00:05

Davis

Hey, welcome. Yeah, that was a very interesting decision on my part, because I had been coming to Burning Man more or less regularly since 1994. And even though I’m a writer, and I did write about the festival in 1995—I wrote the first kind of national article for The Village Voice that really kind of introduced the festival to a larger world outside of the super underground—I’d always resisted otherwise talking or writing or getting involved in that whole world. I came out here to kind of lose myself. And so that was a real pivotal year, because there weren’t really spaces like this for many, many, many years. There were small classes that people would give in their camps, but the idea of really having a lecture space was really significant, you know? And a lot of things in Burning Man evolve over time, and new forms emerge, new needs emerge that are responded to with new technologies, new approaches. And it’s constantly evolving, and in some ways devolving. It’s sort of both are going on at the same time.

And so for me, the introduction of these kind of spaces was both an evolution and a devolution. It was a devolution because this is a space of reflection, of analysis, of discussion, of talking. In a way, it’s a step away from the pure chaos we also seek here. Of course, we can have them both, but it also represents the maturing of the community, the recognition that we’re not just a little bubble, a pure taz out here in the middle of nowhere, but that we’re involved in a larger culture, there are very pressing issues, and it’s a great opportunity to come together and connect and talk.

What I’m going to talk about today is something I call the post-human self, and I’ll get to it later in terms of exactly what I mean by that somewhat odd phrase. But I wanted to start off talking a little bit about visionary art, because that’s where we are, it’s something that I’ve been fascinated with for many years, and have written some about, and done a lot of studying about. And what I want to reflect on a little bit—I mean, you can see part of the attraction here, just even this afternoon and in this Entheon village, is not just to the reality of visionary art, but the fact that there are visionary artists. And inevitably, a certain kind of heroism comes into our feelings about the great visionary artists. Because while we all have a visionary artist inside of us, and many of us pursue that artist in our own creative light, it’s a much smaller group that can speak to many, many, many people in a very strong way. There’s still something distinct and different about a strong artist.

And so what is this appeal? Why are we attracted by this image of the visionary artist? And what I would offer to you is that the visionary artist represents a very beautiful and interesting mixture of two different sides of what we’re about. And one of those sides is a kind of… not quite nostalgia, but a deep intuition that there are ways of knowing and being that lie outside of the modern world that we grew up with—whether we think about it as a return of tribal reality, of a shamanic reality, of a kind of ecstatic religion of nature. There’s a lot of different ways we have our own stories about what this longing is. And in many ways the visionary artist is a great example of a shaman, in the sense that not only do they participate in and experience these worlds of vision that have been produced by holy men and seers and shamans throughout human history, but they bring it back to us in a very obvious, formal way. It’s right there to see. You can see it. It’s an object in the community. It becomes an object of communication, a way that we understand one another. Because that’s the thing, you know: sometimes people forget the shaman doesn’t just go into the worlds just because you arrive there and speak to entities and get messages and see the way the deeper levels of the mind work. That’s not shamanism. Shamanism is what happens when you come back into the community. But we don’t have a coherent, homogenous tribal community. We have a modern—or arguably, postmodern—community.

You can say: yes, we’re a tribe—we, here, at Burning Man—but not really. I mean, not if we’re really going to honor what a tribe is. Because a tribe is a very, very homogenous unit. And what we have here is a chaotic symphony of subcultures. And while there’s a shared resonance, and it makes sense to describe that as a tribe in some ways, in other ways we lose something. And part of what I’m kind of talking about here is that the other side of the equation—not so much the shamanism, the religion of nature, the return to tribalism, the return to some idea of a purely integrated self or purely integrated society—but instead the way in which we are still part of the modern world, and still part of, or the postmodern world, of the technological, western, hyperdeveloped juggernaut that’s flowing towards the future.

And so that’s one of the things that’s great about visionary artists. You see this too, because we don’t think of the visionary artists as a religious figure. They don’t paint icons, you know, like, you go into Byzantine churches and there’s all these icons. I mean, remarkable works of art, but all the artists there don’t think of themselves as artists. They are following, in some ways, very, very prescribed rules about what image-making is. And these are images that are designed not simply to represent or symbolize spiritual reality, but to actually generate it, to channel it. So that, by going and communing with an icon, you actually—it works as a portal, the way that many of these paintings work as portals into other dimensions, into other levels of the self. So in some ways, the traditional Byzantine icon is a work of visionary art, but those artists are not thinking of themselves too much. Always, of course, there’s a little bit of ego involved, but they’re not thinking themselves as being primarily individual pursuers of their own individual vision.

But, of course, that’s what we see with visionary art. There is commonalities, there’s similar languages. But if it all looked the same, it would just be clichéd. In fact, we know clichéd visionary art, because you say, “Oh, okay, the mandala, the fractal. Got the fractal.” You know, you can do interesting stuff with it occasionally, but mostly it’s a dead language. Why? Because, like modern art in general, and like modern culture, we’re involved in a constant process of novelty generation, of innovation, and there’s a tremendous emphasis on the individual artist. So while we may recognize that the visionary artist in some ways reboots up the shamanic archetype, it also very much comes out of the strain of Western art.

