Mathématicien et Scientifique holistique qui aborde des sujets philosophiques
Transcript de la dernière longue interview de Terence McKenna
while novelty theory is something I’ve been working on since the early seventies inspired by psychedelic plant experiences in the Amazon to attempt to look at time and really deconstruct it and attempt to understand what it is and this has been a wild intellectual ride leading to some pretty easily stated conclusions one is that novelty which is my term for complexity
Advanced organization novelty increases as we approach the present moment the universe you and I are living in is a far more novel and complicated place than the early universe was well some people would say well that’s just a consequence of the unfolding of developmental processes but this asks the question what are developmental processes:
why should the universe have a preference for order over disorder especially when we have something called the second law of thermodynamics which tells us exactly the opposite physicists believe the universe is running down ultimately into a state of disorder but what I see is everywhere the emergence of more and more complex forms languages organisms technologies always building on the previously achieved levels of complexity so that was one of my insights coming out of that insight was the further understanding that this process of complexification through time is not proceeding at a steady rate it actually follows a kind of asymptotic curve in other words it’s happening faster faster and this was a revelation to me because it allowed me philosophically to contextualize the human world and to understand that human technologies languages migrations art movements ideologies are not something different from nature they’re the same download of process that we see in the movement of continents the evolution of new species of animals except that these human novel emergent situations are happening much more quickly so I see the cosmos if you will as a kind of novelty producing engine a kind of machine which produces complexity in all realms physical chemical social whatever and then uses that achieved level of complexity as the platform for further complexity well
this explains our present circumstance it explains the rush toward all forms of
new technology and social organization in the new millennium but you don’t have
to be a rocket scientist to understand that if the universe is complexify inand
faster a epoch a time will come when this rate of complexification is
occurring so rapidly that it will become itself the overwhelming phenomena in the
world of three-dimensional space and time and I call this the Omega Point or
the transcendental object at the end of history and I believe it is not that far
off that with the emergence of global internet a human population of several
billions an electronic newest sphere that we are now within the shadow of
this transcendental object at the end of time our religion sense that’s what gives them their apocalyptic
intuitions and I think the ordinary man and woman in the street sense a kind of
built-in acceleration to time itself well rather than dismissing that or
treating it as a psychological perception or something unique to our
society I took it as a basic perception about physics and have built elaborate
mathematically defined theories around this idea and then have found to my
astonishment incredible congruences with other work I’m thinking of the Mayan
calendar and it’s curious countdown like quality toward an extremely unique event
that the Maya felt would occur in the same timeframe that my own equations
predicted even though at the time I was unaware of the Maya so what we have here
is a new model of time based on a very real intuition that I think most people
share which is the time is speeding up that human beings are part of that
process and that the culmination of that process is now within the the van of
historical time in other words I it will happen in 2012 in December coincident
with the same events that the Maya placed at the end of their calendar even
if I’m wrong even if it’s a hundred years or 500 years later these are still
spans of time that when compared to the life of the planet are fractions of a
percentage so whether you believe as I do that we can know the precise moment
of this transformation of the world of time or whether you believe it is simply
coming soon fast really doesn’t make that much difference we are all gathered here at
the end game of developmental processes on this planet we are about to become
unrecognizable to ourselves as species our technologies our religions our
science has pushed us toward this for thousands of years without us awakening
to what the day no ma would be now we stand close enough to it now I think all
but the most lump and among us must feel the tug of the transcendental and the
transformative I am very perplexed when you say that
time is speeding up as far as I can tell such things as crystal oscillators
things which keep time clocks the
relationship of the earth turning to the calendar the full moon all of the things
which are symptoms of our passage through time don’t seem to be throwing
themselves out of kilter so how can you
do you really mean about time speeding up well let me answer in the form of a
