of the two time streams there would be 20 year old people walking around who never lived in the world of the divided time streams and when we would talk about the great day when it all flowed together it would be like listening to people talk about the Armistice of the Great War, some damn thing in the past that had no relevance to your own life, this all revolves out of the perception of J.B.S. Haldane, the British enzymologist, that the world is not only stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose, than we can suppose, that's permission to suppose right there, that there are no constraints on supposition, nothing is weird enough, the only rule is, you know, that it has to somehow hang together, well the way you break into this weirdness is by breaking down the barriers of ordinary expectation and language, that the whole psychedelic ocean
is aswim with minnows and organisms of larger girth that are ideological constructs like the one I just laid out for you, and the way I think of psychedelic shamanism it is, you know that wonderful painting by Paul Klee, called Sinbad the Sailor, where Sinbad is standing in a boat holding a spear and the sea is a checkerboard of clay like colors all around him, to me the Shaman is and idea hunter and he goes out into the dark space of mind with the puny tools of language, rational thought, pictorial ability, poetic heart and attempts to take the measure of something stranger than we can suppose, it's reality. Every society that has ever existed thought it had five percent left to find out, and that the rest was under full control of its institutions. The fact of the matter is, we're whistling past the graveyard, if you push on any of the great pillars that support our world view, you will discover that they are made of mush. I mean science is a tale told by an idiot, (audience murmurs) it is, it is, the contradictions are so patent, the improbabilities so incongruous, that it becomes essentially no more than a plinth for technology, that's what it is. Shamanism means direct empowerment of experience, reclaiming your own mind as the final arbiter of what is real, if you don't understand quantum physics it ain't doing you any good, and you should have nothing to do with it, if the way you handle the problem of reality is by believing that there are experts somewhere who are on top of it I've got big news for you (audience laughs) you know this idea of giving our loyalty away to Time Magazine, Scientific American or something like that, is very bizarre because we are unable to confirm any of the realities that they talk about, I mean who has seen an electron still to speak of the bottomless quark uh I mean and yet these are the mythologies, these are the components of our supposed world view, well how does this tell you how to button your tie or pay your bills, it doesn't. We've sold out for a mass of pottage, ideology is a tremendously disensouling force, the way you reclaim your identity is by reclaiming your ideological primacy, you are the arbiter of what is real and if we want to change the world we have to empower the means that return control to the social atom, to the individual, because that's the only authentic existence that any of us know, I mean in its most radical remonstrance, uh you know I am pretty sure about me but you could be anything (audience laughs) you know, you can pull the focus in quite tight and this is because the nearer you get to the meat the more existentially vital it seems to be and you know, the psychedelics are the tool par excellance for doing this, they connect you back up to the archaic vegetable mind that was in place at the dawn of history, you know whether you like my little story about the Mayans or not, I think it's difficult to deny that something happened that we have fallen into a peculiar place and yet there is still the entomation of a transcendent possibility, you know in Finnegan's Wake
James Joyce speaking of the red light district of Dublin which is called Moy Kain said "Here in Moy Kain we flop on the seemy side but upmeyant, Prospector you sprout all your worth and woof your wings, if you wanna be phoenixed come and be parked" [-sic- Note: this is partially misquoted] You know, is this saying the transcendent possibility is eminent in Joyce's wonderful phrase "men will be durgeable", sounds a little weird now, but what it means is, that we will make collectively a kind of flying saucer at the end of history, the history that is poured together at the end of this millennium because of electronic communications, because of drugs, because of urbanization, because of computers, are boundaries are dissolving. We are entering into the post print electronic futile pre-apocalyptic mode that McLuhan anticipated, and each one of us has the challenge of redesigning ourselves to slip more smoothly through the time stream. This is really what's its about, redesigning personalities, cultures, families, entire global economies because the acceleration of the future is building up as a kind of vibration, you know if any of you know engineering terminology it's called q force as the Shuttle breaks through the sound barrier q forces build up on the leading edges of the air-frame, in the same way the historical vehicle that is beginning to move faster and faster through the historical continuum occasionally encounters the build up of these q