There’s a 150-year-old tradition of bohemian avant-garde, drug-taking, wife-swapping maniacs who are trying with a kind of passion that in many ways is lost in the contemporary art world, but that we see in visionary art to just intensely manifest some specific vision often with tremendous religious and mystical implications. You know, we think of abstract modern art as maybe being a kind of alienating and cold and sort of away from the rich, juicy world that so much visionary art talks about, but almost all of the early abstractionists, the first ones who moved away from realistic imagery following Impressionism, started just drawing lines and dots and squiggles and explosions of color, were meditators, they were mystics, they were theosophists. So there’s a long-standing strain of a kind of modern spirituality that’s open-ended and probing and changing that goes into visionary art. And so a lot of what we see now is as much about our modern culture, our modern Western culture as it is about the return of some kind of shamanic reality. And of course it’s always changing. I just wanted, because it’s in here, I just wanted to point out this Oliver Vernon piece as a really, particularly one of the left there, as a really exemplary piece in a number of ways. One of the things that’s happening now in the art world, and then I’ll move on to my main topic, is the sort of injection of street culture and street imagery and graffiti art into more and more mainstream art context. So we’re talking about how to get visionary content into the media, how to get visionary content into the larger culture. This is one of the vectors, and you’ll see in his work, he combines some classic psychedelia. The weird spheres in the middle there is very much like Rick Griffin’s famous flying eyeball from the 60s. It’s like this very sort of 60s comic book kind of spheroid. But at the same time, you get these weird glyphs that are kind of like graffiti, kind of like some alien language, coming through with some kind of information, coming through with some kind of data. So there’s a data density there that I think is really remarkable. And then the final point is just the way that it mixes different dimensions. The sphere is a very obviously three-dimensional object, but the letters are a little unclear. There are a series of planes that kind of break the plane. And it introduces just as its language, this multi-dimensionality. Multi-dimensionality is a lot of what we’re talking about here. How do you create visual spaces? How do you create environments? How do you create an environment like Burning Man, where there’s this constant splitting off of different dimensions, different portals, different ways of constructing and feeling reality? So I’ve been thinking a lot about visionary art and visionary culture because I just finished a book called The Visionary State of All Things, A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. And it’s an overview of the art and architecture in the spiritual and religious movements in California. One of the main impulses that drove me to write this book into research in California, because we all know that California’s nuts, and it’s been nuts for decades and decades. And so much of what, whether we are Californians or not here, so much of what we participate in and feed off of was born or nurtured in the Golden State over the in the 20th century in many, many ways. And so I was fascinated with this. I want to know where it came from. And a lot of it came from here. It came from Burning Man. Where did this come from? The talk I gave at Palenque Norte in 2003 was called The Colts of Burning Man. And what I was talking about was different dimensions of the festival and showing how they all came out of ancestors of different groups, different subcultures, different activities in the 60s, in the 50s, even before, that sort of foreshadowed this remarkable experiment. So that was really what I was looking for in the book. And I’m happy to say that I hooked up with an incredible photographer who photographed a lot of the architecture. Hey, there’s an incredible photographer who photographed these environments, these Zen temples and Hindu temples and crazy Babylonian ziggurats and ISIS temples and pagan places and sacred mountain tops that make up this topography of the imagination. Very much like what we have here, a topography of the imagination, a map, a geography, a festival of portals and an interdimensional world, a thousand theme parks, budding heads. And in many ways that was the kind of spirit of the book. But there’s sort of a deeper question behind that, and this brings me lengthily to my main topic, which is really what all this stuff is about. Is all this sort of, particularly in a spiritual or alternative religious context, is all this sort of grasping after new spiritual forms of meditation, of yoga, of cults, of gurus, of masters, of psychedelia, of mind-body practices, holotropic breathing, excellent self-help groups, that whole sort of sense of reconstructing the human spirit. Is it ultimate really about religion? No. Now I think this is a modern phenomenon that leaves aside the homogeneity and the authority structures of traditional religion. But is it even really about spirituality? I mean we throw that word around, but what do we really mean by it? And what I came to see is that while there are certain, obviously this is about spirituality, what is spirituality about? What is spirituality about in a historical context, meaning where are we now and where are we going? Is it just about replugging in with the nature or the cosmos or the goddess or the god that we feel is missing from the modern world? Or is something else going on with this? And I think something else is going on. And this is where we get to the prophetic dimension of visionary culture, and I’ll talk more about prophecy later. Because what I think is being prophesied in this experimentalism, which we can talk about in terms of the history of California or the history of new age or new religious movements, and we can certainly talk about here, the tremendous emphasis on invention, on creativity, on can-do, on technologies of perception. This is all pointing towards something that I think is on the horizon, and this is what I call the post-human self. That there’s something going on inside the self and inside the way that we experience ourselves and the way that we perceive ourselves that is already