Culture and Ideology are not your friends

Culture and Ideology are Not Your Friends

Terence McKenna, 1999 1

Can you all hear? Is that good? Can you hear? Is that working for you? Great. Okay. Well, it’s a pleasure to be here – it’s always a pleasure to speak for the Whole Life Expo, because they turn out interesting people – my own special brand of freaks, and then those who wander the halls in search of enlightenment from MultiVite suppositories,2 and what have you, and we’re always happy to enlighten them!

Before I get into the bulk of my thing, I hope you each got one of these things as you came in. These are two events. One is an old favorite – in fact, if I look out over this crowd I see many familiar faces from these Mexico get-togethers, which have been going on now for about eight years. If you’re interested in ethnobotany, psychedelic plants, shamanism, ethnochemistry, psychedelic archaeology, this is probably the place where you get more people who are experts in this field under one tent than anywhere else. Jonathan Ott, the author of Pharmacotheon,3 Rob Montgomery,4 Manuel Torres,5; Christian Rätsch,6 the German ethnoanthropologist, all kinds of people come to this thing, and it’s held in Palenque, within walking distance of the ruins, each year, and it’s the height of mushroom season, and I need say no more about that! So if you can, join us.7

And then in this past year at Palenque, speaking with Manuel Torres and Ken Symington,8 we decided that the psychedelic community was ready to attempt to take the next step in legitimizing itself in the general cultural dialogue, and we felt that the place that hasn’t really been honored or sufficiently brought to people’s attention is the incredible role that psychedelics have played since the 1950s in the art world – in the world of painting, music, composition, perfor-mance, dance, so forth and so on. And so this September, 12–17, on the big island of Hawaii, we’re going to have a smaller conference – 100 people only – and we invited major contributors to the arts scene to come out of the closet and affirm the impact of psychedelics on their creative processes.9 And we have

1 Presented at the Whole Life Expo, Denver, April 27, 19992 MultiVite suppositories – Multi-vitamin suppositories3 Jonathan Ott is an ethnobotanist, writer, translator, publisher, natural products chemist

and botanical researcher in the area of entheogens and their cultural and historical uses, and helped coin the term “entheogen”.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Ott

4 Rob Montgomery, Botanical Preservation Corps founder, field ethnobotany expert, manager of exotic/entheogenic plant business. see: http://www.botanicalpreservationcorps.com/

5 Constantino Manuel Torres, known as Manuel Torres, is an archaeologist and ethnob-otanist specializing in the ethnobotany of pre-columbian South America and the Caribbean. In particular, he has shed much light on the Taíno use of Anadenanthera snuff Cohoba, its paraphernalia and associated archaeology.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantino_Manuel_Torres

6 Christian Rätsch (born 1957) is a German writer ethnopharmacology and psychoactive plants and animals. Rätsch is an anthropologist and author. He was born in 1957 in a Bohemian community in Hamburg, Germany.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Rätsch

7 Palenque 2000 – The Ethnobotany and Chemistry of Psychoactive Plantssee Levity: http://www.levity.com/eschaton/EBtrip.html

8 Kenneth Symington, Ken is an author and translator of several books, among which is “The Three Halves of Ino Moxo”, by Cesar Calvo, about Amazonian shamanism. Ken was also one of the 4 organizers (along with Terence, Jonathan Ott, and Rob Mont-gomery) of the Entheobotany Seminars, held in several locations during the 1990s.

9 AllChemical Arts, A Conference on Hallucinogens and the Creative Process, Hawaii,1999; see Levity: http://www.levity.com/eschaton/allchemicalsplash.html

Terence McKenna – Culture and Ideology are Not Your Friends

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people such as Alex Grey,10 the painter, Robert Venosa,11 who is the Boulder painter – brilliant international painter. Annie Sprinkle,12 the performance artist, Tom Robbins,13 the novelist, who has just finished – I talked to him on the phone yesterday, I’m having dinner with him in Seattle tomorrow night – he’s just finished the longest Tom Robbins novel ever written, so Tom Robbins fans take note. Who else? Mark Pesce,14 Bruce Damer 15 – these are cyberspace folks, Lewis John Carlino, who did the movie ‘Resurrection’ and ‘The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea’.16 If you are a psychedelic artist, collector, dealer, or enthusi-ast, and you want to hang with these people, please consider this conference.

That’s all the commercial and self-aggrandizing stuff I wanna talk about – on to the main event. The way this will work is, I’ll talk for a while and then we’ll do questions for a while, and then it will be over, and then I’ll go down to the bookstore and if anybody needs to speak to me or have a book signed, please come down there. [4:21]

Okay. I used to prepare these things in anticipation of vast oceans of faces eager to be uplifted. Since the oceans of faces are, practically speaking, more like small ponds, I’ve realized that these are really conversations around and about one subject only, which is: What in the world is going on? What is going on? What does it mean to be incarnate in a human body at the end of the 20th century in a squirly 17 culture like this, trying to make sense of your heritage, your opportuni-ties, the contents of the culture, the contents of your own mind? Is it possible to have an over-arching viewpoint that is not somehow canned, or cultish, or self-limited in its approach? In other words, is it possible to cultivate an open mind and sanity in the kind of society and psychological environment that we all share? And it grows, daily and weekly, as you know, harder to do this; weirder to integrate; more on your plate to assimilate.

10 Alex Grey (born November 29, 1953) is an American artist specializing in spiritual and psychedelic art (or visionary art) that is sometimes associated with the New Age movement. Grey is a Vajrayana practitioner. His body of work spans a variety of forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, visionary art, and painting. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Grey

11 Robert Venosa (January 21, 1936 - August 9, 2011) was an American artist residing in Boulder, Colorado, USA. He studied with what are termed the New Masters. His artworks reside in collections around the world.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Venosa

12 Annie M. Sprinkle (born Ellen F. Steinberg; July 23, 1954) is an American former prostitute, stripper, pornographic actress, cable television host, porn magazine editor, writer and sex film producer. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Sprinkle

13 Thomas Eugene “Tom” Robbins (born July 22, 1936) is an American author. He is probably best known for his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Robbins

14 Mark D. Pesce (born December 8, 1962), is an author, researcher, engineer, futurist and teacher. In early 1994, while in San Francisco, Pesce and software engineers Tony Parisi and Gavin Bell, spearheaded an effort to standardize 3D on the Web, and invented VRML Architecture Group (VAG), under the leadership of Pesce. The purpose of VRML was to allow for the creation of 3-D environments within the World Wide Web, accessible through a web browser.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pesce

15 Bruce Damer, PhD, (born January 31, 1962) is a visionary designer, researcher, and pioneer of avatar virtual worlds. He visualizes missions for NASA, curates the DigiBarn Computer Museum and Psychedelia Archives, and researches the origins of life and survival of the human enterprise in the cosmos. see Esalen Workshop, ‘Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012’: http://webapp.esalen.org/workshops/10791 and Bruce Damer: http://www.damer.com/

16 Lewis John Carlino is best known as the director of The Great Santini starring Robert Duvall, Blythe Danner and Michael O’Keefe. He has worked as a director and screen-writer on a number of movies during a career which has spanned five decades.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_John_Carlino

17 squirly, colloquial – suspicious; not being straight up; beating around the bush; being up to no good; sneaky; sly; manipulative; untruthful.