question which lasts longer a million years in which nothing happens or ten
seconds with fifty thousand events crammed into it in other words really time is only
experienced by the events which occur within it and I maintain that the early
universe had very little going on and consequently
time moved very very slowly the
character of time as we approach the present is that there are more and more
what physical domains and energetic domains in which change can occur for
example the early universe was a pure plasma a pure swarm of unassociated
electrons you didn’t even have atomic systems let alone chemistry molecular
chemistry life complex speciated life
and dynamically balanced planetary ecosystems each one of those more
complex phenomena crystallized out or emerged if you will from the previous
systems that had come into existence so when I say time is speeding up what I
mean really is that more and more is happening more and more is happening and
if you ask the question well what would be the ultimate state of connectivity or
of happening it’s when all points are connected to all other points somehow
this concept of connectivity is intimately linked to the concept of complexity and so really what I’m saying
is that the universe is getting its act together it’s connecting the dots it’s
bringing everything into Co relationship with everything else and somehow it does
this through the production of consciousness consciousness is this
integrate a function in biology which takes data which may appear profoundly
unrelated and in fact brings it into some kind of a congruent relationship we
say an organism coordinates a point of view well in a way what’s happening over
time is that the universe is coordinating a point of view and as it
does this it becomes somehow more aware more self-conscious more being like and
less thing and as I said this process is not proceeding at a steady pace it’s
proceeding faster and faster more connectivity occurs now in a calendar
year than occurred in a million years a billion years ago so some time somehow
as we approach the present we find ourselves in an ever denser realm of
activity interrelationship connectivity and the result of this is more of the
same producing a shrinking globe ever more immersive technologies dissolution
of political social gender and class boundaries of all sorts so that’s what I
mean when I say the universe is speeding up you know before the advent of of man
of human beings the fastest changes on this planet of any consequence were
genetic changes changes in the genomes of plants and animals well biologists know that for a fruit
fly to add spur to its leg for a bird to
change its plumage you need hundreds of thousands sometimes millions of years of
evolutionary time with the advent of human beings using spoken language a new
kind of possibility was born it’s called epigenetic change in other
words change which is not about genes but which is about languages customs
behaviors of human beings epigenetic change reaches its dramatic culmination
in speech writing and communication of
all sorts and so the carriers of epigenetic change the human beings are
automatically then the carriers of accelerated novelty and so when you look
at let’s say evolution on a coral and you compare it let’s say to the
evolution of political ideas in modern Europe obviously modern Europe’s rate of
change in this domain is thousands of times faster so by moving from the
genetic to the epigenetic realm we have vastly accelerated all kinds of
processes now we appear to be about to move from the strictly human domain to the
human-machine symbiosis domain and of
course machines process information make connections and do their work at a rate
thousands of times faster than any human being can work so we see again a
progressive acceleration of the process of creating and maintaining varieties of
connectivity and that’s what I mean by time is speeding up yes in the Amazon
all was chaos and mythic revelation but
I knew that you couldn’t bring that back as a scientific theory and my bias has
always been toward science and out of these many intuitions and revelations I
discerned a thread which was about time it began with a conversation with this
logos entity where it said to me did you know every day is composed of four other
days and I said no I not only didn’t know that it’s never occurred to me what
a bizarre idea well so this I this idea then of a time being a resonance created
by other times not immediately before or after it as in scientific causality but
somehow a day centuries ago saying trees in the future come together to create an interference pattern that
creates the unique moment so that was one of the basic assumptions and then
the structure on which this all was hung was the Ching which may seem exotic to
American and European audiences but which is of course as familiar to anyone
in Chinese society as the Declaration of Independence is to us and what is the e
Ching well it’s a very ancient method of
divining and predicting the future based on the idea that every moment can be
symbolized by a unique IDIA gram which is somehow its essence much in the way
that science believes you can explain all nature with a hundred and eight elements
the ancient Chinese took the position that time itself was made of elements my
