Terence McKenna Was a Futuristic Genius

[Music] well novelty theory is something I've been working on since the early 70s uh 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 uh leading to some pretty easily stated conclusions uh one is that novelty which is my term for complexity or 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 asked 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 level s 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 and faster and this was a revelation to me because it allowed me philosophically to context ual the human world and to understand that human Technologies languages migrations art movements ideologies are not something different from nature they're the same uh 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 complexifying faster and faster a 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 a global internet a human population of several billions an electronic neosphere uh that we are now within the shadow of this transcendental object at the end of time our religion sense it 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 uh have built elaborate mathematically defined theories around this idea and then have found to my astonishment incredible congruences with uh other work I'm thinking of the Mayan calendar and its uh Curious countdown like quality toward an extremely unique event that the Maya felt would occur in the same time frame that my own equations predicted

even though at the time I was unaware of the Maya so what we have here is a a new model of time based on a very real intuition that I think most people share which is that time is speeding up that human beings are part of that process and that the culmination of that process is now within the the V of historical time in other words I I believe 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 100 years or 500 years later these are still spans of time that when compared to the life of the planet are 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 and 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 a species uh our Technologies our religions uh

our science has pushed us toward this for thousands of years without us Awakening to what the Dena would be now we stand close enough to it that I think all but the most lumpen 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 um such things as crystal oscillators things which keep time um clocks uh the the relationship of uh the Earth turning to the calendar the full moon all of the things which um are symptoms

of our Passage through time don't seem to be throwing themselves out of kilter so how H how what can you 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 10 seconds with 50,000 events crammed into it in other words uh uh 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 uh time moved very very slowly uh the character

of time as we approach the present is that there are more and more uh 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 uh dynamically balanced planetary ecosystems each one of those more complex phenomena crystallized out or emerged if you will from the previous uh uh 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 in 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 integrative 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 uh being likee and less thing like 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 sometime somehow as we approach the present we find ourselves in an Ever denser realm of activity inter relationship connected ity and the result of this is more of the same producing a shrinking Globe ever more immersive Technologies uh 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 plants were genetic changes changes in the genomes of plants and animals well biologists know

that for a fruit fly to add a 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 a new kind of possib ability was born it's called epigenetic change in other words change which is not about genes but which is about uh languages Customs behaviors of human beings epigenetic change reaches its dramatic culmination in speech writing uh 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 reef 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 your description of the process by which you develop the time wave theory I understand I read um U um true hallucination so I understand it took you some years to kind of work it all out yes 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 uh 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 centuries in

the future come together to create an interference pattern that creates the unique moment so that was uh one of the basic assumptions and then the structure on which this all was hung was uh the ich 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 iching well it's a very ancient uh method of divining and predicting the future based on the idea that every moment can be symbolized by a a unique idiogram

which is somehow uh uh its Essence much in the way that science believes you can explain all nature with 108 elements the ancient Chinese took the position that time itself was made of elements my style of thinking is scientific enough that uh 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 occult it seems unscientific uh why should an ancient Chinese book of divination hold any insight whatsoever for modern physics but The Uncanny thing

about the iching 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 uh 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 sense well then analyze the situation what is wind wind is a pressure variant phenomena that fluctuates over time uh 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 ebbing and flowing that made it well now let's change the metaphor a little bit instead of grains of sand let's think think of genes instead of a windstorm let's think of a billion years of evolution it moves the genes 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 ching 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 EB 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 th000 more than 20 less than 500 and when they finally got it worked out lo and behold 64 situations are all the possible potential

situations there are out of 64 subtypes 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 iching is is not a book of Chinese mysticism it's a book of uh molecular dynamics that sees through biology to the physics that allowed biology to come into existence and um I I'll argue this with anybody in the field regardless of how hardcore and empiricist they claim themselves to be because uh I think uh The Coincidence between the structure of the iching and

the structure of the DNA is staggering it's not a simple correspondence between 64 and 64 all the processes that occur in DNA can be easily modeled uh with the six line hexagrams that make up uh the iching it's almost as though Western science was fascinated by energy for 5,000 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 aside

the Eastern mind 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 pebbl 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 expressed through our ability to

trigger fusion and fish 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 uh 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 uh stuff about the stranger tractor at the end of History 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 go huh well you know in the 19th century if you spoke of nature having a purpose uh you were thought to