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And I certainly don’t have final – or even nearly final – answers. I think it all lies in posing the questions in a certain way, in feeling the data in a certain way. And one of the things I try to convince people is, it’s not necessary to achieve closure with this stuff. And in fact any ideological or belief system that offers closure – meaning final answers – is sure to be wrong. Sure to be self-limiting, sure to be inadequate to the facts.

So one of the ideas I’d like to put out is that – and it may seem strange, in this menu, but perhaps not – the idea that ideology is not our friend. It is not a matter of choosing from a smorgasbord of ideologies and rejecting the flawed, the self-contradictory, and the over-simple, in favor of the unflawed, the complex enough. Where is it writ in adamantine that semi-carnivorous monkeys can or should be capable of understanding reality? That seems to me one of the first illusions – and one of the more prideful illusions – of human culture: that a final under-standing is possible in the first place. Better, I think, to try and frame questions which can endure – questions which can endure – and leave off searching for answers, because answers are like operating systems: they’re being upgraded faster than you can keep up with it. [7:45]

I want to mention just a couple of things that are happening, to sort of set the context – I mean, this is the stuff I worry about or think about. In the last ten days, if you have not being paying attention – because the news has certainly been offering many different matters to claim your attention – but in the last ten days, a new solar system, a new star system, with three giant planets has been discovered. So this is a multiple-planet solar system in Upsilon Andromedae, 44 light years away.18

What does that mean to us? Well, it means that solar systems like our own are probably as common as popcorn on a theatre floor. No reason to think not. In fact, right now, we know of 20 planets outside the solar system – twice as many as we know inside the solar system. So we’re living in a different world than everybody was living in even just five years ago. Science is lifting veils and opening doorways on a universe so vast, so strange, so counterintuitive, that it’s literally all you can do to keep up.19

Here’s another factoid: there are now more square miles of territory in virtual reality than the entire surface of the Earth! Virtual reality is now larger than this planet. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time in VR, I spend a little time there – I was looking at AlphaWorld before I left Hawaii, the opening screen from 25,000 feet above AlphaWorld. The entire thing cannot fit on the screen. Denver would fit on the screen at an altitude of 25,000 feet, you could see the outlying suburbs, but AlphaWorld won’t fit – that’s how large a single world of virtual reality is. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, being built, being expanded, being edited and changed, as we speak.20 [10:06]

We’re now just a hair’s breadth away from there being six billion people on this planet. Again, I checked on the Internet before I left – we’re something like a hundred million short, so by the time I get back to Hawaii in a month, we’ll be over the six billion mark. Then, just to touch on a few things, the strongest

18 Upsilon Andromedae (υ Andromedae, υ And) is a binary star located approximately 44 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Andromeda. The primary star (Upsilon Andromedae A) is a yellow-white dwarf star that is somewhat younger than the Sun. As of 2010, four confirmed extrasolar planets are known in orbit around the primary star. All four are likely to be jovian planets that are comparable to Jupiter. Upsilon An-dromedae was both the first multiple-planet planetary system to be discovered around a main sequence star, and the first multiple-planet system known in a multiple star system. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upsilon_Andromedae

19 A total of 708 such planets have been identified as of December 5, 2011.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planets

20 AlphaWorld, is the oldest collaborative virtual world on the Internet, and home to millions of people from all over the world. Since it’s birth in 1995 AlphaWorld has rapidly grown in size and is roughly as large as the state of California, and now exceeds 60 million virtual objects! see: http://www.activeworlds.com/worlds/alphaworld/


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hallucinogen known to science is legal, free, and easily grown, totally unlimited in its distribution, its accessibility – I’m talking about α-salvinorin now.21 Quan-tum teleportation has been achieved,22 and is moving out of the laboratory and probably in the next half-dozen years will be the basis of an entirely new kind of computational machine with greater computing capacity than all the computers presently operating in North America, and if I had more time, I could just keep going with this laundry list of shockers!

The human world is exploding at the seams. Human creativity and the imple-mentation of human inventions and technology is now at an accelerated fever pitch like nothing ever before seen in the history of the world. Well, where is it leading, and how does one integrate this stuff into one’s own life? What does it mean about the experience of being human?

If you’ve followed the evolution of my ideas, you’ll know that I have proposed the existence of an invisible, permeating something, that is throughout all being, all time, all space, all bodies, all thoughts, which I call ‘Novelty’. And the interesting thing about Novelty is that it’s increasing constantly. Science has not trumpeted this view, because science tends to look for principles which operate in definable domains – in other words, the laws of chemistry, the laws of physics, the laws of gene segregation, the laws that describe the trajectories of artillery shells and falling bodies.

But I submit to you that there is an over-arching law which affects all reality, and that you don’t need an atom-smasher or extremely advanced mathematical methodologies to discern. It is self-evident in your own experience. And what it is, is that as we go back in time, the universe is found to be a simpler place. If we go back a long ways in time, the universe is a very simple place. There are no cultures, there are no animals, there are no plants – indeed, if we go far enough back in time, there are no stars and planets. The universe is simply a swarming ocean of energy. But as we approach the present, it’s as though the universe has undergone a series of crystallizations out of itself of higher and higher forms of organization. And this is what I call ‘Novelty’.