style of thinking is scientific enough that if I were to say to somebody I
propose a revolution in physics based on what I know about an ancient Chinese
divinatory system that would seem foolish to me it seems a cult
it seems unscientific why should an ancient Chinese book of divination hold
any insight whatsoever for modern physics but the uncanny thing about the
e Ching is that it seems to work even in the hands of its critics it seems to
work so let me try out a metaphor on you which I think makes much more clear
what’s going on here visualize for a moment sand dunes and notice when you
look at these sand dunes in your mind that they look like wind sand dunes look
like wind in some sand well then analyzed the situation what is
wind wind is a pressure variant
phenomena that fluctuates over time in a
way the sand grains moved about by the wind are like a lower dimensional slice
of the wind itself and from photographic
analysis of dunes you can calculate the speed and duration of the wind that made
them so the dune is a lower dimensional slice of time of the wind ABing and
flowing that made it well now let’s change the metaphor a little bit instead of grains of sand let’s think of jeans
instead of a windstorm let’s think of a billion years of evolution it moves the
jeans around in a pattern which is a lower dimensional slice of the force
which created the situation in other words on every living organism there is
the imprint of the higher dimensional force which made it now somebody could
say well that’s God well but in a scientific context we don’t speak like that but whatever it is that made blind
matter into whales squirrels and human beings it left its calling card inside
each human being each squirrel each whale that’s the DNA well the DNA codons
are based on a system of 64 exactly like the chain so my belief is that someone
some group of people thousands of years ago looked into human organism looked by
meditative techniques into the center of their own beings and they were not
mystics nor were they empiricists they were simply curious but at the center of the meditative
experience they saw an ebb and flow an energy field that was in a constant
state of flux and they asked themselves how many elements are necessary to
describe this energy field and the answer was more than 10 less than a
thousand more than 20 less than 500 and when they finally got it worked out lo
and behold sixty-four situations are all
the possible potential situations there are out of 64 sub types of time you can
create everything from the coronation of Queen Mary to the resignation of Madonna
out of 64 types of time so really what
the e Ching is is not a book of Chinese mysticism it’s a book of molecular
dynamics that sees through biology to the physics that allowed biology to come
into existence and I argue this with anybody in the field regardless of how
hardcore and empiricist they claim themselves to be because I think the
coincidence between the structure of the e Ching and the structure of the DNA is
staggering it’s not a simple corresponds between 64 and 64 all the processes that
occur in DNA can be easily modeled with the six line hexagrams that make up the
e Ching it’s almost as though Western science was fascinated by energy for
five thousand years we pursued understanding energy and this process
ends with thermal nuclear explosions in the deserts of the American Southwest we
can light the fire that burns in the heart of the distant stars we know how
to do that that’s what the Western mind achieved political issues assigned the
Eastern I was not interested in energy it was interested in time and they spent 5,000
years deconstructing it looking at it and you don’t use atom smashers you
don’t use enormous physical pressure it’s a different problem and you bring
different tools to bear you meditate you look inside yourself you study the
movement of water around pebbles you consider the situation you study history
in any case the bottom line is the people who pursued this understanding of
time achieved as sophisticated a relationship to time as the Western
relationship to matter Express through our ability to trigger fusion and
fission so there’s a great deal for us to learn in the West from these oriental
efforts to understand time and it is not necessarily mystical what I did was
entirely mathematical it’s not transparent to a person who has not
studied mathematics but to a professional mathematician it’s utterly trivial there’s nothing occult about it
and I I think true understanding can be communicated and formally described with
mathematics and that’s what we have here we’re on the brink of a fusion of Western science with quote unquote
Eastern mysticism nothing mystical about it except that we call it mysticism but
the fusion of these two viewpoints is going to give us a complete understanding of the universe of space
time matter and energy I want to go to this stuff about the strange attractor
at the end of history we’ll never ever you know considered that notion that we
are being pulled as opposed to simply just going on forever and ever and
that’s for sure something that people are going to well you know in the 19th century if you
spoke of nature having a purpose you were thought to be anti-evolution
because in the 19th century there was great pain to eliminate anything like
