Transcription
Millions of people go from the birth to the Grave without ever discovering the relativistic nature of the ego. They entirely identify it with the self, when in fact, it isn't that at all. When we were now, the mystery in all of this is the fact that it's kind of reductionist to say that taking these psychedelic plants dissolves the ego. Because there has to be something then which rushes into this now empty space where the ego previously held sway.
What rushes in to that liberated space is what I call the guy in mind. That there is actually a hyper-intelligent being on this planet or in this planet. It perhaps is this planet, but it is sentient. It thinks it can communicate. We are like atoms inside the body or cells inside the body of this enormous organism, which is the cause of our religious obsessing. The reason we're always running around looking for God Almighty is because we evolved on a planet inhabited by a super intelligence that we have lost contact with. And so we deny its intelligence. We, at this point, even deny its vitality. I mean, you know, the Judeo-Christian stick is that nature is at to be at the service of man. And you know, this is a complete inversion of the idea that human beings should be the active hands of the guy and mind.
And when, and this didn't happen for any, there's no bad guy in this scenario. It's simply that, uh, that the climatological conditions which allowed this, um, social mode that was characterized by nomadic pastoralism, orgy, and psychedelic shamanism was gradually replaced by because of drying of the African continent. Uh, the psychedelic substances were no longer available. And there was even an intermediary, an intermediate phase where the psychedelic substance, if it was the mushroom, was preserved in honey. So that the, the great festivals became further and further apart in time. And the ego enters them like a tumor. It begins to form in the personalities of human beings. If you're engaging in psychedelic intoxication and orgy at every full moon, there is no chance for the ego to get a hold. I mean, it's just an aberration that everybody jumps on, has gotten rid of. But if these ceremonies become yearly or less frequent, then these funny notions get going in the more powerful males. Why shouldn't I control more females? Why shouldn't I have more of the food supply? Why shouldn't this area, in fact, be for me to hunt in alone? You get all these concepts of mindlessness that arise out of the growth of this tumorous, cancerous, maladaptive self-defining because that it doesn't serve. And we have committed ourselves to this thing so whole hog for the past five, ten thousand years that now we're so deep into it that it's not clear we can ever extricate it ourselves from it.
Except, and this is the raisin dectra for my career, is we have to go back to the archaic solution. Which is, and it can't be orgy. That can't be the archaic solution that we implement because we're not a nomadic tribe of pastoralists, only 70 or 80 human beings. We're a global culture of five billion people. If we tried to resuscitate lunar orgies, we'd have a wave of social and sexually transmitted diseases that would probably finish us once and for all. So the orgy thing, if is not the answer. But the psychedelic auction still exists. It still dissolves the ego. And it still puts you in contact with viable group values. So this is what we, this is perhaps an answer. And I don't advocate it because I think it's a sure thing. I advocate it because I think it's the only game in town. Hell, if if hortatory beating on people could have worked, then we would have solved all our problems thousands of years ago because Buddha and Christ and all these other people, they had the right idea. It's just that ideas don't cut the mustard. It has to be an experience, a real experience. And and a boundary-dissolving experience is so corrosive to all the institutions of dominator society that no religion in the West sense, ER, has been able to come to terms with the psychedelic experience because it mitigates male dominance hierarchy and all the other things that are the methods by which we do business.