forces, vibration that is sending the message "redesign, restructure, redistribute the load, redesign the tension bearing members of your machinery" and the only way that we can keep pace with the design demands of the feedback loops that are occurring here at the end of history is to avail ourselves of the psychedelic dimension because that's where the data that is flattened in the three dimensional world becomes expressed in a higher dimension that we can slice through with the razors of language, you know how by slicing through a cone you obtain an infinite number of ellipses although none of them is a cone when you stack them all together you reconstruct the original higher geometric object well this is what psychedelics are, slices into the stuff of being where then look for fossils, or stratographic tracing or graffiti or hidden messages, you know, we are looking to try and understand and some of these ideological razors are satisfying and some are not, the Mayan time stream idea is sort of in the half baked dimension, it's serviceable to a certain distance but then you know the fiction of it intrudes, but this is like permission, inspiration, to do serious myth building, to formulate the paradigms that will give structure to the future and I really believe, I mean I am a strange sort of a paradox because people who know me know that I am a very unpleasant cynical caustic person, you know, if you wanna know something unpleasant about somebody as Dorothy Parker used to say, "sit by me", but I also consider myself an inveterate hope freak,I mean I am the apostle of a hope so radical that has been called shit for brains, I believe that the world is within 25 years of coalescing something unrecognizable, I believe that human history which to us seems interminable is in the life of the planet no more than a wink of an eye, and I love to invoke the image of a still pond, that still pond at midnight was this planet until human beings begun dancing around campfires and babbling to each other, and at that moment the moonlit pond that was utterly still began to churn and churn and churn, and that churning is the anticipation, the announcement, something enormous
something enormous is moving beneath the surface of the water and is about to break through, and when it does break through the churning which seemed like such a big deal will be seen to have been but as nothing to the thing that was causing the churning, the transcendental object at the end of time. Now, people say, "why, since the universe is so old, several billion years, how can you possibly believe that we're about to undergo a collapse of the state vector within 25 years or so?" Well, to my mind we are not neutral observers of this situation looking in from another dimension. Our presence on this earth in a city like New York with the density of connectedness that we have achieved is proof that some enormous attractor is exerting influence on organization in this world. You think that stuff like New York just comes? You think that's for nothing? You think that's like a pumpkin or a leaf on a tree, or an iceberg? You've gotta be kidding. It is a response to a tug on the his- on uh, mind to organize and uh, this organizational process happens faster and faster. We can now see that we have burned our bridges, that we must cast off our moorings from this planet, that this, if this is a birth, if we stay any longer in the womb toxemia is inevitable. So we must part from the mother. Who wants to? Nobody wants to. What fetus ever started the journey down the birth canal with heart held high and hopes shining. I think it looks like the end of the world. The walls are falling in. You're strangling. How do you like that? And the walls are falling in, and we are being impelled out of the cradle. The, the relationship of bios to mind is ending. Call it divorce, call it birth. The umbilicus is being cut. This is necessary both for the planet and for ourselves. I mean, it is true that the planet is the cradle of humanity, but you can't remain in the cradle forever, and we long ago made choices that can now never be reversed. We cast our lot with the imagination. We cast our lot with dreams. We cast our lot with the vast architectonic poetry that we express now as cities and that we will someday express as, uh, vast archeological structures in orbit around the planet or implanted in dimensions that are still hidden to us. It's hard to face the fact that there can be no resolution between the um, the steady state return to the earth notion and the path that we have set ourselves on. If we had acted soon enough, perhaps in the year 1000 or something, we could have stabilized the earth's population and minimized and managed resource strain so that we could dream of a steady state, but as it is now there's nowhere but forward. Um, you know, I always go back to that wonderful line of the Grateful Dead: "you can't go back and you can't stand still, if the thunder don't get you then the lightnin' will." That's our predicament. It's our challenge, and the way we streamline ourselves to meet it is you melt your mind again and again, and you recast it again and again as many times, as many ways, and as many forms as is necessary to meet the challenge of the unfolding modalities of being which are multitudinous, unpredictable, peculiar, and stranger than we can suppose. Thank you very much.