preformation or teleology or purpose or God all these things that were they were
trying to eliminate from evolutionary theory and until very recently in
scientific thought the idea has been that events are pushed by the causal
necessity embedded in the events which preceded them in other words if you ask the question what is the most important
event in terms of moment in terms of shaping this moment the answer would be
the moment just before this moment because it hands on the the energy the
space the time recently mathematicians have evolved what they call the notion
of attractors or strange attractors in some cases and these are processes where
a dynamic is not pushed by causal necessity from behind but it’s pulled by
a point in the future you could almost say for example if you release a ball
bearing up near the rim of a bowl that it’s attractor is the bottom of the bowl
and the ball bearing will roll down to the bottom then halfway up the side then up the side in shorter and shorter
cycles until it finally comes to rest in the exact bottom of the bowl well from
the point of view of the new mathematics the bottom of the bowl is a basin of
attraction and the ball bearing has fallen under its influence so I have
always doubted that evolutionary theory
without purpose without teleology could produce as complex a world as we see
around us in a short time five billion years as life of the earth it seemed more as
though these processes we’re not just wandering across a flat epigenetic
landscape they were the process of biological evolution was actually being
channeled between high walls in other words it could move it had some motion
this way some this but it’s forward direction was inevitable and this is the
idea of an attractor that what the universe is doing is it is under the
sway of what I call the transcendental object at the end of time and that is
this domain of hyper connectivity that it would be perfect novelty and all
nature aspires for this state of perfect
novelty you could almost say that nature abhors habit and so it seeks the novel
by producing various kinds of phenomena at every level in biology chemistry and
society and so there really is a purpose to the universe its purpose is this
state of hyper complexification in which all of its points become related to each
other become what mathematicians call cotangent and it gives the universe the
feeling of being imbued with a caring presence it makes it appear as though
nature is tending toward something and that are and it changes our own ethical
and moral position in the universe because you know science tells us that we’re the products of a cosmic accident
we’re at the edge of an ordinary galaxy in an ordinary star system and we’re
damn lucky to be here and that’s it that’s our place a very existential
notion of our place in the cosmos but if you take this other point of view
that processes under the influence of an attractor and that the value the
attractor is maximizing is novelty then suddenly for the first time in 500 years
human beings are moved back to the center of the stage because we are the
most novel thing on this planet we are everything biology is Plus technology
language politics philosophy art so forth and so on so suddenly human beings
become important not mere cosmic witnesses to a meaningless cosmos but
the cutting edge of a cosmos that glories in order and is moving toward
higher states of order and at the present moment we are the carriers once
it was the volcanic processes that shaped this planet once it was the life
of the early oceans once it was the great dinosaurs but today humanity
represents the cutting edge of complexity and and this process of
moving toward complexification so it without invoking god or any sort of myth
you give meaning to human life what is man’s purpose to advance and preserve
novelty you know this is an ethical position it means you don’t replace rainforests with pastures you don’t
censor books you don’t lean on people who make gender choices different from
yours no the purpose of of being a human is to complexify reality even more to
hand on a more diverse more complicated more multifaceted and when this process
of complexification reaches the omega point it will it will fulfill I believe
the expectations of all of these religions but it will fulfill in a mature scientific and and universal
way that these religions all lack because they all reflect their parochial
origins it’s certainly true that we see
a limited slice of reality and your
example from flatland yes anything which moves as a gradient through time we will
not discern very carefully I mean for instance this is why we have the science of economics because it keeps track of
the behavior of markets which is something you can’t see or feel but
which has become very important to human institutions it’s a fourth-dimensional factor that we
need to coordinate into our planning so we’ve created an entire science to study
the movement and behavior of markets what one of the things I’m always trying
to visualize what the contents would be like even though I know that in
principle it’s probably not possible to imagine it but several factors are on
the horizon which I think can be brought together to sort of get a picture of what we’re headed toward one is our for
some time now we’ve been involved in building complex prosthesis which we