be anti-evolution because in the 19th century there was great pain to eliminate anything like preformation orology 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 uh 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 or moment in terms of shaping this moment the answer would be the moment just before this moment because it handson 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 uh 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 its 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 uh 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 uh have always doubted that evolutionary theory without purpose without teolog could produce as complex a world as we see around us in as short a Time 5 billion years as the life of the earth it seemed more as though these processes were not just wandering across an flat epigene flat genetic landscape

they were the 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 its forward Direction was uh 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 hyperconnectivity that it would be perfect novelty and all nature aspires for this state of perfect novelty you could almost say that nature abhor habit and

so it seeks the novel by uh 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 coent and uh it gives the universe the feeling of being ued with a caring presence it makes it appear as though nature is tending toward something and that our 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 and 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 COS but if you take this other point of view that process is 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 uh 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 uh and uh

this process of moving toward complexification so it without invoking God or any sort of uh 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 uh 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 m to faic Universe to our children and when this process of complexification

reaches the Omega Point uh it it will it will fulfill I believe the expectations of all of these religions but it will fulfill it in a mature scientific and uh and uh Universal way that these religions all lack because they all reflect their parochial Origins it's certainly true it's certainly true that we see a limited slice of reality uh 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 Uh of markets what one of the things I'm always trying to visualize what the concrescent 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 system so forth and so on so we the animal body has reached the limits of its evolutionary abilities a cheetah can run 75 mes an hour an elephant can lift 3 tons and

so forth and so on to go beyond those capacities of the animal body you have to make a marriage with mechanical things so uh we are extending ourselves through the machines well one of the things that these machines do is their time compressors uh 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 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 uh and it's we're doing it by becoming information that is freed from material and somehow this allows us to make this

asent to the next dimensional modality information is not uh time and space constrained the way we are we talk about the difficulty of moving uh uh 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 tetres of it we do this every day so we see aha 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 stared at 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 and so these are major symmetry breaks but in every case the answer has been you bet and sooner or later somebody did it and then all succeeding Generations uh

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 animal that left the primordial ocean they simply were behaving EV blind Instinct and evolutionarily dictated behaviors but the degrees of freedom accessible to us are so uh multier that we can actually appreciate for the first time our circumstance and our circumstances 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 we're moving beyond matter I just can't imagine what you mean can you try to talk a little bit more about that well first of all I can't quite imagine what we mean either

I think this is the test is to to imagine what could that mean maybe the bridge uh concept is virtual reality obviously we're on the brink of building computer assisted worlds that don't quote unquote really exist but the 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 a non-physical realm of information through trance in a way there's nothing new here this is part part of the archaic revival well I well I feel like you know tasting the

sacred Earth will you still love me will you still Feed Me When I'm 64 um are we rolling uh I forgotten the thread what was it oh oh is it a human thing is it a unique is this Ascent into 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 are doing I think that we are as much corks tossed on the ocean of time as are hummingbirds and prairie dogs

in other words a 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 uh in human history after all human history is 10,000 years wide the planet

is 5 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 reach so far back in time that they drag life out of the Primitive oceans some of its shells of influence reach so far back in time that they Define the emergence of the homed 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 25,000 year transition zone before you enter the Zone you're an animal after you leave the Zone you're a God but but for 25,000 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 uh a friend of mine once said he said history is the shock wave which precedes the escaton and I absolutely believe that and I believe as historical processes in intensify it's reasonable to believe that we are ever closer to the escaton if my ideas seem strange to someone I ask them can you imagine this planet in 500 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 100 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 asmt itic uh unfoldment into a kind of cultural superspace and uh 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 further I'd like you to attempt to give me a definition of concrescence and escaton well let's go backward escaton first escaton is a good word out of theology it simply means the last thing the last thing is the escaton and it is everything become one thing uh for theologians it's God for somebody of a more materialist bent it might be something else but the escaton is the last thing eschatology

is the study of the time of the last thing now what was the other word concrescence concrescence this is a little trickier concept uh I took it from Alfred North Whitehead concrescence is the idea of something that grows together it conres 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 escaton or or hyper novelty I mean that the process of the human and and biological concrescence of intent reaches some kind of Maximum concrescence is the

end of the process of becoming becoming is not true being true being exists at the concrescence be uh the kind of being we experience become is a partial state of being much like history is a paral partial state of concrescence History definitely places us outside the world of biological intent uh the animal mind but history does not bring us into the presence of the escaton it's a partial process and concrescence is what Waits at the end the escaton is the concrescent but we really can't have any way of knowing what that is that experience of

