Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Complete transcript:
It's great to be here! It's absolutely great to be here. I think yesterday in Manhattan was as
beautiful a day as I've ever seen anywhere. I hope you all noticed. It's the kind of day that
makes you want to just... drop acid! And walk around in the park... Anyhow, I'm delighted
What's new with me? (I'll get all that calm-us-down, make-us-feel-at-home stuff behind
me.) I've moved off the mainland; I'm 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
Before I was in Manhattan, I was in Heidelberg, Germany, for two weeks working on a
film, and this is the project that's been on my mind recently. We're doing a film called "The
Rosicrucian Enlightenment." It's an effort to use an incident in early 17th-century
European history, right before the 30-Years War, to make a kind of propaganda film,
Queen Elizabeth of England and young Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia, and
their effort to build an alchemical kingdom in central Europe, right before the 30-Years
War. It's a wonderful romantic story -- alchemy, magick, politics. But the purpose of it is to
make a statement about our own politics and circumstance. So that'll be coming down the
pipe in awhile.
I'm 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
Just a bit of background here... I'm the purveyor of a notion that is uniquely my own
(basically, no one wanted 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
that's concerned -- a quality which I call "novelty". (And I cribbed this from Alfred North
Whitehead.) It's a very slippery concept to define mathematically or precisely, but
intuitively I think it's right there on the surface; we all know what novelty is. Novelty is
density of connection. It's that which is new or never tried. It's 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 -- it's 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
Well, as a rap at that level, you can take it or leave it -- it's sort of a rescinscion 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. (I'm delivering this at light speed because I'm 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; it's 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. There's 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 a kind 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, I'm 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 a piece of email today. (Maybe it's a person that's in this room -
- it wasn't somebody I knew.) They said, "Isn't it about time to come clean about the fact
that the novelty plunge has been a huge bore?" So that stirred me, and I actually made a
little list -- and I'm not saying that we've 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
Several new planets have been discovered around other stars. 70 Virginis, 47 Ursa
Minoris, and Beta Pictoris -- 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 point, and the resolution is getting finer and
finer. We're 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. That's one item. (I'll do the
Ten billion new galaxies were discovered and announced. I believe it was the missing
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 that's the astronomy section of what's 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.
It's 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
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 Bliche's (sp?)
novel Cities in Flight -- do you all remember that? The story of John Amalfi, the mayor of
New York City when New York City was well beyond the Milky Way?
Another interesting point describe in the Times two days ago: it's now agreed by everyone
that a very large asteroid impact 4 or 5 million years ago delivered a huge amount of
organic material to the Earth's surface without destroying it in the impact. I won't 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
we've 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 doesn't come in the
form of politics, wars, revolutions, upheavals -- that was the change of another era. In the
technology, and in science. All these scientific discoveries I mentioned are the result of the
thing. It's as though the acceleration into novelty is now very much a phenomenon of our
technical productions, our machines, our interconnectivity. And it's interesting -- we have
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 don't think we are experiencing an incredible plunge into novelty, you have an
I'm not suggesting that this pace of breakneck change will continue indefinitely. It won't. 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. We are no longer existentially-
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 it's going out on a limb to do so, because many squirrels occupy this particular part of
the park -- nevertheless I've been willing to go out on a limb and extrapolate these
processes forward and say: somewhere beyond 2012, reality as we know it is taken off
the menu. And I've been saying this since 1971, and the only model I had was the
boundary-dissolving challenge of the psychedelic experience. And I still think that, in 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, I think, that we have never been here before. But we are so accustomed to
causal thought, that we assume we have been pushed here, pushed here by historical
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 -- that's the other thing. 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 it's an illusion, or it's 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 it's very hard for people to imagine transformation without catastrophe, because
that's the only kind we've 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 positive transformation, 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 would be a fairly
rough ride. I don't think so. I think that's a form of cultural paranoia that keeps us from
It happens that I'm named after a Roman dramatist, a very minor character who wrote
these sort of foppish little social comedies that didn't 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 I've sort of taken that as my banner. I'm an anarchist.
Being an anarchist means you're not afraid of your fellow man. All the political theories
that come out of Thomas Hobbes and the paranoid school are about controlling the
perceived 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, you're going to have a nightmare. And this is the
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 the present, here. Very large parts of the
then they're descending into a hell. But what I see is an incredible victory of pluralism, of
tolerance, of multiplicity. It's 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 won't be for long, because there will
be no world capitol of media -- it's spreading everywhere) I think it's worth talking about
what media is, what it has done 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
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. All of 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 millions and millions of people. It's a cultural slight of hand on our part to not realize
that no one should read a 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 we're 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
has created a 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 to thousands, 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
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 Image per 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. That's what it's all for.