You know, well, it's, it was that we had a chemically mediated symbiosis with the guy in mind. And and it was a, it wasn't a locked symbiosis like you get in in lichens or something like that. It was a kind of flirtation with symbiosis. It was that we took these psychedelic plants and contacted this hyperdimensional mind of nature and discovered that because it was hyperdimensional, because it wasn't constrained in space and time the way we are, that it had useful information. Uh, information, very practical information. Where has the game gone? This is what shamans are good for, is to tell you where the game has gone. Uh, how will the weather be next year? Classical problem for shamans. Well, how do they know this stuff? How can? Cause you see, shamanism is essentially a going into a higher dimension to obtain information that then feeds back into the group destiny. Well, how can these shamans know this stuff? How can they attain to this superhuman level of understanding? It's that they get in touch with a different kind of intelligence. An intelligence to whom where the game will be next year is as transparent as where the game was last year, because past and future don't exist for that intelligence. And our relationship to that intelligence was one of of devotee to goddess or supplicant to mystery. But eventually, the connection was broken. And meanwhile, the ego was arising. And the ego is like a mirroring of this larger psychic function. In other words, the ego is our pathetic attempt to, uh, create God on our own. This was Julian Jaynes' theory. He thought, you see, that up until his latest Homeric times, which is 800 BC, that, um, if you got into a tight spot and we're about to be off or something, miraculously a voice would appear, would would come on. It would just turn on your head and it would say, you should get out of there. And people thought this was a God. It was a God. But eventually, they were able to, um, assimilate this psychic function into the personality. And then they said, well, that's not God talking, that's me. That's myself. And this is the idea where God is then located inside my body. And I take orders from this inner God that I call the ego. And if it is allowed to develop, and it's strange, it always develops along these patriarchal lines. You know, it brooks no babbling. It's not interested in argument. It knows what is to be done. And then the only time you get a problem is when you place one ego in contact with another. And then, of course, they go at it hammer and tongs. But originally, what we had was a symbiotic relationship with this guy in mind. And this is the mystery that haunts this planet, haunts our history, haunts our psychedelic experiences and our dreams. It's that there really is a controlling super intelligence that can be contacted through psychedelic drugs, presumably religious practice. When you see how long they've been making the claim, although it must be a high noise signal when you do it that way, because they seem to get it always skewed off in some weird direction that then reinforces paternalistic institutions. But this is what all this goddess talk is about. Is either we are becoming more sensitive to the presence of the guy in mind, or the guy in mind, under pressure of the approaching apocalyptic crisis, is beginning to raise its voice louder and louder and louder. So that now, you know, when you go into nature loaded, every rock, every tree, every stream is saying, awaken, awaken, come to focus. There's minutes to go, as William Burroughs likes to say, you know. So we have to connect up. And so we are, in a sense, the hands of this diffuse super mind that is spread through nature. And our presence as thinking, reflecting, culture-building individuals is not simply an amazing but meaningless set of circumstances. Our presence as a global technical civilization signifies the onset of the final crisis. It's as though, you know, you watch a pond and the surface is smooth, mirror smooth. Well, then it begins. The surface of the pond begins to churn. This is the signal that something huge is about to emerge out of the pond. And human history is that turbulence on the still surface of nature. Nature would never have allowed a phenomenon like human history to get going were it not in response to a deeply felt planetary crisis that is approaching at ever-accelerating speed. And I have enough faith in nature to believe that when the moment finally is upon us, we'll be ready. But the tools are being laid up right now. The ultimate tools, not the prototype tools. The bow and arrow, that was a prototype. The catapult, that was a prototype. The B-17, that was a prototype. But the thermonuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, this is not the prototype. This is the actual instrument by which you could save a planet, as well as destroy it. Because you're at last dealing on the level of energies necessary to make those kinds of changes. And I think the evidence is all around us that the historical mode cannot persist. It can't just draw all the curves. Output of petroleum distillates, output of energy, population growth, proliferation of weapons. When you draw all of these curves, they can't be propagated 500 years into the future. Sometime in the next 50 years, uh, you know, we're going to have to make or break what history was all about. And the, uh, the arising of global culture, the arising of an integrated electronic awareness, high-speed computational machinery, tremendously powerful weapons, spacecraft, all of this stuff looks to me like the raw material for a, um, salvational exercise. And notice that it's not only a way to save the planet. It's, in a sense, a way to save not only ourselves, but to save our ancestors as well. This, if we can, if we can act in a moment of great crisis to preserve the planet from ruination, we will redeem human history. Then it all makes sense. The pogroms, the migrations, the brutalities, the stupidity. It was all toward a purpose. And then somehow those lives that were lost in those pogroms and invasions and migrations and so forth are given meaning. A meaning which they will totally not have if we simply blow the planet apart and wreck nature and ruin the oceans and blow off the atmosphere. Then it just looks like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. So it's as though the meaning itself is in our hands. What shall we make of this? Is it just as James Joyce said, atoms and ifs, or is there a, a plan, a process, a plot, and a role for us that will, uh, give us some dignity in this situation which otherwise, up to this point, as far as I can see, we totally lack? I mean, it's all very well to spend an afternoon wandering around the Louvre. But on the other hand, you know, spend the next day wandering around the slums of Calcutta, and you just really have to wonder about what the human enterprise is about.