that is going to be like No And the reason why is because asking that question is like asking a man looking East at 2 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 streak 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

um 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 um the relationship of those observations to uh the world of the physicist and their efforts to Define reality and why they're not using uh including in their models these aspects that you're pointing to the main

reason they aren't friendly to a model main physics phys well the the main reason physicists are not friendly to a progressive concrescent 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 chemist chemistry and you would have to give credit to human history as a stage higher than biology and physicist 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 uh life on this planet is 4.83 billion years old physicists just discount it they call it an EPA phenomenon well con then when you talk to uh 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 uh not saying that we need artificial divisions but that over the entire domain of known phenomena this uh 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 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 uh uh beginning with Freud's discovery of the unconscious and yung'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 permiss iess psychedelic drug taking uh Rave culture body piercing Jazz the list is endless what do all these things have in common they are reversions to AR to 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 re-empower archaic values as the century unfolded the understanding of what this re-empowering of archaic values might mean has changed Yung and Freud discovered the unconscious discovered that we are not all ladies and gentlemen but that there is a cannibal lurking within um 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 Arc the impulse toward the archaic and the

impulses of uh of modern science and modern medicine uh the key is the Psychedelic experience that's what makes the shaman a shaman that's what made the archaic in fact aric and so people like Freud and Yung and the surrealists and the dos 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 anticipatory experience of of this escaton 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 uh 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 um we have 14 years until this event measured on the calendar and uh you know a really common ordinary way to describe the times that we're living in is that they're very

very chaotic um filled with acts of unspeakable evil um and at the same time there's this sort of Buzz and thrust of optimism everything from a guy like Peter Schwarz talking about the long wave the big booming economy um breakr in in uh you know educational levels and qualities of life but it's definitely uh a dynamic where 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 uh Tendencies and uh forces here at the end it's only going to get weirder the level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction so uh I think 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 uh because eventually people

are going to say what the hell is going on it's just to nuts it's not enough to say it's nuts you have to explain why it's so nuts so between now and uh 2012 the next 14 years I look for the invention of artificial life the cloning of human beings uh possible contact with extraterrestrials possible human immortality and at the same time appalling acts of brutality genocide race baiting uh homophobia famine starvation because uh the systems which are in place to keep the world saying are in utterly inadequate to the forces that have been Unleashed

uh 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 uh 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 the notion that that would ever change was beyond conceiving uh so the good news is that as primates we're incredibly adaptable to change put us in a desert we survive put us in

the jungle we survive under Hitler we survive under Nixon we survive we can put up with about anything and it's a good thing because we're going to be tested to the limits uh uh the breakdown of anything and this is why the right wi is so alarmed because what they see going on is the breakdown of all tradition all order all sanctioned 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 uh the mushroom said to me once it said this

is what it's like when a spee IES prepares to depart for the Stars you don't depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions it's a fire in a mad house and that's what we have the fire in the Mad House 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 we are we happen to be the point species on a transformation

that will affect every living organism on this planet at its conclusion let's pause for a second um I see how with with uh um 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 plan planet now we're ready to take on the big picture so let's just talk about the the conclusions of the archaic mind what it reaches 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 um uh the goal of the archaic mind is to connect with communicate with and align itself to this greater Gan holism which is sometimes called nature the great spirit the realm of the ancestors but this is what the archaic uh mind understood and was comfortable with and in fact it is true our own uh decision to view the universe As Dead As inanimate as unintelligent allowed us permitted us to dissect it use it and uh and uh 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 ganic and the and the AR AIC is uh a survival Instinct at this point we must give uh 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 uh high temperature high energy resource extraction commodification uh 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 uh a morphogenetic intent and an unfolding reality that is larger than human understanding imagine large larer than human [Laughter] [Music] understanding so the whole entire Milky Way galaxy is a being well it's a kind of it's an organism yes and uh the the the Galaxy is a kind of an organism you can

think of it as a fractal resonance with a cell the galaxy has a nucleus a very dense material where very mysterious processes are 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 builds by fractal intent and that uh all organisms have a core and then a deploy IDs surround whether we're talking about the cell the solar system the Earth the Galaxy uh in the

process of the conservation of novelty uh 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 uh 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 uh background or foreground so everything organ izes itself fractally spiral 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 uh 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