That's what liberation really means: it isn't permission to jog. It's permission to create!
The obligation that rests upon everybody in this room -- and the poorest and most twisted
among us still probably 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 I'm trying to do this with
my web site. I'm very keen on these new technologies because I don't see them as they
stand today -- that's exciting enough -- but I see them as what they could be. And my idea,
which you can display the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul, your aspirations.
We are not these shaven monkeys that we appear to be. That's the surface, 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
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
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 -- whatever is 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.
artist is essentially a magician, and a pipeline for the Logos, for the Demiurge, the
Overmind, this hovering, generalized kind of World 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 say "experience"; I thought of saying "plants"
-- because certainly there are psychedelic experiences not based on plants. But I find the
plant experiences most compelling, because I think somehow we are at our most fulfilled
when we have a heart connection to Nature, to the living world. And this doesn't 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
don't need chachkas, I'm not saying that! But there are higher purposes to be served here.
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. It's not that there are good ideologies and bad ideologies -- 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 don't 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
This ties into a larger issue which I'm interested in -- and this is another way of saying
"ideology is bankrupt" -- [it] is, Culture Is Not Your Friend. Culture is not your friend, no
matter what your culture is. And this is sort of not a Politically Correct thing to say,
because in the present ambience, (sort of, those who haven't gotten the word) there's a lot
of attention to recovering our ethnic roots and to expressing our unique ethnicity, and so
forth and so on -- I think that's the beginning of understanding. But all terms that stress
ethnicity are words applied to groups of people. Have you ever noticed that? Have you
ever noticed that you're not a group of people, you're 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 out your ethnicity as a caricature.
So culture is not your friend, ideology is not your friend... Who's 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 felt presence 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. Cultures thinks 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 real
answers to these questions -- that's 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. It's 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 the
intensity 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 you've ever wondered) the incredible phobia of these things on the part of the
establishment, the incredibly deep alarm that these things trigger in people. You know,
Tim Leary once said of LSD, it's "a compound that occasionally causes psychotic behavior
in people who don't take it." That's how powerful these things are! And the reason is, they
are a direct challenge to the myth of the tribe -- whatever the 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.
That's because all these ideologies, from the psychedelic point of view, are seen in all
their limitations and foolishness, and their historical assumptions and their naivet� writ
large across them. Ideology is a fool's game. Or it's a scoundrel's 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 there's just nothin' 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 doesn't mean you have to flee from it, it doesn't
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
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 we're dealing with now. You
understand what I mean? It means people can't 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 wratch it up. One notch. Not
twenty notches, one notch. Then we see if that works. You may think this is some kind of
down-prescription for reducing the world to a fairly predictable and mundane place. It isn't
at all. It's a way to rapidly filter out a lot of nonsense. But the truly weird -- and the truly
true -- can survive this process. It doesn't do any damage to them, and you will then find
them intact.
And I can only testify to my own experience. I've 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
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 I've only found it on DMT, I have to tell you. I don't know maybe I'm a...
Well, no, I was astounded by Jerusalem, I was astounded by the Mosque of Omar,
there've been maybe five or six other moments in my life when true astonishment broke
through. But the psychedelic 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
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? It's not subtle. That's the one thing you have to understand. It's not about looking
into somebody's eyes and getting the whammy, it's not about some intuitive knowing, it's
not some vague... It's about begging for mercy because they are rotating and balancing
the wheels of your after-death vehicle having taken you prisoner in your own apartment!
That's my idea of an encounter with the incredible. God knows, the worst thing you can
say about any drug is that it's subtle! Deliver us from subtle drugs, please!
Well, I mentioned this balkanization of epistemology thing because my own theory tells me
...in the presence of the Mystery. Nobody knows what life is -- don't 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. That's 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, well this thing
you're on about the novelty and the concrescence -- it all sounds very automatic. What's
the political implications of this? Are we just riding along on the back of the dog, and there
is no political implication? No, I don't 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 it's a very complicated situation.
It's troubling to me that in our community of dissidents, it's 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
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, we're in a sense disempowered.
You know it's a curious thing in the 20th Century, it's a paradox, a coincidencia positorum:
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 damn. 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
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 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 didn't know it,
we would very quickly multiply this understanding until it became the consensus.