happening and will continue to happen more so. And so even if we leave aside global warming, potential catastrophe, the takeover of the machines, global war, you know, all the myriad of fearful scenarios that lie on the horizon, that I think we face another kind of apocalypse. And I use that word very, very gingerly because I don’t mean a discrete moment in time when everything changes. I mean something more like the original term means, which is revelation. And we have certain revelations about the self that are on the horizon and coming down the pike, and they’re not necessarily so easy to take down. And I’ll get to that in a little bit. So what’s happening to the self? There’s two main ways I think about imagining or understanding how we’re transforming our sense of subjectivity of who we are, how we feel on a day-to-day basis. And those are media, particularly electronic media and pharmacology. In the media space, one of the things that characterizes the modern world, and people don’t usually think about it in these terms, is that it made a pact with electricity. In the pre-modern world, you know, they tended to organize nature in terms of maybe four elements, sometimes five, air, earth, fire and water. And these were imagined to be the kind of animating spirits behind all the different kinds of matter one would encounter, including the human body, including the temperament. Our own personality tendencies, our own temperament was seen as a kind of elemental operation in alchemy and in traditional medicine. And then something comes along, the sort of capturing and use of electricity. And in my view, electricity is as fundamental as one of these elements in terms of the way that it feeds in and transforms our sense of material reality. And just to give you a little bit about that, electricity in its nature has a kind of cosmic dimension. It ties us to the cosmos in a more direct way than even the elements do evolve. Of course, the elements are ultimately, you know, products of vast stellar activity. By using your toaster in the morning, you’re tweaking particles on the far end of the universe. That’s what they tell us. So even the most mundane uses of this, in many ways, very mundane technology. Electricity does not hold the enchantment for us now that it once did. We’re participating in a kind of cosmic reality. But I think in making that pact, electricity has certain plans for us. Plans that are not, that are sort of coming online, have been coming online. Things like the collapse of space and time. Things like the weaving of a collective intelligence. Things like the speed, the incredible speeding up of our inventiveness, our possibility spaces, our abilities to envision. So that rather than just talking about the computer, you can see all of electrical and electronic media as kind of an expression of this pact, this elemental pact with the spirit. The way that we think of air, earth and fire as having spirits, like in a pagan ritual. Electricity has a spirit, but it’s not necessarily an easy one. It comes with some difficulty because it tends to undermine our rooted animal nature, our sense of being, living in a world of four elements. You know, for a vast majority of human life, 99.99999% of it, we’re like running around where most of the things we encounter, almost everything we encounter, is nature. Some form of nature and other. The weather, the food, the rocks that we’re, you know, hunkering behind. Yes, we make little primitive shelters or have very simple forms of culture, but we’re mostly swimming in nature. And now we’re swimming in culture, in largely electronically mediated culture. And that this process, this feedback loop is going to intensify and intensify. And the kind of dislocation and sort of fluidity, multiplicity that one can experience in visionary states where images and patterns and sounds and lights all sort of feed into this kind of virtualized, hyper-dimensional experience is going to increasingly become the reality of media. And Alex talked a little bit about computer graphics and the ways in which these allow for an incredible intensification of our ability to actually simulate visionary experience, not just reflected in some kind of, you know, this sort of visionary art expressive cultural gesture, but actually capture it in a way that perhaps can actually trigger the brain without any kinds of compounds. So there’s a psychedelic quality, if you will, to electronic media that is going to intensify and that is already intensifying. And what it does is it helps, it creates this very dislocated sense of self. It’s an exuberant one in many ways because it’s about connection. It’s about a kind of virtual communion. It opens up the possibility space of the different kinds of images, different kinds of worlds we can encounter. But it also has a price and a lot of the crass media that you see now is not, you can’t say, oh, that’s just about, you know, the corporate structure, it’s just about the dumbing down of America. It’s about what happens when you take a feedback loop, which is essentially what electronic media does. You have a human idea, you do human practices, you put it into an artifact, the artifact spits it back into a consumer or someone who’s using the media. And that creates these feedback loops of human ideas, human culture and technological invention. And reality TV, the horror of reality TV is an inevitable outcome of the linking of this feedback loop to our lower selves, to our unevolved selves, to our egos that don’t want to die, that have immortality projects that are dominated by greed and lust and lust for fame, a desire for a certain kind of presence, which becomes evanescent the moment you’re there. That’s the trick of the media. I want to be on screen, I want to be on screen, I want to be on screen, and then I’m on screen and I’m emptied by the screen. You know, this is something that a lot of actors have to deal with. They’re emptied by the process. But from the outside, it looks like they’re full. So it’s like the hungry ghost realm that Dale Pendell mentioned earlier, where we start chasing images of some kind of real life, some kind of authenticity, some kind of real power. And you can see that in the media. I mean, I had a very disturbing visionary experience, one of the more prophetic ones in the sense that I didn’t feel I was dealing with personal material, but really a glimpse of a kind of future world. And it was sort of like a hell