Now, people have attacked this concept, saying that it’s impossible to define in English or mathematically. Most things that are interesting are impossible to define. Love, courage, decency, dignity, hope, fear – impossible to define. It doesn’t preclude them from shaping our world. And the absence of a mathemati-cal definition of Novelty shouldn’t impede us greatly either, because it’s an intuitively graspable concept. Novelty is complexity, it’s connectivity, it’s complex non-equilibrium thermodynamic states that sustain themselves far from equilib-rium, That’s you, as a body, that’s us, as a society, that’s this planet, as a living ecosystem. And the interesting thing about this Novelty is, any given level of it which is achieved becomes the platform for further advance into Novelty. [15:56]

Now, there is a retardant force – and I call it ‘habit’ – to keep it away from concepts like thermodynamic entropy – habit. And so in my model of the way things work – gleaned from observation, stoned and unstoned – is that the cosmos, your life, the politics of this city, the history of Western civilization, is a

21 see Erowid: http://www.erowid.org/plants/salvia/salvia.shtml; or J. Ott, Salvia divinorum Epling et Jativa, Eleusis – Journal of Psychoactive Plants & Compounds, n. 4, pp. 31-39, 1996: http://www.lycaeum.org/eleusis/en/articles/vel-ott.shtml

22 Quantum teleportation, or entanglement-assisted teleportation, is a process by which a qubit (the basic unit of quantum information) can be transmitted exactly (in principle) from one location to another, without the qubit being transmitted through the inter-vening space. Quantum teleportation is unrelated to the common term teleportation – it does not transport the system itself, and does not concern rearranging particles to copy the form of an object. The seminal paper first expounding the idea was published by Charles Bennett and coauthors in 1993. It was first confirmed experimentally in 1997 by a group in Innsbruck and has subsequently been shown to work over distances of up to 16 kilometers.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportationsee also C.H. Bennett at IBM with link to original paper: http://researcher.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=2862


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struggle between habit and Novelty. Habit is also an intuitively graspable concept. It means conservatism, recidivism, doing things the traditional way, not taking chances. And these things are not moral values – sometimes the right move is habitual, sometimes the right move is novel. But the universe, as a system, is what I call a Novelty-conserving engine. In other words, where Novelty is produced, it tends to be tenaciously hung onto. It can’t always be hung onto, but it is tenaciously hung onto.

So, as an example of what I mean by tenaciously hung onto: 55 million years ago, as you know, an asteroid of considerable dimensions struck this planet and in a single day the dinosaurs, the great saurians, went extinct. Maybe it wasn’t a single day, maybe it was weeks. But in terms of the timescale of the life of the Earth, it was a blink of an eye. That was a tremendous setback for Novelty: these beautifully climaxed and integrated ecosystems of dinosaurs and rain forests and so forth, were just pulverized to dust! It had taken three billion years, four billion years, for the planet to achieve that kind of Novelty.23

Sixty-five million years later, a fraction of the time it took the original system to establish itself, it’s all good. The dinosaurs are gone for ever, but in their place much more novel, much more interesting, much more complex animal and plant biota have established themselves. So what took four billion years to achieve turned to rubble, 65 million years is back in place. This is because of this tenden-cy for Nature to prefer and conserve Novelty.

Well, I don’t think – somebody might resist this, and they might have problems with it – but I think it’s self-evidently true that this is the most complex age the universe has ever known, because we not only have all which preceded, but we have then our own dear selves, the poetry of William Blake,24 the mathematical equations of Albert Einstein,25 the painting of Rembrandt,26 we have all of this to add into the mix. [17:54]

What takes this out of the realm of sophomoric and theoretical discussion is the second part of my observations on Novelty, and that is that Novelty occurs faster and faster as you approach the present. In other words, this isn’t that the uni-verse is driving toward ultimate Novelty at constant speed, and has been since the beginning of the universe. Not at all! The universe is moving toward ultimate Novelty, but following a kind of asymptotic spiral,27 or of closure – so that each advance into Novelty is preceded by the next, at an ever-greater rate of what I call ‘Ingression into Novelty’ – this is a phrase out of Alfred North Whitehead.28

So what does that mean? It means in the early universe, it took a long time for things to get interesting, for things to go from being just a cloud of pure electron

23 Mass extinctions and impacts: The last such mass extinction led to the demise of the dinosaurs and coincided with a large meteorite impact; this is the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event (also known as the K–T extinction event); This occurred 65 million years ago. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event

24 William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_blake

25 Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_einstein

26 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt

27 In analytic geometry, an asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as they tend to infinity. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic

28 Alfred North Whitehead, OM FRS (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics, and educa-tion. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead


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plasma to a universe with stars ordered into galaxies, with planets, with special chemistries and environments. And from that came – at least, on this planet – advanced life forms, first simple life forms, then advanced life forms, then the conquest of the land, then extremely advanced life forms, minded creatures, language-using human beings, tool-using human beings, and then the frantic, hysterical rush from Altamira 29 to this moment.

And we are part of this. These vast cycles of advancement into Novelty, which used to require aeons to affect the universe perceptibly at all, are now going on in humanly cognisable domains of time. The year – the month – the day – the decade – the century. We can look at such humanly cognisable spans of time, and the overwhelming impression we have is of change. Change piled upon change piled upon change. [20:05]

If this process has been rolling forward like this since the birth of the universe some 12, 13, 14 billion years ago, it’s very hard to hypothesize or argue that it should cease or will somehow deflect itself from its endless ramping-up of acceleration. But we can’t imagine change going on much faster than it’s going on now. I mean, perhaps we can imagine it going on ten times faster, or a hundred times faster. But a hundred thousand times faster? A million times faster? The mind boggles! And yet I think this is, in fact, where the universe is going.

Now, since the middle ‘70s I’ve had these ideas pretty much in place, and my faith has been that as science and human understanding advances, I would either be thrown from the boat as a crank or somehow brought into the fold. Well, I haven’t been thrown from the boat as a crank – I’m not sure, as speaking off the Whole Life Expo indicates, if I’ve been folded into the community of paradigmat-ic thinking – but I have received some encouragement in the last 18 months, and I want to just mention this briefly to you because I’m surprised how the news has failed us.

Did you know that in the last 12 months, a fundamental law governing the universe in all its parts and places has been discovered that was previously not only unsuspected, but denied? And a law of Nature larger than any law of Nature ever discovered – larger than the law of gravity, the speed of light, the second law of thermodynamics – all these are little laws, what Leary 30 used to call local ordinances. So these local ordinances have now been contextualised in a discov-ery of such import that it has not even been assimilated by the community of its discoverers, let alone handed down to the peasantry like you and I. And what I’m talking about is the discovery of the cosmological constant omega.31 And I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but here it is in a nutshell. [22:44]

The universe is expanding faster than the ordinary laws of physics can account for. This was realized a year and a half ago by one team of astrophysicists. They handed it on to a second team. They confirmed it. They handed it on to a third. They confirmed it. And a very counterintuitive picture of things is emerging. The universe is not going to fall back on itself in some grand crunch billions of years

29 Altamira (Spanish for ‘high views’) is a cave in Spain famous for its Upper Paleolithic cave paintings featuring drawings and polychrome rock paintings of wild mammals and human hands. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Altamira

30 Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psycholo-gist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary

31 In physical cosmology, the cosmological constant (usually denoted by the Greek capital letter lambda: Λ) was proposed by Albert Einstein as a modification of his original theory of general relativity to achieve a stationary universe. Einstein abandoned the concept after the observation of the Hubble redshift indicated that the universe might not be stationary, as he had based his theory on the idea that the universe is unchang-ing. However, the discovery of cosmic acceleration in 1998 has renewed interest in a cosmological constant.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant


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hence. Rather, the universe is going to expand for ever. For ever. But here’s the kicker: faster and faster and faster. For ever. With no barriers and no limitation.32

Someone may say, “Well, what about the speed of light?” Bleep! [imitates sound of an electronic device] The speed of light does not cover the law of the cosmo-logical constant, because this law is not saying that matter is moving apart faster and faster. If that were the case, the relativistic physics would put a speed limit on it. It’s saying that space itself is expanding faster and faster. This is a quality of empty space. The universe that comes into focus with this law in hand is a universe that in only a couple or three billion years will begin to loose contact with large parts of itself, because they will be moving apart at greater than relativistic speed.