People don't intrinsically fear the future. They fear it because they've been programmed to
fear it. And they're 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 that before 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 the anthropologist, the biochemist, the botanist, the neurologist, who have
explore consciousness. The end result of all of these tools is the rebuilding of the human
self-image. I've 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 present ambience 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
their mature form. These are like certain kinds of lungfish -- they're fish and they have fish
babies that have fish babies that have fish babies... Then comes a season when the water
dries up, and they don't 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 it's basically a case of fish or cut
bait. I feel ready. I feel we're 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 who born after World War II and came through the
60's, laid a certain kind of groundwork, but we didn't understand enough about what the
enterprise was. It was impossible to understand it in one decade, the nature of the
enterprise. We've 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
So the time is now, the tools are here. We can use the turn of the millennium as a kind of
flog on the dissipation of print-created values. This isn't 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, don't realize how
profoundly terminal for their enterprise the year 2000 is going to 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 -- they'll 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. It's where
we've always been headed. That's 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
QA
Okay, 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, it's a
here's a one-to-many exercise. So this is the chance to redress the balance, and this is
where I usually have the most fun and learn things. So anybody who has a question, it
doesn't have to hold to tonight's topic -- whatever that was. Feel free. I give long answers,
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. I'd 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
petroleum, raw minerals... That's one thing I need to question; I don't know if that's going
where does that leave us if we are trying to go back to nature? That's 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,
aren't going to have access to the technology that we're 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. We're 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 I'm trying to live what I'm talking
about. So here's 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. I reach 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
d'etre for the existence of modern cities. There's no reason now for office culture to be
maintained. And once corporations realize this, I think they will break it down. There's 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
don't like climbing on 747s and crossing nine time zones to give a speech. So, my hope is
The other thing is -- and I didn't talk that much about it in the talk -- consumerism is much
overdone, I mean to the level of pathology. 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 it's media's job to sell stuff, and the more stuff that sells
the more successful it is. But the selling of this stuff will eventually lead to what you're
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 they're auctioning over at Christie's, 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 your taste!
Presently we tend to behave as though, if you acquire things that are tacky, that's terrible,
but if you acquire things that are [affectedly] "exquisite", that's wonderful. No, it's just a
relative kind of terrible. True aristocrats live with nothing, I think. I had a professor of
Chinese philosophy 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, I'll get to see some kind of great art collection. I'm 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 couldn't help but notice that UFOs
were gone. What happened to the UFOs?
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 unconscious flying back from the end of time and all that. And it just seemed to be
completely missing from the picture -- it's a curiosity as to why it's missing.
TM: Okay, well here's why. First of all, I stand by everything I said. Something strange
haunts the skies of Earth. 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 can't participate in it. I have encountered DMT creatures, I have
I'm 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. Here's my
take on the entire abduction 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 Century have lost the ability to
distinguish between memory and dream. And as Ross Perot says, "End of story!" That's
what's happening. Imagine a person in an archaic society. The most dramatic narrative
event is an old shaman telling a story around the campfire. And it's 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. That's all in there. And if believe Freud, Jung, or
anybody else who's thought about the unconscious, you know that the unconscious can
use that material to create scenarios of pathology or individuation. So if someone tells a
story 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 the
silver flannel pajamas, large eyes, and an interest in studying your rear end. The Alien is
truly alien!
I don't know what to make of this breakdown of rational discourse on this issue. But it's 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 you'd taken 5 grams of psilocybin, you couldn't have
given it to your grandmother. " So it has to do with different approaches to evidence, and
different aesthetics, I think. So I'm all keen for the UFOs, but very keen to divide away all
the silliness. I think we're approaching a time where it might be reasonable -- gently,
kindly, and with a smile on our faces -- to denounce just plain foolishness. There's a lot of
absolute foolishness --
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 didn't say don't judge. I thought what I was
saying is, make distinctions. You have to judge. You're going to be presented with and
the Hassids, the Zennies, the Buddhas? Where do you put your faith? You're going to be
constantly called upon to make this call. Now you don't have to make sense to me; you
don't 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 is something 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 haven't taken the depth of the mystery. I
mean what it is is the Cosmic Giggle, and they're not going to nail that to the barn door;
that's its nature, that it's mercurial, shifting beyond your reach. It changes as you behold it.
Q3: Hi. I got your software, and I started to read the book, and I gotta ask you: How come
a descent into novelty? Is it that easy to get to novelty?
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 it was 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
Now you said to talk a little bit more about this time we're passing through. Well, one thing
I didn't mention in the talk (because it takes for granted that you've studied my thing,
which is a lot to presume) -- there are resonances in my theory. It's not simply that it's
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. It's not good to push the analogy too hard,
because many times are intersecting. But in ordinary theory of history or theory of
causality, the 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 that's 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 of
Aeschylus... 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.