realm of television, where we’re just in that space and everyone is constantly seeking to occupy a place that looks like it has some kind of power, and some kind of essence. And ever since I had that experience, it was like this great sort of death star that I was like locked in in, and I was like swimming in it for hours. It was horrible. And then finally I escaped. And I was like surfing on a wave, and like the Polynesian Isles, and there was this Rastafar, and he was going, oh, you’re still trying to stick with nature? Come on, hold on, hold on. And we’re flowing. We’re in the flow. It was beautiful. And then this death, looming death star of lowbrow electronic media descended once again. And there I went for another hour. And the weird thing is that ever since that point, I can’t watch TV. I mean, I really can’t watch it. There’s a lot. I mean, it makes me kind of woozy. I mean, I can do it. I can watch Star Trek reruns and stuff, but it just doesn’t really happen. And there’s a line from an early Tuxedo moon song, a San Francisco freak band, Parixelons. We laugh at the TV set calling it the Eye of Hell. And there’s a kind of hell realm that we’re bringing on realm, or a kind of purgatorial realm that we’re bringing online. And one of the things that I think is happening is that all of the ways that we’re used to feeling like we’re alive, and by we I don’t mean us here, but human beings, a sense of power, a sense of domination or whatever is being eroded in some sense by this electronic situation. We’re creating a place where we don’t really know who we are anymore. We don’t know who’s making the decision. We don’t know who is really behind this desire or this thirst. And so that knowledge becomes part of this endless feedback loop, this endless circulation. And it creates a very anxious culture, and we see that in a larger sense. So a lot of the low brownness of the media, and of course it really has been going down in a general way, even in the 15 years that I’ve been working inside magazines and newspaper and media. There’s really been a tremendous dumbing down, and it has to do with the fact that we are increasingly bringing online our own human subjective, our own self, but that self is in crisis, because it’s being transformed by the very technology that’s bringing us online. Another way into this that’s a little bit more concrete is pharmacology. And so what, you know, what new neuropharmacology offers you is entirely different stories about who you are. We usually think about it in medical terms, I have a condition, I’m going to treat my condition with a medicine, that’s the dominant story. So, for example, to take a personal example, I have anxiety. I’m often very anxious. It’s often unpleasant. So where does that come from? How do I engage anxiety as an individual? Is it something that I’m karmically linked to? Is it a demon I must wrestle with and come to embrace? Or is it really just an imbalance of my neurons, of the bath that my brain swims in? Is it simply a random or unintentional, unnecessary artifact of our meat bodies that we’re growing, gaining increasing amounts of control over? That’s a very different story. It’s a very different story. Because when I’m dealing with anxiety as a karmic link, as a familial link, I can see the, oh, through the mother, through the grandmother. When I’m dealing with it as an artifact of consciousness trying to stay sane in our insane world, I must deal with anxiety as a source of meaning. It’s a wrestling with meaning. What does this mean for me? How can I extract meaning from suffering, from my own suffering? And the alternative model says, dude, that’s just, what are you doing? You’re putting your head up your ass. There’s no reason to, don’t mess with it. Just medicate it. Just deal with it and then you can move on to better things. And you can tell by the way I framed it which way I lean, but I don’t lean that way in a rigid stance by any means. I use pharmacological substances on occasion. And it’s more about that, given the option, one wrestles with meaning rather than simply medicating, but I honor and respect a more transhumanist position, which says that intelligence is not a good thing. It’s now offering us the ability to overcome things that we have inherited as monkeys, essentially, and that the world that we’re facing, the world that we need to deal with, doesn’t need those monkey energies running the show anymore. And I think we can all see how it’s causing a lot of problems on the big scale. And I don’t want to insult the monkeys, but I think you know what I mean. Emotion unchecked, emotion without identity associated with it. But at the same time, once you go down this road, and I think more or less all of us are on some level down this road, it just gets weirder and weirder and weirder. Because where does it stop? Where does the use stop? Where can I go and say, well, okay, anxiety’s not mine. Depression isn’t mine anymore. But you know, my love for my children is mine, I think. The pleasure I experience when I see a great film, that’s me. Well, actually, but the film is sort of doing it to me. So you start to run into the situation where our awareness about the variety of technologies that produce different states, states of anxiety, states of pleasure, states of understanding, states of visionary consciousness, you know, looking into a sense of, you know, a sound light machine and suddenly entering into another dimension, that those technologies also amputate the naive idea that we are those things. Marshall McLuhan talked about the way that technologies are prostheses, meaning that like just I lose my leg, I get a false leg. Is that my leg or is it not my leg? Yes, my leg. I walk around on it. I care for it. I care what it looks like. I want to put a nice shoe on it. It’s my leg, the way that I don’t have my glasses on now, but the way my glasses are my glasses, as Pesci mentioned earlier. But McLuhan said something else, is that prostheses are also amputations. There’s also a rupture, a kind of undermining of a naive ability to simply in a kind of organic, holistic, natural, emotionally satisfying way simply be that thing, be that emotion, be that pleasure, be that experience. And so pharmacology sets up a situation where, and this is its story, not necessarily its reality. Obviously there’s a lot of great power in these compounds, the abilities to change our state, but they’re also in their own way snake oil. They come