call machines and computers they are part of us we don’t perceive them as
part of us because we identify with the flesh and exteriorize the the fabricated
metal but in fact they are a part of us as much as our political systems our
agriculture production systems so forth and so on so we the animal body has
reached the limits of its evolutionary abilities that cheetah can run 75 miles
an hour an elephant can lift three tons and so forth and so on to go beyond
those capacities of the animal body you have to make a marriage with McKay
Nicoll things so we are extending ourselves through the machines well one
of the things that these machines do is their time compressors you know you and
I sitting here talking or operating at about 100 Hertz if we could be magically
downloaded into a top-of-the-line computer we would run at 800 megahertz
that means we could do 800 million more things in this moment than we can do
when we’re wearing flesh so it may be that we will find a way to
technologically stretch time and this will become for us like a false eternity
you may have only 10 minutes left in your life but it may be time enough to
pack in all of human history from the fall of Rome to the present moment so we
are finding ways out of the three-dimensional Newtonian prison which
says you know life is narrow and confined and ends at the grave and it’s
we’re doing it by becoming information that is freed from material and somehow
this allows us to make this ascent to the next dimensional modality
information is not time and space constrained the way we are we talk about
the difficulty of moving an object at the speed of light our entire planetary
technology cannot achieve moving a marble at the speed of light but we can
move information at the speed of light Tetra bites of it we do this every day
so we see how we stand then like children at the edge of the ocean of
information and we’re putting our feet in and wondering you know could we swim in that what would it be like to be wet
in that what would it be like to go into that new medium a similar dilemma must
have confronted the early amphibians as they stare the land and said you know could we
leave the ocean could we go up into those places could we breathe air and
actually make the transition to such a hostile and alienating environment as
the land and so these are major cemetery breaks but in every case the answer has
been you bet and sooner or later somebody did it and then all succeeding generations have followed suit what is
fascinating about this particular transition is that we are conscious of
the implications we who will make the transition will in some sense some
limited sense understand its implications where I don’t think that was true for the animals that left the
primordial ocean they’d simply were behaving of a blind instinct and
evolutionarily dictated behaviors but the degrees of freedom accessible to us
are so multifarious that we can actually
appreciate for the first time our circumstance and our circumstance is all
inspiring I mean we are about to take the step out of matter the planet is on
a collision course with the most profound event it’s possible to imagine the freeing of organic life from the
chrysalis of matter for a billion years there’s been life on this planet but
never life that could step outside of matter but this is obviously what’s in
the cards and we are privileged to be central to that event you just said I
just can’t imagine well first of all I
can’t quite imagine what we mean either I think this is the test is to want to imagine what could that mean
maybe the bridge concept is virtual
reality obviously we’re on the brink of building computer assisted worlds that
don’t quote-unquote really exist but which we will experience the way we
experience dreams or the imagination and I think this is where psychedelic
substances come in shamans have always entered into a non-physical
realm of information through trance in a way there’s nothing new here this is
part of the archaic revival will you
still love me will you still feed me when I’m sixty-four are we rolling I
forgotten the thread what was it oh is it a human thing is it a unique is this
a scent into novelty a human thing no part of what I discern here though we
humans are always ready to suffer guilt and take blame for everything going on
in the universe I don’t believe this is something we’re doing I think that we
are as much quarks tossed on the ocean of time as our
hummingbirds and prairie dogs in other words any an event of cosmic
significance and importance is going to occur not far in the future are we
causing it no can we stop it no can we
hurry it no it’s built in to the structure of matter itself one way of
thinking of this is that the laws of physics are evolving to permit greater
freedom and we are and people have said to me well don’t you find it a little
strange that such a momentous event would occur in human history after all
human history is 10,000 years wide the planet is five billion years old pretty unusual
coincidence that human history would be happening when this cosmic event happens
no that’s completely wrong human history is being caused by the nearby presence
of this event in other words if you think of the event as something which has shells of influence some of its