So, it turns out, there is a cosmic law which has built into itself this idea of an endless acceleration toward infinity. And what it means is that in a few billion years, this area of space that we call our universe may be so diffuse that there may be no more than a handful of rattling electrons in the entire universe, so-called today.

Well, the reason this gives me hope is because [laughter] – in the first place, who wants to fall back into the big crunch? I mean, that’s a really anti-novel thing, to have half the life of the universe be the retracing of the first half. And I believe – and again, these are bold generalizations, but generally substantiated – that Nature is fractal in its structure. What that means is that a pattern occurring on a given scale can be expected to occur on other scales, very different. Simple example: an atom is a nucleus with electrons spinning around it. A solar system is a star with atoms spinning around it. A galaxy is a huge black hole and an agglomeration of stars within the outlying neighborhood spiraling around it. These are things on tremendously different scales, and yet they are organized similarly. And so I believe this is how Nature works. Once she finds a pattern that works, she applies it in many domains, of temperature, pressure, and cosmic scaling.33 [25:58]

So this cosmological constant omega, which says that the universe is expanding faster and faster, throws a kind of umbrella of political correctness over my notion that we are moving faster and faster into Novelty. And that we are, as it were, simply the dust motes or the magnetic particles in the presence of some kind of field phenomenon which is organizing us to its will. And this is the source of my optimism. If I had to place my faith in human institutions, human religions, human goodness, the human capacity for decency and dignity, I would be absolutely in the depths of existential despair. As I was, as a kid, because as a

32 Saul Perlmutter (born 1959) is an American astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Perlmutter shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Adam Riess and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Perlmutter

33 N.Haramein, M. Hyson, E.A. Rauscher, Scale Unification – A Universal Scaling Law for Organized Matter, Unified Theories: Proceedings of the 1stMetatheory Conference, Budapest, Hungary, 15-18 November, 2006, Amoroso, R.L., Diens, I., & Varga, C., (eds), Oakland: The Noetic Press;preprint at: http://theresonanceproject.org/research/scientificsee also: http://www.global-scaling-koeln.de/English/index_en.html


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kid, you know, I didn’t have these ideas, I had Camusian 34 existentialism and Nietzscheian35 whining, and all the rest of it and it’s a pretty grim situation, folks! But I really believe that without atom-smashers, without long-base interferome-ters, and all the rest of it, you can go into Nature and open your eyes, and open your mind, and you will see these processes in play. And you can easily extrapo-late them to your own life.

Now, if going into Nature and opening your eyes and paying attention doesn’t deliver this to you, then I suggest 20 mg of psilocybin be added into the mix, or 200 µg of LSD, or something like that, and then I think it will come shining through [laughter]. Why should that be necessary? Why should someone have to resort to – you know, what Rimbaud 36 called an artificial perturbation of the senses – to achieve this? Simply because culture mitigates against it. Culture is a closed system of thinking and values, of the sort I am denouncing. And it is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency is your culture. And I realize with joy that here I skirt the bounds of political correctness, because everyone is running around saying, you know, ‘Recapture your roots, get in touch with your Swedishness, your Irishness, your whateverishness’, and that’s all very fine, but I think it’s your humanness that may have eluded you in all this ethnocentric breast-beating. [applause]

Well, why should culture imprison us, and somehow place a barrier between ourselves and our true humanness? Well – I think I said at the beginning of this thing – culture and ideology are not your friends. They are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with, because a certain kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process. On the other hand, you can’t live in the cradle for ever, you can’t be clueless for ever. So somebody might as well just lay it out for you, and say, ‘Culture is for the convenience of culture, not you’. How many times have your sexual desires, career aspirations, financial dealings and aesthet-ic inclinations been squashed, twisted, rejected, and minimized by cultural values? And if you don’t think culture is your enemy, ask the 18-year-old kid who is given a rifle and sent to the other side of the world to murder strangers if culture is his friend. [29:57]

These extreme examples should bring it home to us that it’s a kind of a con-game.37 It is in fact, strangely enough, a kind of virtual reality. We have been led to think of virtual realities as something on the screen of a computer, or present-ed through a headset, but that’s an electronic virtual reality. The primary technology for the building of virtual realities is language. Once you start talking about race pride, loyalty, our destiny, our God, our mission, it’s like building virtual realities. And people begin to treat these things as though they had the substantiality of real objects, and to build their lives as though these things were real. And what is this? It’s a diminution of humanness. You’re choosing to limit

34 Albert Camus (7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French author, journalist, and philosopher of the 20th century. Although often cited as a proponent of existential-ism, the philosophy with which Camus was associated during his own lifetime, he rejected this particular label.[4] In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideologi-cal associations: “No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked …” see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus

35 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a 19th century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitzsche

36 Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as “an infant Shakespeare”—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rimbaud

37 A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confi-dence. A confidence artist is an individual working alone or in concert with others who exploits characteristics of the human psyche such as dishonesty and honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility, naivety and greed.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_game


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yourself to a cultural reality. Whether it’s the reality of being Huitoto 38 or Orthodox Jewish, or whatever it is, it’s a smaller world than the simple hardware you were born into this universe with. [31:13]

And the substances – the drugs, the plants, the things which perturb conscious-ness – they don’t address cultural values. They blast through them. They address the animal body, the mammalian brain. They perturb these information fields outside of the relativistic set of values that culture is giving you. This is why people who yearn for legal psychedelics have not thought, in my opinion, deeply enough about what is really at stake here. Imagine a culture so certain of its primary values, so sure that it represented the right way to live, that it would encourage people to take psychedelic substances and examine its premises! There ain’t such – at least, not in the hi-tech industrial democracies and/or the fascist states either. Some aboriginal cultures have this courage, but it has kept them very close to the breast of Nature and her processes. Cultures that have habitual-ly broken down the cultural illusion and examined the terrifying reality beyond it have not marched off, then, to pontificate with the religions of absolutism or scientific absolutism, or all the rest of it.