with a story, and when you take them, when you go into that world, you’re going into a story. It’s like there’s a different shaman on the block. You know, he’s got a little white coat, and it’s like, don’t worry about all that other stuff. This is the thing that’s going to like set you free, or this is the thing that’s going to work for you. But it’s another story, but it’s a powerful one. It’s a powerful one and one that I think we have no way out of. But it creates a very difficult situation, a kind of crisis, a kind of apocalypse where we are in a very difficult situation. All of the contents of the self are suddenly online. They’re all part of an ability to manipulate. So we can be instrumental about our own selves. What are we gonna choose? What are you gonna choose? Suddenly the consumer is involved in your own most intimate sense of self because the consumer, do I want to take that way? Do I want to take these new range of stimulants that are coming down the lines in order to be more productive? Do I want to take this in order to stop having anger fits that fuck up my family life? We start making, we start expanding this range of decisions, but in so doing, and this is a tricky point, in so doing, we are highlighting or making clear the part of us that is aware of ourselves without necessarily fully being ourselves. The chooser, the one who goes, I am not that. I am not that emotion. I am not that physical situation. What is it then? What is it? And it’s a purely streamlined road to the deepest metaphysical spiritual questions about who am I? And the question who am I has this great viral quality because it tends to undermine your naive ideas if you’re really wedded to it. It undermines the simplistic notions you have about who you think you are. And that can be incredibly liberating, but it’s also very scary because we organ, we ballast ourselves, we feel okay by relating with our given personality, with our inherited personality, with our emotional body. And obviously those things are delicious and I’m not talking about a kind of schizophrenia, but I am talking about an increased degree of self-awareness that has a remarkable productive spiritual liberating qualities, but it’s also a very difficult one. I don’t think it’s too difficult for the people here. I have faith that the kind of crisis that I’m seeing, and I’m just emphasizing the crisis side of it because I think it’s under talked about, not because I think it’s the whole story. I have faith that you have the tools for that, but when I look at the world outside, reality television just being a kind of obvious example of the way you plug in quote unquote primitive, unreflective emotions into an intensely aggressive kind of technological circulation. Those same kinds of things are gonna happen and already happening with pharmacology and you ain’t seen nothing yet. 10, five, 10 years, remarkable new compounds are gonna come down the pike that are gonna allow us to more and more finely finesse our ups, our downs, our ability to communicate with groups. Do we wanna eradicate shyness? Is shyness a disease or is it a temperament? In the old four elements world, these things are temperaments. They’re like gods you’ve come into the world with. It’s like I came in with a lot of mercury. I’m not getting out of mercury. He’s my god and my tormentor, but suddenly these elements are just kind of up for grabs. We lose that sort of stability. And this is where I think another side of visionary culture comes in and plays a potentially really important role. And what I mean by that is that the kind of relationship one develops with pharmacology inside of visionary culture has a very interesting quality to it that it can illuminate this larger situation about the pharmacological self or the post-human self that I’m talking about. The self that can no longer organize itself with the old human stories, whether those are modern human stories or pre-modern human stories. There’s another story going on here, a kind of cosmic story, a kind of technological story, something else that’s happening. And that’s what I mean by the post-human. Now visionary compounds are very interesting things when you start talking about neuropharmacology because there’s a really cool paradox that I believe. I don’t know, but I believe we’ll end up being another route that visionary culture enters into and is already entering into the mainstream. Okay, so now you have all these neurologists and neuropharmacologists and they’re like, they’re the king cheese now. What physicists were in the middle of the 20th century, the brain guys are now because they know they’re getting close to the seat of it all. But as they need to account for visionary, as they need to account for all of these mind states, they have to account for visionary mind states as well. They have to account for dreams. They have to account for lucid dreams. They have to account for those weird dreams you have when you’re going to sleep and you get stuck and these weird creatures come at you. And you gotta start to pay attention to the whole range of neurological phenomenon, including visionary, spiritual, religious, and psychedelic states. So you get this weird paradox where the materialists, the people who say, oh, it’s all just your brain, it’s all just neurons and chemicals and we can tweak it, have to confront inevitably the full reality of the visionary experience and account for it. And so you already see that. There’s people saying, yes, we can do certain kinds of electrical stimulation on the brain and produces senses of presence, produces sense that there’s a God there, produce visual phenomenon that resembles psychedelic phenomenon, you know, all this stuff is in our brain. You know, the showman’s back in the day we’re just figuring out ways to tweak their brains in a way that would create a kind of dimensionality that let them leave the ordinary human world and into another kind of world of imaginal construction. But so in their attempt to undermine the spirituality of these states, they have to take them as real. And so then the reality of these things enters into the culture. You can’t deny it anymore. You have to account for it. So if these states themselves are healing, if these states themselves are productive of the sort of next stage of evolution, which I think in some ways they are, though not always in the way that people think, then those things are going to flow into the culture. It’s