shells of influence reached so far back in time that they dragged life out of the primitive oceans some of its shells
of influence reached so far back in time that they define the emergence of the
hominid line out of the higher primates some shells reach back to Egypt some to
medieval time as you approach the present it becomes stronger and stronger but I would argue that the presence of
human civilization on this planet is the strongest evidence we have that matter
and organizational processes are about to make some kind of a leap to a new
order of being what what history is is the twenty five thousand year transition
zone before you enter the zone you’re an animal after you leave the zone you’re a
god but for twenty five thousand years you’re kind of an animal and kind of a
god and you’re constantly being swamped by your animal nature and then great
teachers are appearing and dragging people back to the right line and we are
schizophrenic in history a friend of mine once said he said history is the
shockwave which precedes the eschaton and I absolutely believe that and I
believe as historical processes intensify it’s reasonable to believe that we are ever closer to the eschaton
if my ideas seem strange to someone I ask them can you imagine this planet in
five hundred years given the propagation of ordinary historical and scientific
rates of unfoldment and discovery can you imagine this planet in a
thousand years no no one can imagine that because processes are now in play
which so totally rewrite the script that no one can imagine a hundred years or
200 years in the future because the discoveries which will be made in that span of time will so totally rewrite the
human experience of itself and the environment that we cannot see deep into
the future and this indicates to me that the future is exploding in an asymptotic
unfoldment into a kind of cultural super space and and our own bafflement at the
impossibility of conceiving any real future given the political and social
and technological forces in play is proof of that before we go farther
I’d like you to attempt to give me a definition of Crescent and eschaton well
let’s go backward eschaton first eschaton is a good word out of theology it simply means the last thing the last
thing is the eschaton and it is everything become one thing for
theologians it’s God for somebody of a more materialist bent it might be
something else but the eschaton is the last thing eschatology is the study of
the time of the last thing now what was the other word conk rest since this is a
little trickier concept I took it from Alfred North Whitehead conk recen s— is
the idea of something that grows together it can crest PSA’s it becomes
more dense more connected more defined in space and time and when i talk about
the transcendental object at the end of time or the coming of the eschaton or
hyper novelty i mean that the process of the human
and and biological concrescence of intent reaches some kind of maximum con
crescents is the end of the process of becoming becoming is not true being true
being exists at the concrescence be the
kind of being we experience becoming is a partial state of being much like
history is a partial partial state of compress ins history definitely places
us outside the world of biological intent the animal mind but history does
not bring us into the presence of the eschaton it’s a partial process and
concrescence is what waits at the end the eschaton is the contents but we
really can’t have any way of knowing what that that experience no and the
reason why is because asking that question is like asking a man looking
east at 2:00 a.m. to describe the coming sunrise it he can’t because it is
literally over the event horizon of the future and when we look into the future
we see that the East is streaked with rosy dawn but we cannot conceive of the
day that is about to come all we can see is the dim glow of some kind of
eschatological promise ask me this question in 2010 and I’ll have a
different answer back to this issue of
physics and your description of the two things which are left out of their models the way that you describe it is
so self-evident and simple the complexification the further away that you get from the Big Bang
and the fact that everything is the complexification is speeding up would you talk just a little bit about the
relationship of those observations to the world of the physicist and their
efforts to define reality and why they’re not using including in their
models these aspects that you’re pointing to the main reason they aren’t friendly toward a model well the main
reason physicists are not friendly to a progressive concrescence model like this
is because you would have to look at you would have to give credit to biology for
being a stage higher than chemistry and you would have to give credit to human
history as a stage higher than biology and physicists study physics if you
study physics there is no biology you don’t have to deal with issues of
biology when you study physics I mean there is something called biophysics but it’s not well received in physics or
biology so physicists are tend to discount biology even though life on
this planet is four point eight three billion years old physicists just
discounted they call it an epiphenomena welcome then when you talk to
[Music] sociologists they want they give no credit to physics science has