Now, I will read you this little quote from Moby Dick, which sort of gets to some of this. Are you all familiar with Moby Dick? Are any of you familiar with Moby news? You should be. I mean, this is the greatest work of prose ever written by an American, without contest, I think. I mean, I like to think that when human history is written, Americans will be remembered for two things: they went to the Moon, and they're the people who produced Moby Dick. I mean, this is our Odyssey. This is our Odyssey and our Iliad. Nobody's ever gone past it. Okay. There's a scene early on. You all know that it's a whale hunt, right? Okay. So there is a scene where the captain, who is running this show and driving this thing, this hunt for this whale to a truly apocalyptic conclusion, because for him, this is no hunt for an animal. This is a confrontation with an alien god. And he is determined to murder this thing because it, as he's delicately puts it, dismasted him, meaning it, it bit off his leg and destroyed his sexual machinery. And his first mate, who functions as Christian right reason, wimpy little Starbucks, says, "Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbucks. "That simply smoked thee from blind to St. Instinct madness to be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemy." And Ahab says, "Hark ye, yet again, the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event, in the living act, the undoubted deed, there some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask. How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall. Shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there is not beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me. He heaps me. I see in him outrageous strength with an inscrutable malice, signaling it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate. And be the white whale agent or be the white whale principal, I will wreck that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy. I would strike out the sun if it insulted me. For could it do that, then could I do the other, since there is ever a sort of fair play." And that was the point that I wanted to make about two points: striking through the mask to achieve reality, and that we can do it because there is ever a sort of fair play. The field is level. The cards are not stacked against us. If we play our hand right, we can take the whole game. They wouldn't have it any other way. That's right.
By the way, I'm getting into that book by Camille Paglia called Sexual Personae. And it's definitely the read of the season. And I didn't realize the publication date is listed this September 1991, so it's hot. And I read the section on Moby Dick, which comes very close to the end. And if all of it's as good as that, then it's really something. I mean, I haven't, there hasn't been that much fun between the covers of one book since Marshall McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy. So, you know, if you think of yourself as a feminist, an art historian, a literary critic, an egghead of all these things, she's just outrageous. I think we have to get her here as fast as possible because she's really freewheeling and makes a lot of people mad, which is always a good sign. I think it's called Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia. Maybe some of you saw about a month ago in the Image magazine, which is the insert in the Sunny, there was an article about her and they put her on the cover. And she's very controversial and says lots of provocative things. And the article stressed her dumping on Derrida and Lacan and Foucault and that whole crowd, and saying, you know, all of them put together were not worth one page of William Burroughs, basically. And, you know, not that we care about this, but in academia, this is big news because they're in awe of all those people. I tried to read Derrida, I couldn't make head nor tails of it. It just seemed to me like anti-thought.
All of this is inspired by a number of papers that have recently been called to my attention. If I can get this the way I want it. And one of them is called, and I recommend it to your attention, it appeared in the June 1989 issue of Zygon and it's called "The Omega Point as Eschaton: Answers to Panenberg's Questions for Scientists." And this is, uh, it's by Frank Tipler. And this is a very interesting article which tries to argue for the reality of Christian eschatological hermeneutics in the light of information theory. And actually makes a number of points that I thought I would be alone in making for my entire life. And and now I see that I'm actually, uh, an infant in this department. And that these people have thought more deeply and more widely and with a more stunning commitment to radical ideas than I could have even conceived of. I mean, it's humbling stuff. I mean, they're talking here about computer strategies to resurrect the dead, not some of the dead, all of the dead. And a number of ideas that I confess were completely, um, alien and exciting to me. And I also have a correspondence between Frank Tipler and Hans Moravec, the author of this little thing I just read you. And a paper by Moravec that apparently has not yet been published called "Time Travel and Computing." And time travel is sort of what I wanted to talk about this evening from a certain peculiar perspective. One of the ideas that I've had to embed in my system fairly uncomfortably because I think of myself basically as a skeptic and a rationalist is the idea that the world is on the brink of a tremendous transformation. A transformation on a scale such that it can really only be compared to the events which created the universe in the first place. This is what ties this series of notions to Christian eschatology. Because the unique preoccupation of Western religion, whether it be Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, is this weird insistence on the end of the world, the, uh, collapse of reality as we know it. You don't get this in, um, Eastern thinking, as you all probably know. Hinduism, uh, is a theory of what is essentially a steady state. There are cycles of outpouring of phenomena and then regressive cycles when everything recondenses. But the universe is basically thought to be eternal. And this then poses no problem for, um, rational expectation, because it's very easy to imagine an eternal universe. In Christianity, to preserve the rationality of expectation, the, um, eschatological event, I guess I should deter explain that term. All these esch words, eschaton, eschatological, so forth and so on, mean we're referencing the final things. The branch of theology that is called eschatology is the study of the final things, the end of the world. And the way Christianity has handled it to preserve rationality, at least superficially, is by setting it far, far in the future. Then it doesn't irritate or, you know, demand a great deal of thought and consideration. My, um, notion, it has against my own intellectual gravity, has pushed me toward the conclusion that it is near. Which puts me in the same category as all those people in cartoons carrying signs which say, you know, "Repent, for the end is near." It's the thing. I mean, I feel shy, and, er, sea to feel shy, but I feel always reluctant to talk about it because it is the most counter-intuitive position in the system that I've tried to elaborate. Because not only do I think it's near, but I think that we can say when it is. Um, and just so you aren't kept hanging in suspense, tomorrow at 8:30, close, close, um, December 22nd, 2012, at dawn, Eastern Standard Time, the universe will roll up like a, uh, one of those blinds, you know. It will just roll up. The fall, the stars will fall from heaven. Reality as we know it will completely disappear to be replaced by something else.