really, it’s like they’ve let in exactly what they’ve wanted to keep out. And they may tell you, well, that’s just because I’m stimulating a part of your brain, but then you’re having the experience. And as we know, there’s a noetic quality, a quality of reality to these experiences that spills far beyond, far beyond the contrast that we can possibly imagine with our own ordinary heads. I’m not making any argument about whether they are ultimately in our brains or not, but that’s beside the point. That’s the point, is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore. As we bring these things into consciousness, into culture, into media, into technology, they enter into this increasingly chaotic world where the self, the human self, the subjective sense of reality, the sense of perception are all kind of up for grabs. And there’s all these very low forces that are attempting to capture them, things like right wing talk radio, a remarkable vampiric technology that manages to feed off of fear and resentment, and some of the less noble aspects of the masculine temperament, and turn it into this massive political force. That’s a use of technology to hold onto subjectivity. It’s not about the content. When you listen to talk radio, it’s all opinion. Well, I think those immigrants, they’re coming here and they’re like, they need to follow law, yeah, law, law. And they give you all the Republican talking points. Yeah, it’s all about following the law. But what’s really going on is affect. It’s all just emotion. It’s not an argument, it’s not an idea. It’s a way to capture lower emotional energies and kind of keep a tap on them. But this is going to continue to undermine in these different technologies that we see here, light technologies, music technologies, visionary art are sort of vehicles for a more subtle way of dealing with this. Because what visionary culture teaches you how to do is to develop a relationship with a compound as if it were a kind of spirit. Not one who is your God, but one who’s potentially your teacher, perhaps a pal, perhaps one of those friends you don’t exactly trust, but enjoy their company. Perhaps the ones that you feel like you have some karmic relationship to. So there’s a kind of relational way of dealing with substances inside visionary culture that gives us clues, deep clues, for the question of how do we deal with this larger issue that’s gonna happen in the culture at large? And in our own lives, when we’re dealing with non-visionary states, with our own decisions we make about our own personality structures. So there’s an incredible opportunity there for this kind of raising up of the intelligence and the communication, communicating intelligence that enables us as a community and as individuals to be able to navigate these spaces. And I think those navigational skills will become increasingly necessary and translated out of a specific visionary context. And that’s the thing that has to happen. You’re not gonna have everybody, you don’t want everybody flying down, there’s already too many people flying down to Peru hanging out with the Isle of Scare-O’s. What you want is an ability to communicate the central truths of those experiences to larger people, to give them the ability to know that you can move safely between different mind states. You can have relations with compounds that go for a while and may go kind of a little awry, but you can come out, or at least mostly come out, generally come out. Overall there’s an intelligence about these things and there’s no reason to deny that side of it. So in that sense, that’s the way I mean that visionary culture has a kind of prophetic role to play. But this is very different than a lot of the kinds of prophecy that we associate often with these compounds. And I wanna sort of offer a counterbalance. It’s not a negation, but it’s a counterbalance to a tendency in the visionary culture community towards a certain kind of what I’ll call religion, certain kind of religion. And this is the idea that there’s some kind of transformation just around the bend that’s gonna change everything, or there’s some kind of transformation just around the bend that’s gonna totally change me and I’m gonna be integrated once again. I’m no longer gonna be a fragmented, conflicted, modern person that we all are a lot of the time. And this dream that there is some kind of transformation is part of the visionary experience. It’s an inevitable outcome of the things that one sees, the things one reads about, the discussions and communications one has. But I also think that it’s a danger because it absorbs the energy that is better spent bringing back into the mix, back into the mess, back into this somewhat fragmented, somewhat self undermining, somewhat anxious, modern or postmodern or post human condition that electronics are bringing to us, that the breakdown of the world’s bringing to us, that pharmacology is bringing us. So that in a way it’s like, it’s like forgive the masculinist analogy, but it’s like a temptress where the game is to keep the seduction in play, where you keep the energy alive, whereas if you go, you break the field, where what’s really going on is a certain kind of dance, a certain kind of tension, and the visionary experience has as its temptress this kind of crude prophetic function, where it’s like yes, there’s a transformer, just around the bend, it’s a new culture, we’re going to transform, it’s all gonna change. And I think that really takes us away from what we’re actually doing, which is bringing in pieces, fragments, glimpses, particles and weaving them together. And in that weaving, in a very human world, in the sense of being in our ordinary world, using technology, using machines, using communication, we’re trying to see what all that stuff does when we include intelligence, when we include rationality, when we include science in the modern sensibility. So the idea that there’s something gonna happen in some certain date and it’s all gonna change, it looks like it’s an escape from modernity, but it’s not. It’s the most modern thing you can do. One of the fundamental things about the modern world is the idea of revolution, revolution, that you have an old order, the monarchy, and then you transform it and you bring in the people, you bring in democracy, you change the world. The shamanic peoples, prunin peoples, whatever you wanna call them, first peoples, did not think about massive transformations