[audience claps]
You know, we're archiving it. We're virtualizing it.
Ok, um, Terence will field a few questions, but he's had a very long weekend so we'll limit it to about 20 or 25 minutes, and you just get one question and not a Russian novel. More, try for haikus if you can. Oh also, tapes of this talk and of all the talks Terence has given this weekend are available. You can order them right there. Speak to that gentleman, Steve Stein. And this literature is available out there. OK.
What do you see reality looking like after 2012?
The question is what do I see reality looking like after 2012. Well, there's always a smorgasbord of scenarios. I mean there's the very soft scenario, it goes like this. Nothing more happens in 2012 than that suddenly and for no reason, everybody begins behaving appropriately. You know? I mean imagine if in every situation people behaved appropriately. Now, at first that seems like a trivial idea, but if people would behave appropriately for ten minutes, the next ten minutes would be the greatest adventure in the history of the human species. Because we would behave appropriately in the context of the situation we had just created by behaving appropriately. There would be no end to that. The hard version, the thrilling heavy metal version of the 2012 collapse of the state vector is... it's some version of a UFO or a chemical concrescence. Uh, I call it the emergence of the transcendental object. What I really think is happening and has been happening for a long time, is a migration of matter and mind toward each other, and toward a state that is somehow both at once. This is what the alchemists dreamed of in the fifteen and sixteen century. So, I imagine a concrescence of a kind of super material that is not a new material so much as a part of ourselves, an objectification of ourselves. I mean, imagine the material that if it's raining, you can stretch it and it keeps the rain off. If you're hungry, you eat it. If you need to go somewhere you sit on it and it moves. If you need to know something, it becomes a computer terminal. If you need to talk to someone it becomes a TV screen. Well, this is what the computer is, the computer is an omni-adaptable machine, and it may be possible to carry it forward to the place where it is really ultimately seen to be ourselves, that we are in the business of somehow passing ourselves out of flesh and into some other medium. Now this raises peoples' hackles, I mean they say 'What? What's he saying?' uh, but you know, biology itself and DNA is an information manipulative system, and out of us have come more efficient systems. I think that we're on the brink of taking control of our own form, but no one has really come to grips with the idea of what it would mean to live in the imagination. I mean, how would you live if you could live any way you wanted to? Well, in the first five minutes you say, well move me to the grand ballroom at Versailles while I think about this... okay now I'm there I see how tacky that is, uh, you know? And very quickly within minutes you would discover, well I don't even have to stay in a human body, I can become a post ... you're talking about something stranger than we can suppose, because we don't live in the imagination, we live in three dimensional space, the crushing force of gravity and constraints, constraints, constraints, but if our mind were free, you know it could be a breeze, a flower, a strophy, a smile on a woman's face you could be anything. Uh, you could be anything! And that's kind of my idea of what would happen. All boundaries will be dissolved, all goals will be attained, you hit the jackpot, it's uh... a concrescence, the melting together, the return to the origin, next question.
Yeah... to contrast ayahuasca to mushrooms. Ayahuasca is this Amazonian combinatory psychedelic that is made from uh, a large woody vine called Banisteriopsis caapi, and DMT containing plant that is a relative to coffee. And of course psilocybin mushrooms most people are familiar with. The question is contrast the differences, and I assume the question means in the trips. The astonishing thing about psilocybin, I mean, the absolutely knock your pins our from under you thing about psilocybin is that is speaks English. It talks to you. It actually sits down with you, and says "did you know, I bet you did know, that everyone's little finger just fits their nostril," or whatever it is, uh you know whatever it is that it wishes to convey.