Now, why would anyone think such a thing? I mean, what set of rational premises could lead to such an irrational notion? Um, well, I, I've have this idea that there is a counter-entropic principle built into the universe that has not re, has not been, um, described by science at all. It may have been noticed, but never in itself, it's inclusive nature. And I call this anti-entropic principle novelty. Novelty. It has been increasing since the very first moments of the, uh, birth of the universe. Whether you subscribe to the Orthodox cosmology of a Big Bang, which I would like to sit on the fence about. It seems to me, I mean, you may think my notion is unlikely, but you should remind yourself that what science believes is that the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant from an area whose diameter was less than that of the electron. It seems to me this is almost like the limiting case for the incredible. I mean, if you could believe that, what would you resist believing? Uh, I mean, if if you believe that, you may be interested in a large bridge over the Hudson River that my family has had for generations, and that we're willing to sell you for a dollar. Um, but this is what science believes. This is what most scientists believe. Although, in all fairness, in the last five years, this has gotten more shaky. Not everybody now believes in the Big Bang. Well, what I would like to substitute for the Big Bang is what I call the Big Surprise. And, um, the Big Surprise doesn't come at the beginning of the universe. It comes at the end of the universe. Which seems to me, you know, if you want to the battle of the singularities. Orthodox science says the entire universe sprang from a tiny area in a single instant. The notion that out, I mean, it sprang from pure nothingness. It sprang from a point-like dimension that was, as far as we can tell, utterly without any quality whatsoever. This seems to me the least likely environment in which to seek a singularity. I mean, how can we imagine, unless we call upon God Almighty, a perturbation in a flawless nothingness that would usher into, you know, 10 to the 47 particles of many types streaming outward, symmetry breaks, so forth and so on. It seems to me, if you, that all cosmological myths require a singularity of some sort. But some singularities are more likely than others. And so, in my notion, and I call it my notion because so many people have told me I'm completely welcome to it, in in my notion, um, the place to look for a singularity is in the most complicated circumstances imaginable. Not an unflawed emptiness, but a world where you have atomic chemistry, polymer chemistry, organic chemistry, uh, advanced animals and plants, languages, cultures, technologies, information coding and regurgitation systems. In other words, the more complexity that you can pile into a situation, the more likely you're going to get what is called an emergent property or a singularity or the Big Surprise. And so, um, as I look back at the history of the universe over any scale you care to name, the last five years, the last 500 years, the last 500 million years, the last five billion years, there it is, a generality which seems to hold, which is complexity, once come into existence, is retained and folded back into this interstices of being to produce yet more complexity. This is linked, and at least appears-linked, to the cooling of the universe. At the Big Bang, the temperature of the universe was trillions of degrees, and there was no, there wasn't even, uh, atomic chemistry. There was just a, a plasma of electrons. And then after some time, measured in nanoseconds, the temperature of the universe fell sufficiently so that stable orbits could be established around atomic nuclei. And then you have the emergence of a prim, you know, simple inorganic chemistry. Well, then after a further falling temperature and much longer period of time, you get the thermal disruption of chemical bonds falls below the limit where you can get complex molecular structures. And then a whole new set of emergent properties, building on the levels which preceded, until finally you get the birth of stars. And that is basically huge lumps of condensed hydrogen. The simplest of all elements. The hydrogen aggregates into stars in such amounts that tremendous pressures are set up at the center of these hydrogen masses, sufficient pressures for a fusion to begin to take place. And fusion cooks out iron and other heavy elements, including carbon. And carbon then becomes the key to the next level of emergent complexity. And from there to us, it's only a series of these declensions. But what's interesting about these declensions into complexity is that each phase happens more quickly than the phase that preceded it. So that the, um, and we actually are not peripheral to this process. We're at the center of this mandala in several by several different ways of thinking about it. The most convincing, I suppose, is, uh, that the density of connections in the human cerebral cortex makes the human cerebral cortex, without contest, the most densely ramified material in the universe. We carry within ourselves, then, the most complex, uh, organization that has been been laid on to the material universe. And it seems to me this is a