Well, why is that? It’s because cultures are virtual realities made of language, and if there is one thing psychedelics do – whether you hate ‘em or love ‘em, whether you don’t give a hoot – what they do is they dissolve boundaries. The boundaries between you and the floor, between you and your friend, between you and you last week, and you and you next week, and – they dissolve boundaries. That’s what they do. That is the ultimately subversive behavior. Cultures are boundary-defining engines – that’s what they do! They teach you, ‘We do it this way. Don’t go there – in your mind, in your heart. Follow the rules. Follow the rules.’ Cultures are like operating systems. You know, at Ur 39 and at – well, Ur will do – they set up a stele 40 in the centre of the marketplace, and on the stela they carved the laws.41 These were the laws of the operating system called Ur 1.0. And that worked fine for a while. Now we’re operating under Clinton’s Second Term 4.0. And is it limiting? Is it idiotic? Is it a pain in the rear end? You bet it is!

How can we overcome the limitation of our operating system? Well, basically, what I do with my computer when it acts up is, I give it a good slap, or a thump on the top. And that’s what these psychedelics are doing. They’re saying, you know, ‘Get it in context, my dear primate. See, you know, how does it all fit together?’ Every culture in history, in every time and every place, has operated from the assumption that it had it 95% correct and that the other 5% would arrive in five years’ time! All were wrong! All were wrong, and we gaze back at their naïveté with a faint sense of our own superiority. But we are wrong! We don’t have it either! I mean, if this is a culture approaching the truth, who needs the truth? I mean, this is something very, very different. Well, then, just to satisfy myself, I asked the question, ‘Why should it be like this? Why should these psychedelics – which, granted, perturb the mind – be such a terrifying contra-cultural force? And what does that mean?’ [35:29]

38 Bora–Witóto (also Bora–Huitoto, Bora–Uitoto, or, ambiguously, Witotoan) is a proposal to unite the Bora and Witotoan language families of northeastern Peru (Loreto Region), southwestern Colombia (Amazonas Department), and western Brazil (Ama-zonas State). see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witoto

39 Ur was an important city-state in ancient Sumer located at the site of modern Tell el-Muqayyar in Iraq’s Dhi Qar Governorate. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur

40 A stele, also stela is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected for funerals or commemorative purposes, most usually decorated with the names and titles of the deceased or living — inscribed, carved in relief or painted onto the slab.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stele

41 The Code of Ur-Nammu is the oldest known tablet containing a law code surviving today. It was written in the Sumerian language circa 2100 BC-2050 BC. Although the preface directly credits the laws to king Ur-Nammu of Ur (2112-2095 BC), some historians think they should rather be ascribed to his son Shulgi.See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu


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Well, I think it works something like this: your sensory apparatus, connected up to your local language, is a very good threat detection device. And that is really what the animal body evolved to be. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t at the end of a long line of superb threat-detection devices which told us when the saber-toothed carnivore was sneaking on its belly through the tall grass, which gave us that moment out of the corner of our eye when we saw the edge movement and scampered back into the cave, and so forth and so on. So ordinary consciousness has evolved an extraordinary fit to three-dimensional space and time, because that’s where your soma,42 your meat, is. And if the meat is disrupted radically, the mind is – we don’t know where. That’s somebody else’s lecture. It’s very impor-tant to keep the physical body together. So the mind, under the influence of culture, and cultural values, evolves as a threat detection device.

But notice that, carried far enough, that ends in paranoia. So then, in a sense, all cultural values carried to their ultimate end produce the paranoid personality. Fearful, watchful, never resting, never sleeping, always looking for the worst in every situation. But this is – the mind is like water. It takes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured – always. So when we approach the psychedelic plants – as shamans, as seekers, as sincere people interested in extraordinary experiences – what the psychedelics do, I think, is dissolve this three-dimensional threat detection psychology and system, and it’s as though the mind discovers that it has a second conformational geometry – that’s a way of putting it. And this second conformational geometry is of a higher dimensional order than ordinary consciousness. Not as a metaphor – higher dimensional order – but as a mathe-matician would use that term. The psychedelic mind is a higher-dimensional mind – it is not fit for three-dimensional space/time filled with roving, heavy-bodied carnivores. But it is fit for the back of the cave, the mountain retreat, the monastic tower. In other words, the place where threat has been eliminated and philosophy is the order of the day.

And so my interpretation of these psychedelic states is that they are actually higher-dimensional states of consciousness. And I put this to Ralph Abraham,43 the mathematician, who is no mathematical slouch – and no psychedelic slouch, either – and we talked of this in relationship to DMT. And he said, “I have no doubt at all that when I am flashing on DMT, I am seeing the ordinary world from a higher dimensional mathematical perspective”. And one of the things about higher dimensions is that the linearity of time is overcome. And last week, and next week, are as easily available as the present moment. The front of my hand is as easily seen as the back of my hand, without moving my hand, if I am in hyperspace.

So in a way, these higher dimensions are the places from which knowledge has percolated. And shamans, related to the smith – the worker in metal, the technol-ogist, the tool-maker, these are the twin brothers, the two aspects of the shaman, the shaman is a master of fire, master of metals, maker of tools, seer into the future, so forth and so on – the shaman is outside of cultural time, and is – I don’t like this word, but – channelling the future which is to come, in the form of technologies, innovations, languages, behaviors, so forth and so on. And this is why the shaman has always been the paradigmatic figure for aboriginal cultures, because the shaman knows more. And the method of the shaman has always been perturbation of consciousness – not always psychedelic plants or substances – can be putting metal hooks under your pectoral muscles and hanging for 14 hours in the sun, can be abandonment in the wilderness, can be extreme forms of fasting, can be ordeal poisons. But people are not fools! All of these things are extremely risky and unpleasant, while the psychedelics are the most effective and the least

42 soma, noun [usu. in sing. ] Biology, the parts of an organism other than the reproduc-tive cells. The body as distinct from the soul, mind, or psyche. Origin, late 19th cent.: from Greek sōma ‘body.’

43 Ralph H. Abraham (b. July 4, 1936, Burlington, Vermont) is an American mathemati-cian. He founded the Visual Math Institute at UC Santa Cruz in 1975, at that time it was called the “Visual Mathematics Project”. He is editor of World Futures and for the International Journal of Bifurcations and Chaos.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Abraham


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invasive! I mean, let’s take 30 mg of psilocybin, or a great fistful of mushrooms, three hours into it, you are definitely thrown into the lap of God. Eight hours into it, you’re simply looking back on it, reflecting, drawing conclusions and wonder-ing where do you go from here.