behave appropriately in the context of the situation we had just created by behaving appropriately. There would be no end to that. The hard version, the thrilling, heavy metal version of the 2012 collapse of the state vector is um, it's some, some version of a UFO or alchemical concrescence. I call it the emergence of the transcendental object. What I really think is happening and has been happening for a long time is a migration of matter and mind toward each other and toward uh, a state that is somehow both at once. This is what the alchemist dreamed of in the 15th and 16th century. So I imagine uh, a concrescence of a kind of supermaterial that is not a new material so much as a part of ourselves, an objectification of ourselves. I mean, imagine a material that um, if it's raining you can stretch it and it keeps the rain off. If you're hungry, you eat it. If you need to go somewhere, you sit on it and it moves. If you need to know something it becomes a computer terminal. If you need to talk to someone it becomes a TV screen. Well, this is what the computer is. The computer is an omni-adaptable machine and it may be possible to carry it forward to the place where it is really ultimately seen to be ourselves, that we are in the business of somehow passing ourselves out of flesh and into some other medium. Now, this raises peoples' hackles. I mean, you say, "what, what, what's he saying?" Uh, but you know, biology itself is a, and DNA is an information manipulating system and out of us has, have come more efficient systems. I think that uh, we're on the brink of taking control of our own form, that nobody has really come to grips with the idea of what it would mean to live in the imagination. I mean, how would you live if you could live any way you wanted to? Well, in the first five minutes you'd say well I'll, move me to the grand ballroom at Versailles while I think about this. Ok, now I'm there. I see how tacky that is. Um, you know? And very quickly, within minutes, you would discover, well, I don't even have to stay in a human body. I could become a post- (recording cuts off @46:05)
(recording resumes @46:20) You're talking about something stranger than we can suppose because we don't live in the imagination. We live in three-dimensional space with the crushing force of gravity and constraints, constraints, constraints. But if our mind were freed, you know, would you be a breeze, a flower, a strophe, the smile on a woman's face? You could be anything! Uh, and that's kind of my idea of what would happen. All boundaries will be dissolved. All goals will be attained. You hit the jackpot. It's uh, it's uh, a concrescence, the melting together, the return to the origin. Next question. Yeah. (question unintelligible)
To contrast ayahuasca to mushrooms. Ayahuasca is this Amazonian combinatory psychedelic that is made from uh, a large, woody vine called banisteriopsis caapi, and a DMT-containing plant that is a relative to coffee, and of course psilocybin mushrooms, most people are familiar with. The question is contrast the differences and I assume the questioner means in the trips. The astonishing thing about psilocybin, I mean, the absolutely knock your pins out from under you thing about psilocybin is that it speaks English. It talks to you. It actually sits down with you and says, you know, "did you know, I'll bet you didn't know that everyone's little finger just fits their nostril," or whatever it is. Uh, you know, whatever it is that it wishes to convey. But, and, and the mushroom has this millenarian, outer space, woo-woo-woo kind of hortatory, galactarian, Flash Gordon soup kind of patina to it. The ayahuasca is very, chemically very similar but experientially very different. It's all about your body, energy in your body, energy in the immediate environment,
environment, other people, seeing into peoples' bodies, um, a very powerful kind of insightfulness into one's circumstances, and a very deep, feminine, lateral kind of spreading out into the environment. I mean, when you do it in the Amazon you just feel the trees and the rivers, the flow, you really feel flow on many levels. So these two things could hardly be chemically more similar and experientially more different. Now, if you push ayahuasca, if you take high doses or doses with an intense amount of DMT, you can work your way into a place that's indistinguishable from the DMT flash. I mean self-transforming elf machines and the whole nine yards. It's all in there, but uh, ayahuasca is often brewed weakly, brewed so as to be not strong. It's also brewed weakly. Uh, but, uh, so with, you know, you have to, don't think if you've done it once that you've got the full picture because it's a matter of really intensifying and then exploring it. The other great difference between those two things is the mushroom is complete and perfect as it comes out of the ground. No human intervention is