that are gonna utterly change human structure and the planet. They’re about continuity in return, continuity in return. And that’s what I’m talking about, is return, return to the situation, not to fall into the trap of religion in that sense. And so for me, the kind of model of the visionary community in its full prophetic mode is not necessarily these great visions of a goddess or a god or a form or a figure or an alien language. This stuff’s great, but it’s also kind of like science fiction. It’s kind of like watching cool movies and we come back. For me, a better example than the kind of, you know, the sort of guru model is Erewid. How many of you guys here know Erewid? Erewid.com. Oh, we got about two thirds of you, three quarters. No, but three. Three. Dot or sorry, three quarters of you, thank you. Anyway, it’s a psychoactive information site online. And most people appreciate it because it’s extremely useful. It’s pragmatic, it’s not visionary, it’s not giving you a line, it’s giving you what information we can bring together from science, from people’s personal experience, from people’s own visionary experiences. But it does it in a way that is extremely useful. Now, that’s mostly how we deal with it, but there’s something much deeper going on there that is part of what I mean about this sort of prophetic function, which is there’s a profound ethics of information and communication that go on there. Because it’s not about imposing a single point of view. It’s about drawing the user into a community of intelligence and information that educates them and makes them part of a larger collective, but dialogue rich, full of controversy, full of bullshit, full of moves that are not necessarily from the best motivations. But the fact that it models a kind of communication, a kind of community that gives us a glimpse of the kinds of ways we need to be involved with each other to mediate and survive the transformation that I’m talking about. That it’s through our communication with one another, through sustaining an open community where dialogue occurs, where science is fed into personal experience, that we are able to develop ways of thinking and being with one another that will create the kinds of, whatever you want to call it, harmonic fields or whatever, that will enable us to go through this tremendous transformation. So I urge you, if you haven’t checked out ArrowWid to go into it, and also just to reflect a little bit more about it, because people who use it love it, but it’s sort of just like, yeah, it’s an information source, something that helps me out or whatever. But if you start to really go into the way that it’s been enabled tens of thousands of people to increase their intelligence in relationship to the kinds of compounds that are going, that are modeling, modeling for us, simulating, if you will, this transformation or this kind of opening in the future that’s going to be incredibly intense, it’s going to be a very wild ride. And just because I can’t help pitching, I wanted to let you know that this, if you use ArrowWid at all, it operates on a shoestring budget. They’re not out there with trust funds, they’re not out there getting government grants, they’re doing work that a government should be doing, or not the government as we have it now, but it should be part of a rational state, which is not what we have. And so if you’re at all, what’s that? E-R-O-W-I-D .org. And, but I’m not just doing a pitch, I’m doing it because by going deeper into that community, I think you begin to participate in a form of information exchange, a form of understanding that models the kinds of skills that we need to develop in order to take on an increasingly chaotic and self-undermining process that has a liberational quality, but has a lot, a lot of traps. And so I think with that note, I will end, and I think we have about 10, 12 minutes for questions. I really like the question and answer part, so I hope I’ve been stimulating, and thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, Robert asked a question about the computer and its relationship to visionary experience, and used the example, I probably were talking about, I don’t know what it’s called, it was theCUBE Tronics last year, but does anybody know the name of it? With the ping pong balls and the flashing? The Big Round Cubatron. The Big Round Cubatron. That’s it. And obviously those patterns are generated by computers. I suspect that the structural design of the Belgian waffle is a computer device. That’s one of the other things that computers let us do is not just create remarkable virtual images, but to design buildings in ways that are extremely difficult to do otherwise. So, you know, like Frank Gehry buildings are absolutely products of the computer. So what you can see is that the existence of the computer gives us these new languages that bring us closer into what I think ultimately is a kind of electronic consciousness of the fractals and other great examples. The fractals are incredibly simple mathematical things. They’re just little, tiny, reiterative functions. But in order to generate a fractal, you need to do that equation so many frigging times that a human being would never discover this pattern. Only a computer can discover the pattern. So this icon of like early electronic psychedelic visionary culture, which is so rich in so many ways, scientifically, as an allegory of mathematics in the mind. I mean, the fractals are incredible. It is a gift, if you will, from the computer, not to mention all the virtual graphics, definitely. Other questions? Yes? Good. That’s a great point. That’s a great point. It’s actually, I’ve heard a number of names. There’s Ukrainea, Ukrainea, and Message from the Future are both things that I’ve heard. So none of the initial, like all the cantilevers are just evolved. They don’t have any structural logic behind them. Oh, yeah, definitely. So there’s very much a reiterative function to what they’re doing as well. Yeah, I didn’t want to imply that, I mean, it’s kind of false. You say, oh, the computer’s given us this new thing as if the computer is sort of like this, you know, alien intelligence. But one of the things it does is gives us these deep natural patterns, these abilities to be organic and replicate organic logic in a different way. Yes? Right. This is a very good question. He asked about Kaczynski and the sort of really dark side view of the combination of technology and the