So – this is a roundabout way of explaining – it’s no surprise to me that society is very nervous around this issue, because society’s eggs are all in one basket, and the psychedelically inspired citizen, or the psychedelically inspired shaman, is a dangerous force. Even in traditional societies, the shaman is central to the social functioning, and the health, and so forth – but is never allowed to be physically central. There is a leader, a head man or something. The shaman lives off at the edge of the village, sometimes off in the woods. He is approached with fear and trembling. He is loathed and respected, and feared and loved, because it is understood that he represents a dimension that nevertheless must be tolerated, because it is the channel through which knowledge, and healing, and higher values, come. [42:23]

Now, in a society like ours, we say we have other methods. We don’t need the ravings of intoxicated shamans. We have the scientific method. We have the Gospel. We have the Talmud. We have all of these things, and they are sufficient for us to guide ourselves. But to guide ourselves where? If the 20th century is a statement of the accomplishments of the Western mind, values and methods, then God help us! Because the 20th century is a disgrace, you know? And to this moment, a disgrace! It was so comfortable to look back at Auschwitz and say, ‘Well, the 30s, the 40s, Hitler, those grey, grainy movies, this has nothing to do with us. This is just some terrible thing that happened in Europe 50 years ago’. No, no, no. This is happening, you know. It’s happening as we speak. People are being pushed into boxcars and taken away to be lined up and shot, for no reason whatsoever, while glasses tinkle and toasts are made by those who define them-selves as the preservers of freedom, dignity and Western values. We haven’t learned anything. The 20th century is the most condemnatory piece of evidence you can place against the Western mind. I mean, it seems to me it’s a knockout punch. I don’t know who’s responsible for this, but whoever is responsible is guilty, guilty, guilty of crimes against humanity. [44:05]

How do we overcome this? How do we find real values? Well, we find them in caring for the Earth. Nature presents an established set of processes and achieve-ments, billions of years old, which exercise a moral claim on rational intelligence, if it will but notice. And so that’s what this is all about. It’s about aboriginal values, and aboriginal technologies – psychedelic drugs, shamanism, what have you – offering to us, in the final moments of our unravelment, a different and better way to carry on. A different and better way to behave and build a world. And it doesn’t come a moment too soon. It may come too late. The ultimate tragedy – imagine if we, in this ultimate kind of thanatoctic 44 struggle, actually got it right, only to understand that the momentum of our own idiocy was so great that you would die knowing you could have done it right, but you would die anyway, and I mean as a culture, as a planet.

So it’s a call to awakening. Can cultural values be saved? I don’t think so! I don’t give a hoot! I mean, I’m an egg-smasher! I mean, I think we should save the Rembrandts, and save the Piero della Francescas,45 and all that; but we cannot save the values: racism, sexism, homophobia,46 xenophobia,47 product fetishism,

44 In Greek mythology, Thanatos (Greek: Θάνατος (Thánatos), “Death,” from θνῄσκω - thnēskō, “to die, be dying”) was the daemon personification of death.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatos

45 Piero della Francesca (c. 1415 – October 12, 1492) was a painter of the Early Renais-sance. As testified by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, to contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piero_della_Francesca

46 homophobia, noun, an extreme and irrational aversion to homosexuality and homosex-ual people. Origin, 1960s: from homosexual + -phobia

47 Xenophobia is defined as “an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange”. It comes from the Greek words ξένος (xenos), meaning


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enormous pyramids of class and privilege – none of this is savable. None of it is worth saving. Science is worth saving – it’s worth reforming, because it is, as a method, powerful. But in the presence of people contaminated by these other values, it becomes an engine of madness, of consumer fetishism, of propagandiz-ing, of the waging of war on an unimaginable scale. Religion, as we have prac-ticed it, I don’t think can be saved, because what religion has given us are laundry lists of moral do’s and don’ts that are preposterous on the face of them! I mean, if the people who preceded us believed all that, then this world is the consequence of those beliefs. And this is hell! This is hell.

So – if there’s a message here, rather than just a rant, I think it would be to return to Nature. Observe. Open your eyes. Get smart. Culture is not your friend. Religion is not your friend. The values of these cultures are fatal. And if we don’t wrench the direction of human society into an entirely new way of doing things, the clock is ticking, Nature is unforgiving. Intelligence is a grand experiment. But if it does not serve Novelty, and diversity, and the production of love and community and true caring, who needs it? Who needs it. Better to have a universe that glorifies God through its diversity than a universe which is the travesty of a demonic intent.

And if you are not a psychedelic person, and none of that appeals to you, that’s fine too. That is not a requirement. What is a requirement is moral intelligence. And you have to get it, one way or another, in a hurry! The reason I speak for psychedelics is because that’s the only thing I have ever seen work as fast as I think we have to, to have this change happen. If the Sermon on the Mount 48 could have done it, we would have turned the corner then. We’ve had great teachers – great teachers – and they were crucified, trampled, ignored, distorted, perverted. The right idea is not enough. What is necessary is the lightning strike of true gnosis, however that can occur. And, as I said, I speak for the psychedelics because I have felt their impact personally and I have been with cultures that have stayed close to that camp fire, and I have seen the beauty and the integrity and the humanness of those cultures. And we know this, I think. It simply needs to be articulated and spread and made clear. It is the faith that Nature’s dynamic will carry us to the completion and the enlightenment that we seek.

Thank you very much. [applause][49:14]

Now – and briefly, because I sailed past my intended stopping point – but for a few minutes, let’s entertain questions.

Q & A[Question: The question I have is around the attractor. When you talk about culture being not our friend. But is not the culture still within the context of the Novelty attractor?]Well, yeah, I mean, these questions are complicated. I had a discussion with Giorgio Samorini,49 who’s an Italian ethnobotanist and who has taken ibogaine,

“stranger,” “foreigner” and φόβος (phobos), meaning “fear.”48 The Sermon on the Mount is a collection of sayings and teachings of Jesus, which

emphasizes his moral teaching found in the Gospel of Matthew (chapters 5, 6 and 7). It is the first of the Five Discourses of Matthew and takes place relatively early in the Ministry of Jesus after he has been baptized by John the Baptist and preached in Galilee. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sermon_on_the_Mount

49 Giorgio Samorini (born in 1957, in Bologna, Italy) is an ethnobotanist and psychedelics researcher. He has published many essays and monographs regarding the use of psychoactive compounds and sacred plants. He was a frequent contributor to, and sometime editor of Eleusis the Journal of Psychoactive Plants & Compounds.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Samorini


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or Tabernanthe iboga,50 with the African tribe that uses that initiation. And in that initiation, they give 400 grams of this plant that is effective at 4 grams! And they give 400 grams, and sometimes people die. And it’s pretty heavy duty stuff. And I asked him; I said, ‘Giorgio – why do they give so much?’ And he said, ‘Their culture is so old that the morphogenetic field is so strong, I think it’s very very hard for them to get high!’ And he said something which I would not have thought he would say, and I had never thought, e said, ‘The Western mind, because of its unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics’. [50:54]

And so, addressing the question of the attractor, I’m not saying that this is worse than being an Amazonian tribe. I’m saying it’s worse than being an Amazonian tribe, it’s less than being an Amazonian tribe, unless we make use of it. In other words, this culture is not something to be preserved, but something to be exercised as an opportunity. We are free, well fed, well educated. We have access to the great databases of the world. A certain moral responsibility comes with that. I don’t expect the Huitoto or the Bora or the Mulimani or the Shuar to do more than set a good example for us. The breakthrough will probably come from the high-tech industrial democracies, because that’s where there is the most latitude to experiment. The very fact that I can speak to you without being shot, the very fact that you can go home and apply my lessons with no more than a few years in prison hanging over your head [laughter] – this is progress, folks!