compartmentalized nature in order to analyze it and there is no theory of
nature as such and that’s really what I’m offering I’m offering a theory which
covers physics chemistry geology biology sociology linguistics the the whole
thing in other words not saying man is some special category not saying that we
need artificial divisions but that over the entire domain of known phenomena this tendency to
complexify through time a and B faster and faster can be discerned we need a
theory of everything physics talks about theories of everything but none of these theories of
everything address biology let alone sociology linguistics and you know the
phenomenon of human beings well the archaic revival there is a way
of looking at the entire 20th century beginning with Pablo Picasso bringing
masks back from Africa and showing them around in French cafes in 1915 beginning
with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and Jung’s elaboration of
those discoveries and then every phenomenon of major importance that you
care to mention in the 20th century fascism Abstract Expressionism rock and
roll sexual permissiveness psychedelic drug taking rave culture pit body
piercing jazz the list is endless what do all these things have in common they
are reversions - art - archaic behaviors they are represent rejections of the
Edwardian gentleman with his white man’s burden and represent instead a
realization that for us to survive and live with ourselves we have to really
accentuate unfolded the understanding of what this reeling of archaic values
might mean has changed Jung and Freud discovered the unconscious discovered
that we are not all ladies and gentlemen but that there is a cannibal lurking within Albert Hoffman’s discovery of LSD
demonstrated that that inner wilderness is accessible to most people through
chemistry well then still later it was understood that the the key ingredient
in active shamanism is psychedelic plants psychedelic experiences and in a
way that closed the loop between our K the impulse toward the archaic and the
impulses of of modern science and modern medicine the key is the psychedelic
experience that’s what makes the shaman a shaman that’s what made the archaic in
fact archaic and so people like Freud and Jung and the Surrealists and the
Dadaists and the Abstract Expressionists all of these people were very close to
the mark the shaman is the paradigmatic figure and the psychedelic experience
seems to be the anticipate or experience of this eschaton that we’re headed
toward you know when psychedelics were first being discussed it was thought that they would prepare people for death
in a sense they probably do but in the same way that they prepare people for
death they prepare people for transformation it gets you used to the
idea that the world is not what it appears to be and it gets you used to
the idea that the world is somehow animate intelligent and proceeding along its own
agenda so in a way shamans have always been anticipations of some future state
of mankind they’re the masters of language they are the ones who are
telepathic with the animals they are the ones who can see into the future
so this archaic nostalgia gets real focus once you realize that it is the
shaman and his or her shamanic techniques that confers on them the
extra historical dimension that that is how you get out of linear history that’s
how you visit the realm of the ancestors that’s how you
travel into the future that’s how you break up the tyranny of Newtonian serial
time we have 14 years until this event measured on the calendar and you know a
really common ordinary way to describe the times that we’re living in is that they’re very very chaotic filled with
acts of unspeakable evil and at the same time there’s this sort of buzz and
thrust of optimism everything from a guy like Peter Schwartz talking about the
long wave the booming economy breakthroughs and you know educational
levels and qualities of life but it’s definitely dynamically you’ve got
extremes of good and evil in that way would you talk a little bit about the
relationship between that dynamic as we go forward and the novelty continues to
climax well novelty is not necessarily good or
nice novelty is complex that’s what it is and so I see really a concatenation
of tendencies and forces here at the end
it’s only going to get weirder the level of contradiction is going to rise
excruciating ly even beyond the excruciatingly present levels of
contradiction so I think it’s just going
to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk
about how weird it is and at that point novelty Theory can come out of the woods
because eventually people are going to say what the hell is going on it’s just
too nuts it’s not enough to say it’s nuts you have to explain why
so nuts so between now and 2012 the next 14 years I look for the invention of
artificial life the cloning of human beings possible contact with
extraterrestrials possible human immortality and at the same time appalling acts of brutality genocide
race bathing homophobia famine starvation because these systems which
are in place to keep the world saying are in utterly inadequate to the forces
that have been unleashed the collapse of the socialist world the rise of the
Internet these are changes so immense nobody could imagine them ever happening