state. And, well, my position on that is that I deeply respect those positions and have spent time in them in the sense of, I feel like I really get it in that position being that it’s just not working out very good. That we’re not capable of controlling these things and the sort of ideas that they’re programmed with, the extent of the power, the way they link with capital, the way that all these sort of larger bodies, like a corporation, begin to kind of take over and dictate the direction of things, is just creating an extraordinary crisis that’s completely unsustainable and there’s nothing we can really do about that. And in many ways my desire not to inhabit that position is a sort of ethical existential act. It’s not because I believe that that’s necessarily a wrong view. And in a way that’s also an answer to the question of how do you increase intelligence or the good kind of human intelligence or community or communication that could potentially help shift things in the proper direction. And I don’t know the immediate answer for that and this might sound a little bit like a cop-out, but when I think about the Bardo realm, it’s like we get these glimpses of the Bardo, we’re going to die, and we’re going to see all the forms of all of our fears and desires. And, well, I don’t know about you, but I think the Bardo’s going to be a pretty rough ride for me. The chances of me making it out of there on my own, pretty thin. And I’m not involved in any particular, I don’t have like my Tibetan master who’s given me the juju moves or anything. So I call it just holding out for the angels. And I don’t mean that in a flip way, but that there’s some kind of descending pattern, some kind of crystalline ability to move through these spaces that we have inside of us, but we don’t experience or see. And in a way, I think one of the great things we can do now is to model on many different levels, inside the self, inside small isolated communities off the grid, inside larger cultures, inside of things that are flowing through the media, inside environmental technologies, and all these different ways where we’re like modeling solutions. Because the thing that we don’t really know is as information and pattern and communication become more and more tightly coupled with the material world, when the breakdown between the virtual and the material occurs more and more, when suddenly there are RFID devices and all of our objects, when already the GPS breaks down the difference between physical space and virtual space in a way, that there’s some kind of bridging of the material structure, all of these institutions, all these structures, all these technologies, and the virtual, let’s call it. And that by creating these seed crystals of solutions, of a clarity, of open community, there’s this potential, and this is where the angel comes in, that it spreads in a way that we cannot anticipate. So it can be so frustrating and so disheartening to feel the powerlessness that so many of us feel now when we watch this kind of monstrous juggernaut go forward. But I really believe that in all these different ways, and it’s hard to know where the lever is, it might be in just simply getting into environmental technology as quickly as we can, ignore all the spiritual stuff, it’s a trap, and it might be the opposite. It might be that in developing personalities that are able to deal with our condition in a full way to register them with clarity and love and be able to direct human creativity in these proper directions, we actually create a kind of crystal that’s able to spread in a way in some way that we can’t see. And so that’s sort of the way I confront that issue. But I recognize the dark picture. I see it and, you know, honor it. Yeah, that’s a great question. So Mark was asking about how do you relate with media? He was talking about he moved to Australia, and just by getting outside of the United States and moving to a culture that even though it’s modern and developed, is much less mediated. He felt like he gained some space and the sort of pressure got off of him, and I think we all experienced that pressure and we all react to it in different ways, and some of us just escaped from it and some of us just accept it. But I think that as with pharmacology, there is with technology a kind of practice. It too is a field of practice, the way that one practices is spiritual practices, there’s practices in art. And that that practice with media involves being aware of the facts that we’re constantly making with these things and being willing to issue manual overrides that cut off these communication lines for periods of time, maybe very temporary, maybe for weeks at a time, that we recognize that they left to their own devices, they just want to weave us in and make us a node. And that’s not necessarily bad entirely because some of it, that some of that is what we need in order to communicate given the historical and technological realities that we live in. But at the same time, it has a vampiric kind of quality. And so media fasts are the simplest way of talking about it because you institute even the simplest media fast through your cell phone, take it with you for a weekend or whatever it is. You immediately begin to see the way that the technology has already infused your own life, your sense of space, your sense of time, your sense of communication. And if you lose the thread of that kind of self-awareness, if you don’t put breaks into the circuit, which is a lot of ways why we like altered states is because there are breaks in the circuit of our habits, of our normal construction of reality, that you can approach those breaks as well in many ways incredibly brilliantly with media. And you can do it with media. It’s not just about escaping from media, but it is about keeping a certain intensity of self-awareness and a kind of relationship. That’s really what I’m talking about here is not believing that we can all just melt into a puddle of unity, that actually sustaining the relationship where we’re engaged in dialogue and discourse and difference is the way that we go forward. And to keep that relationship with your machines as well, these little sprites that if left uncontrolled will have their way with you is only part of this larger dialogic process that I think is a real key to where we’re going. So thank you very much for your attention. I really appreciate it. And we really appreciate you, Eric. Thank you so much.