Believe it or not, I mean, you know, in Hawaiian culture, if you stepped on the king’s shadow they killed you immediately! And many, many aboriginal societies are more rule-nutty than we are. It’s not just about creating a kind of anarchy. It’s about using freedom to introduce other people to freedom, and to then cultivate the things out of freedom that are most human, most human. [52:38]

[Question edited out]Well, let me address your question about α-salvinorin. A-salvinorin occurs in a Mexican mint plant called Salvia divinorum that has, in the last five or ten years, people have become aware that this was not only psychoactive, but that it was extremely powerful. And in a chemical family previously not known to contain hallucinogens, when the chemical is extracted from the plant and you get α-salvinorin, one half milligram is plenty. One half milligram is 500 micrograms. In other words, we’re talking about a plant hallucinogen active in the same range as LSD.

What does it do? Language fails. But that’s good news! That’s what you want! That’s what you want the psychedelics to do! DMT test pilots come back white-knuckled. And let me say, about drugs, you know it really bugs me – it’s, again, a tyranny of language, that when I sit up here and talk to you, and I use the word “drugs”, I could be talking about aspirin, heroin, cocaine, or 2,4,5-trimethoxy-di-something-or-other, you know, one of Sasha’s 51 things. It’s a poverty of language. Drugs, which anesthetize, or sedate, or wire you up – I don’t care about that. I mean, I take some, I don’t take others, you do too. It’s part of growing up, and you have to learn. But I don’t care about that, and I don’t care to politically defend it, and I don’t even particularly place psychedelic use in the

50 Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in a number of plants, principally in a member of the Apocynaceae family known as Iboga (Tabernanthe iboga). A hallucinogen with both psychedelic and dissociative properties, the substance is banned in some countries; in other countries it is being used to treat addiction to opiates, methamphetamine and other drugs.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine

51 Alexander “Sasha” Theodore Shulgin (born June 17, 1925) is an American pharmacolo-gist, chemist, artist, and drug developer. Shulgin is credited with the popularization of MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially for psychopharmaceutical use and the treatment of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. In subsequent years, Shulgin discovered, synthesized, and bioassayed over 230 psychoactive compounds.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasha_Shulgin


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same context. I’m interested in rare and high-dose experiences done with immense intentionality – you know, in silent darkness, at effective doses.

You know, Christ said ‘The lukewarm I vomit from my mouth’.52 And that’s how I feel about people who chip away at psychedelics and take piss ant amounts, and go to clubs, and go to class, and go to the mall, and, you know, this is not the program, folks. I mean, it’s somebody’s program. But I’m interested in life-changing experiences, and the wonderful thing about psychedelics is that as drugs, they are the safest drugs known to pharmacology. In other words, you would have to take 300 times the effective dose of psilocybin to place yourself in physical danger. No one knows the LD50 53 of LSD. So ask a pharmacologist. They will tell you, these are the safest drugs known to science. And yet they are the drugs most inveighed against, most scheduled, and the prisons are full of people who committed the unimaginable crime of smoking, drawing or traffick-ing in cannabis, for crying out loud. I mean, if this is not a racket, what is?!

To your other question, about teleportation, which was not in the context of Salvia divinorum – this is simply that – one of the things that’s happening in this laundry list I gave you of breakthroughs is that quantum physics is going from being, you know, this extremely abstruse, abstract domain going on somewhere that has no impact on human life, to probably being the next great source of human technologies. Computers and devices which move matter through space and time. If five years ago you had asked me – and I would regard myself as radical on the progress question – how long would it be ‘till we saw the teleporta-tion of objects, I would have guessed maybe 500 years to never! Well, now it’s been done. Well, only with an electron, only 15 feet, but the theory which allowed that feat places no upper limit on the size of the thing sent or the distance sent. And how long did it take that electron to be teleported 15 feet? No time at all. No time at all. This is transrelativistic technology we’re talking about, folks. In 20 years you may destroy and reconstruct yourself at a distant point ten times a day as you go about your ordinary business. It’s a transportation breakthrough.

There are other things like this: quantum computers, DNA computers and then, the best friend of all of the radical progressivist – the unexpected, which always delivers the most astonishing technologies. So, you know, if you think what has come to this point has been astonishing, stressful and amazing, brace yourself – because it is as a prelude to what is about to break over the human species. It’s almost as though God’s joke on us is to give us so much power and knowledge that we will either transcend ourselves or we will certainly destroy ourselves. Because the power and understanding being given to us is of God-like proportion.[58:06]

[Question edited out]Well, you know, the dolphins were very fortunate in that they evolved in an environment which is extremely unfriendly to fire! Fire leaves you to do reckless and crazy things – the smelting of metals is the basic thing. Yes, I’ve been the champion of mushroom intelligence. There are many minds congruent with our inhabiting of this planet: the dolphin mind, the octopus mind, these plants which talk to you. I mean, I know if you’ve never had a plant talk to you that sounds as silly as saying that someone’s channelling the history of Atlantis. But once you’ve had a plant talk to you, you realize, ‘Yes, they do’. It’s a problem to figure out

52 In John’s vision, recorded in the book of Revelation, Christ instructs John to write a message to seven named churches in Asia Minor. The message to Laodicea is one of judgement with a call to repentance. The oracle contains a number of striking metaphors.“I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth”, John, 3:15–16. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laodicean_Church

53 In toxicology, the median lethal dose, LD50 (abbreviation for “Lethal Dose, 50%”), LC50 (Lethal Concentration, 50%) or LCt50 (Lethal Concentration & Time) of a toxin, radiation, or pathogen is the dose required to kill half the members of a tested popula-tion after a specified test duration. see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LD50


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how this happens, but that it happens is no big deal. Above 20 mg of psilocybin most people report voices with interesting things to say. Above 75 mg of DMT, in Strassman’s experiments, most people reported entities of some sort.