and now that they have happened nobody even bothers to mention what a big deal
it is the fact that there is no such thing as the Soviet Union people never
talk about it anymore but when I was a kid the notion that that would ever change was beyond
conceiving so the good news is that as primates we’re incredibly adaptable to
change put us in a desert we survived put us in the jungle we survived under
Hitler we survived under Nixon we survived we can put up with about
anything and it’s a good thing because we’re going to be tested to the limits
the breakdown of anything and this is why the right wing is so alarmed because
what they see going on is the breakdown of all tradition all order all sanction
norms of behavior and they’re quite right that it’s happening but they’re
quite wrong to conclude that it should be resisted or is somehow evil the
mushrooms said to me once it said this is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars
you don’t depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions it’s a fire
in a a house and that’s what we have the fire in the madhouse at the end of time this
is what it’s like when a species prepares to move on to the next
dimension the entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this we are
not acting for ourselves or from ourselves we are we happen to be the
point species on a transformation that will affect every living organism on
this planet at its conclusion I see how
with Jenkins calling it galactic cosmology it’s like our home continues
to expand we’ve gone from the village to the nation-state to the planet now we’re
ready to take on the big picture so let’s just talk about the conclusions okay well the great watershed difference
between the archaic understanding and what is called scientific materialism is
the archaic mind understood in fact perceived that nature
is conscious nature is alive nature is an organism full of intent the goal of
the archaic mind is to connect with communicate with and align itself to
this greater gyein holism which is sometimes called nature the Great Spirit
the realm of the ancestors but this is what the archaic mind understood and was
comfortable with and in fact it is true our own decision to view the universe as
dead as inanimate as unintelligent allowed us permitted us to dissect it
use it and and deny its validity outside
of human purpose now the consequences of living like that is coming back to haunt
us you know we have almost destroyed our home we have almost cut the earth from beneath our own feet
so this impulse toward the guy Lamech and the and the archaic is a survival
instinct at this point we must give
reverence and credence to nature and nature’s methods because no other methods will allow us to work our way
out of the present mess we’re in high-temperature high energy resource
extraction commodification mega agriculture we’re at the end of the rope
for these things so the archaic holds answers but it only holds answers if we
are willing to think of the universe as a living intelligent entity in with
which we are in partnership not set against but that in fact we are a part
of a Morpho genetic intent and an unfolding reality that is larger than
human understanding imagine larger than human understanding
[Laughter] [Music]
so the whole entire Milky Way galaxy is a being well it’s a kind of it’s an
organism yes and the the galaxy is a kind of an organism you can think of it
as a fractal resonance with the cell the galaxy has a nucleus of very dense
material where very mysterious processes you’re going on then it has a
cytoplasmic envelope of stars and gas clouds that surround that core and then
it is an individual very distinctly defined by the vast emptiness that lies
between it and the next galaxy yes I think nature bills by fractal intent and
that all organisms have core and then a deployed surround whether we’re talking
about the cell the solar system the earth the galaxy in
the process of the conservation of novelty structures are created with
cores that are more complex than their outlying neighborhoods to my mind a
galaxy hanging in space is a picture of the time wave every star is a data point
in an enormous computer simulation of the novelty wave that’s why it has that
spiral structure you know scientists are very puzzled that the galaxies don’t fly
apart they don’t seem to have enough mass that their gravitation should hold them together and there’s been a lot of
talk about dark matter or some missing factor well the missing factor is
novelty the galaxy stays together because the galaxy wants to be a galaxy
in other words it it wants to hold on to the level of novel morphology that it
has achieved it has an actual appetite for expressing itself in that form
that’s why the galaxies are spirals and in a sense those spirals are very large
pictures of the time wave where we can at last see it not confused with its
background or foreground so everything organizes itself fractally spirally with
a dense center in its spatial domain and a dense Center in its temporal domain we
are like this galaxies are like this planets stars bird flocks coral reefs
but in the case of the galaxy it’s particularly easy to observe the structure because the thing is so huge
that its forces dominate and damp out other forces which might distort it
you