strong argument that we are at the cutting edge of this process of emergent novelty. Now, up until a million years or so ago, we were just one more animal wandering around on this planet, albeit a sort of weird animal: bipedalism, binocular vision, complex pack signaling. But on the other hand, wolves and dogs and ants have complex pack signaling. But, um, then we began to elaborate. Notice that up to that point, the most, um, sophisticated information storage system that novelty had evolved was a genetic storage, storage in long polymerized molecules that templated other molecules to reproduce themselves. Well, with the emergence of human language, you get what is called epigenetic, uh, storage and conveyance of information in poetry, dance, ritual, of all sorts, artistic endeavors of all sorts. This is the unique domain of human beings. And it represents a vast acceleration in the rate at which this kind of informational business can be transduced. Well, then, so it flows forward. And then about 12,000 years ago, we really get going by, uh, building cities, beginning to notch wood, uh, with the our observations of lunar cycles and stuff like that. And then, you know, the rest of the story. I mean, it's just a jump from, as I said the other night, chipping flint off a core to hurling an instrument outside the solar system so that it can look back at our planetary system.
Elf told me that now there's a fine thing for a scientist to say. An elf told me that time travel is possible, but it's, it is constrained in ways which are not normally part of our expectation of time travel. The way in which it's constrained is, once time travel is discovered, you can travel as far into the future as you wish, but you can't travel into the past any further than the, uh, moment of the invention of the first time machine. The reason for this is that before the invention of the first time machine, there were no time machines. And how can you take a time machine into a domain where there aren't any? You see, it's just to preserve logical consistency. That's right. You can't take a car where there are no roads. When, when cars were first invented, the main objection to them was, what are you going to do with this thing? You know, there's nowhere to, you know, it can't go where a horse can go. So what good is it? Um, so here's the fantasy scenario, um, which for a while I liked very much. It's that quantum physics and to nanotechnology and all this malarkey is, uh, refined and focused toward the notion of building a time machine. So that then, on the morning of December 22nd, 2012, at the World Time Institute in the Amazon, the first time journey is about to be taken. And the whole world is watching on holographic television as the lady Temponaut is strapped into the machinery that will hurl her centuries into the future. And there's a countdown and a button is pushed and off she goes. Now, most people's interest would be to follow this woman wherever she's going. But let's forget her for a moment. The point has been made. She disappears. We assume she went off into the future. But what happens right there, right then? It seems to me, in the very next millisecond, thousands of time machines would begin arriving from the future, simply because they had driven to the end of the road. They had come back in time to witness the first journey into the future. It's as though you could take your Piper Cub and fly it to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1906, to see the Wright Flyer take off. You see? Are you all with me so far? Oh, yeah. Right.
Now, there's a problem with this, which some of you, I'm sure, are thinking, I hope, anyway, which is what's called the grandfather paradox. Which is the old conundrum that haunts all time travel schemes. Which is, if time travel were possible, you could go back in time and kill your own grandfather. Well, then you wouldn't exist. Well, so then this sets up a logical impossibility. Either you exist or you don't exist. And some science fiction authors have have assumed that that somehow massive influxes of synchronicity would preserve your grandfather. You know, you would approach him with your Saturday night special, but it would blow up in your hand, or it would ricochet off the Saint Christopher medal he always wore, or something like that, because he cannot be killed by you, because in that case, you wouldn't exist, in which case he couldn't be killed by you. And this troubled me for a long time. Then what exactly would happen in this situation? If a time, because the, the according to Hans Moravec of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, I mean, time travel is no big deal. The first paragraph of this paper, "The last few years have been good for time machines. Kip Thorne's renowned general relativity group at Caltech invented a new quantum gravitational approach to building a time gate, and an international collaboration gave a convincing rebuttal of the grandfather paradox arguments. Another respected group suggested time machines that exploit quantum mechanical time uncertainty. The technical requirements for these suggestions exceed our present capabilities, but each new approach seems less onerous than the last. There is hope yet that time travel will eventually become possible."