Q3: I wanted to know more about Alfred North Whitehead and how the I Ching and
TM: Well, people think of Alfred North Whitehead as a somewhat obscure and stuffy guy,
just because he was English and it was the 1920's and guess he didn't do a lot of bong
rips or something. But if you read Process and Reality -- I strongly urge you to read this
book. It's not easy, but you don't need a Sanskrit dictionary, and you don't need to take up
residence down at the ashram and sweep up... Whitehead has a language that he speaks,
and he talks of feelings 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
organization or a human being as a "nexus of actual occasions". Well I just find his
vocabulary, his way of thinking about things, and his mathematical rigor to be
tremendously appealing. If you take Whitehead to you breast, you don't 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
Q4: I want to know if you believe in the paranormal abilities of humans, and if so, if you
TM: Yes, absolutely. I don't 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
But I'm not ready to give up on this. First of all, how many psychiatrist residents have ever
seen and unmedicated schizophrenic? 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 the Twentieth Century, with schizophrenia naked?
What it seemed to me to be was a kind of -- it was almost like it's a disease of spacetime
itself. You walk into a nexus and then you're tweaked, and you see too much, you say too
much. And it's very hard to get you squeezed back down into what they call a "coping
mode". And that's all most psychiatry's about; it doesn't ask philosophical questions.
They're 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. That's the only time I've ever seen anything like this go down. And yet this is
not done. It's impossible to get permission to give psychedelics to people with [any] other
experimental protocol than to see whether they 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, I've
been with cultures where people could smell water, and it was a life and death deal. Well,
is that a paranormal ability? I've 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 their culture this was how you did it; it was not paranormal. In
our culture there's 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? I'm a painter, and I drove an
hour and a half to the area, and I don't have access to the Internet. Recently somebody
and I tried to do it, and it didn't work. And I'm wondering if I need to adapt...?
TM: Well, it's a stretch for all of us. A year ago, I had no web site, I didn't know what HTML
was, I had no 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. You're
going to have to accept the fact that you're going to have to learn a bunch of new stuff. At
first a person my age resents that. Now that I'm into it, I haven't had this much fun since
the 1960's, I haven't learned so much stuff! So what kind of stuff do you learn? Do you just
learn the software -- you're the slave to commercialism, in some sense? I don't see it that
way. Photoshop teaches you about light. The 3D rendering programs teach you about
space. The animation programs teach you about motion. And believe me, it's not simple.
When you're in a 3D rendering program, of the sort that gives you, simultaneously, three
views, from three different angles, of the object which you're sculpting -- a stupid person
cannot coordinate all that data! And I started out unable to coordinate all that data. And
then you learn, "Oh, it's 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 it's incredibly rarefied and removed
from the lives of most people. And you are, somehow, handmaiden to the interior
wider audience. I mean it's fine to be collected by a dozen people, but I don't think that
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 that's to be done now.
Q5: My worry is just that there's something lost in the medium, because it's 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
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 that's disguising itself as an
alien invasion. You already addressed this a little bit, but I'd 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 50's we've had the example of The
Day the Earth Stood Still and When Worlds Collide right on up through that television
series which I didn't 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 that's not what's
happening. What's 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 don't think it comes from the distant stars -- it knows us too well, and loves us too much.
It could come from the dead. Now that's what I mean by something weirder than an alien
invasion. An alien invasion compared to a collective mass contact by the dear departed is
So, whatever this thing is, it keeps itself masked. I've literally had the experience on
mushrooms of saying to it, "Show me what you are, for yourself." Well, it's like there's this
enormous organ chord, the temperature falls, black velvet curtains are raised -- and after
about 20 seconds of that, I'm saying, "That's enough of what you are for yourself! Let's 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 always been accompanied
by this thing. The Demiurgos -- some people just throw down their cards and call it God
and be done with it. I'm not ready for that, because I don't think it's the God who "hung the
stars like lamps in Heave," as Milton said. It's not that God. If it is a god, it's the god of
Biology. And I don't have any problem with that. I think that the reason people took
psychedelics, and the reason psychedelics had such an impact on early human society,
was, not because they dissolved sexual boundaries, not because they increased hunting
skills, not because they all those things -- which they did do -- 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 wall by the untrammeled practice of history, that the Gaian murmuring
<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> doesn't give much weight to the vibrational frequency theory, but does believe we
being released from a mental hospital, he has been successfully managing his own life.
<TM> agrees that it must come down to individual judgment, and that there are some
<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 would provide 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.