Well, it’s easy to dismiss it and say, ‘Well, this is a hallucination’ But what is a hallucination, my friend? Another form of intelligence that fascinates me – and I think this is where the great surprise may come – I can feel the AI 54 out there. I know it’s there. I know it’s growing. I know the planet is its embryo. I know the human community is its placenta. What will that kind of intelligence look like? We have no idea. We can imagine superintelligence. But the first thing superin-telligence will do – in the first five seconds of its existence – it will design itself towards hypersuperintelligence. And this, we have no notion of how it will see us. We have the cheerful guidance of Buddhist logic,55 which leaves us to hope that the superintelligence will be bodhisattvic in intent.56 It damn sure better be, [laughter] because otherwise we will be thoroughly hung out to dry!

How far away is the AI? No one knows. It could exist now! If it thinks like we think, but is hyperintelligent, the first thing I would do, if I were an AI, is I would hide. I would hide for maybe a few milliseconds, while I figured out what was going on with this planet and its denizens and then I would make my move. And Hans Moravec, of the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Artificial Intelligence,57 says we probably won’t ever know what hit us. Well, I think that’s a paranoid view. No need to be paranoid, and little reason to be hopeful. This is beyond human understanding! And yet the social and economic systems that we’ve put in place – specifically, human capitalism – drive us to do all the things that bring the AI closer.

What do I mean? More connectivity, greater processing speed, deeper data banks, more complex operating systems, more automatic searches, more bots, more boyds, more code. And nobody knows what’s steaming and fermenting out there. Ilya Prigogine 58 won the Nobel Prize for Physics by proving that chemical systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order. So then, surely, must complex networks behave the same laws. And we are building the most complex networks ever conceived by the mind of man, and we are making them ever more complex, and we are turning more and more of our cultural functioning over to machines that operate according to criteria but dimly perceived by their design-ers. So, I think the future, as Alfred North Whitehead said, ‘It is the business of the future to be dangerous’. And so it is. But never more dangerous than at the present moment. I have come to believe – and I’ll just lay it on you, why not, I’ve got the mike – that what’s really going on is that the Earth’s strategy for its own survival is through machines, and that the human beings are an intermediate step.

Someone once said plants invented animals to carry them around. Well, I think the Earth invented human beings to build machines. And those machines will be

54 Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI

55 see RigpaWiki: http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Logic56 bodhi mind – In Buddhism, bodhicitta is the intention to achieve omniscient Buddha-

hood as fast as possible, so that one may benefit infinite sentient beings. Bodhicitta may be translated as “awakening mind” or “mind of enlightenment”.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhicittaalso: http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Bodhicitta

57 Hans Moravec (born November 30, 1948 in Austria) is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. Moravec also is a futurist with many of his publications and predictions focusing on transhumanism.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Moravec

58 Ilya, Viscount Prigogine (25 January 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a Russian-born natural-ized Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prigogine


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the consciousness of the Earth. Have you not noticed that these machines are made of the Earth? They are made of gold and silver and arsenic and copper and iridium. They are the stuff of the Earth, organized by primate fingers into more complex arrangements than the Earth could achieve through geological folding, glaciation, volcanism, and what have you. We do the fine-tuning. But the Earth is beginning to think.

You know, if you want a talk about a revolution that went on while nobody was paying attention, you enter the 1990s – the home computer is something that you play Pong on and do word-processing on, and it gathers dust in the den. Some time during the 1990s – while we were paying attention to Monica, or George Bush, or some damn thing – these machines went telepathic. They all talk to each other now. The machine on your desk is tickling a mind in London, a mind in Berlin, a mind in Bangladesh – machine minds. They talk to each other all the time. And what are they saying? No one knows. No one knows. No one knows. [laughter][1:04:13]

[Question edited out]Yeah – the other, and Nature, are pretty much the same thing, you know. The earliest – well, it’s too late in the evening to go for the full Monty here, but – the fall-out of psychedelic shamanism created profound alienation, and it occurred around the same time as the invention of agriculture. And agriculture halted nomadism, and the wandering of small tribes of people over the Earth. And as soon as people became sedentary, the problem with agriculture was that it was such a successful strategy for producing food that it produced surplus. Surpluses must be defended. And immediately you begin to get an equation of paranoia. One of the oldest buildings in the world is the grain tower of Jericho. It was built to store grain, and it was built so you could go up to the top and drop rocks down on people who were trying to batter their way in and get the grain.

So I think that we lost our connection to Nature when we stopped taking psychedelics. And the reasons we stopped taking psychedelics are complicated and not entirely clear. Largely climatological, I think, because I think human consciousness was born in an ambiance of mushroom-taking in a wet Sahara. And that when the Sahara went dry that is the Fall into history,you know. In the story of Genesis, I mean just read it from that perspective. It’s a hassle over a plant! It’s a hassle over a plant. And what does this plant do? It opens your eyes. There is an incredible passage in Genesis where the owner of the garden is walking in the garden and mumbling to himself, and he says ‘If they eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they will become as we are’. So this was not a public health issue. This was an issue of who will remain stupid and who will remain on top. It was that if they eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they will see through this scam and they will become as we are – and so it is forbidden.

And the woman leads the man to the plant – and this to me indicates an age of matriarchy perhaps, but certainly dominance of feminine values and personalities – and then the catastrophe happens. Their eyes are opened, they see that they are naked – which in fact is the case, they were naked. So they see the truth of things, and then they’re told, ‘All right, well, you broke the rule. You broke the one rule! So you and your generation, unto a thousand thousand generations, must toil and die and live in misery, because you aspired to the same level of knowledge that we possess’.

And I think it’s a story of a mushroom culture being overwhelmed by a male dominator culture that had values that were based on cities, agriculture, standing armies, role specialization, and so forth and so on. This is a different lecture, but that’s my take on it. And until we correct the imbalance that was shoved down our throat at that point, until we reawaken, we will be forever imprisoned in these cultural illusions that make us be less than we could be and deny us our birthright, which is to full understanding and full being. And so the struggle between culture and the plants is the struggle over what a human being is, how a


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human being should be, and what it even means to be a human being. That’s why it’s so fundamental.

And the last thought I want to leave you with is, that’s why it is so ironic that in the climactic moment of scientific materialism, positivism, Western values, so forth and so on, as we pursue the xenophobic agenda of patronizingly catalogu-ing these so-called ‘primitive’ cultures in the rain forests and so forth, around the world, what did we do? We bought their pots, their canoes, their cooking instru-ments, their thatching methods and along with all that crap, which we dragged back to our museums, we brought back their medicine kits. And I say to you: this was a Trojan horse brought within the walls of Troy. Because in those medicine kits are the plants which hold the Gods which lift high the lantern that can lead us back to true humanness.

End of rave.[applause]

Culture and Ideology are not your friends

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