necessary. Ayahuasca is a preparation of two plants that are boiled for hours and combined in certain ratios, and it is definitely bears the imprint of the personality of the human being who made it. In that sense it qualifies as sort of, the world's first drug compounded pharmacologically. So those are some of the differences between those two. Yeah. [unintelligible audience question] 1908. You're right. It was June of 1908, was it? I don't know. The best, most pleasing idea I've heard is apparently there are some reports that a ship sailing off the coast of Iceland that same day reported something very unusual uh, emerging from the sea. And it's possible that this was actually a collision with a mini black hole that entered the planet at Tunguska and exited the planet just south of Iceland. This would happen, I mean, this would, it would, the earth would be tran-, almost like smoke to a black hole moving at high velocity and it would create the impact at the entry and then there was this enormous waterspout observed that day. So, I, rather than opt for the elaborate explanation I gave tonight, I think we should go with something as simple and pedestrian as a collision with a mini black hole. [unintelligible audience question] Well, I think we fell into, oh, well it's a complicated question. It's about conflict and the fall into history, that history has been characterized by intense conflict. As we enter the post-historical milieu will we carry with conflict with us? Will it be transformed? What will happen with it? Um, my gloss on history is that it's a state of uh, ego inflation caused by the absence of psilocybin in the human diet. Really. That psilocybin in the diet of early human beings made ego impossible, and that ego is like a cancerous or calcareous growth in the personality and that we have to endlessly uh, lysesize, or dissolve, or get rid of this, and the only way it can be done is by boundary dissolution. And the reason we existed without egos for a very long time was because every Saturday night everybody got together and took mushrooms and flopped together in a heap, and then nobody knew whose children were who, and everybody associated their wellbeing with the wellbeing of the group, and it was impossible for the "my women", "my children", "my weapons", "my land", "my food", "my slaves", these ideas, to get started. As we enter the post-historical phase I think what we're going to, the way we will enter the post-historical phase is by rediscovering the real power of language and we will be able to dissolve a lot of the conflicts between us by through a judicious application
judicious application of psychedelics and technologies creating visibly beheld languages that will be forms of quasi-telepathy that will considerably lower the threshold of misunderstanding between us. I really do know what I mean. There just isn't time to explain it. One last question. It must be a woman. This lady. [unintelligible audience question] So am I restating the question correctly to say that you're asking is the body obsolete or am I saying is the body obsolete and is that a good thing? [unintelligible audience response] Yes. Um, well, you know I don't pretend to have answers to this stuff. I just try and cast the questions in high relief, and the biggest tension I feel in my own ideological life is this question of are we supposed to flee the earth to save it, and if necessary do we have to give up our bodies to do that, or is there some way that we can achieve, that we can preserve the joy of being flowering meat, because it is a great joy to us. And uh, I confess, I don't have an answer. You know, I hang out with the virtual reality crowd, hoping that maybe that's an answer. That ain't no answer, believe me. Maybe some day, but well after 2012 I imagine. No, I feel the tension of these things. We've gone too far to be able to come up with a solution that's gonna please everybody. I mean, some people are going to absolutely feel that we've decided to go to hell in a handbasket no matter what we do. So all we can do is try to raise the level of public rhetoric, try and raise the level of dialogue among ourselves so that whatever course we end up taking, it's a decision that was collectively made and collectively expressed. And I realize that this is not a satisfactory answer to your question. It's cause there ain't one. Uh, this is our dilemma. We are growing up. How do you like stacking your toys away and saying goodbye to mom and dad and setting off down the road? There is an inel- an undeniable sense of tremendous poignancy and loss, and yet, you know, we left it all behind when we built the first cities in Babylon. We left it all behind when we descended from the trees. We left it all behind when we emerged from the sea. You've gotta believe that the forward vector is the vector toward the light. Well, thank you very much. This was a pleasure. Now let's party.