(Transcript here.)

When he first posted about it, someone piped up with concerns about Merrick’s tone.

The third question regards the (to me) overly aggressive attitude you took whilst you were talking about the Liberal Democrats. I was wondering how you thought it would come across to the general population of the UK? I compare this to the amiable way that Nick Clegg spoke after you.

Our culture’s gone through many cycles of upheaval, greater and lesser anger against the State and the failings of our elected representatives (and the lack of real alternative offered by their rivals). Direct action seeped into mainstream consciousness in the 1990s, mainly through environmental activism such as anti-road and anti-GM protests.

As the scientific evidence of the seriousness of our ecological blundering mounted, and the blundering continued apace, many assumed that the (supposedly) incoherent, “angry” approach to political action had failed. Corporations and the bland public reality they’ve created dominate, so the only game left is to work from within, they said. It’s the “smart” way forward; ranting from the sidelines simply engenders conflict and stand-offs, and doesn’t win over the public at large. People like “nice”, so that’s what we need to give them if we want to win them over.

There’s rarely a day goes by now that doesn’t show this attitude to be a load of shit. Of course, any intelligent person recognizes the value of tactics. However, I question the automatic association of anger with incoherence. I think this is a legacy of a culture—and I’m especially talking about my own country here, England—that seems constitutionally uncomfortable with strong human emotions. We lose coherence when angry because we’re entering alien territory, natural emotional landscapes that we’ve been alienated from.

Hatred, as Primal Scream said, will eat you whole, and has to be let go of. But all too often, in therapy, politics, and society in general, we confuse these twisted emotional brambles with the healthy shoots of anger. Our lack of emotional literacy leaves us prey to those who want us to “let go”, when actually they’re talking about repressing.

Merrick got quite a few boos at Glastonbury. The commenter on his blog took this as an indication that, if even such a left-leaning audience as Glastonbury Festival booed, the public at large would react badly to the anger expressed at the Lib Dem’s failure to offer a real alternative. Therefore, we should tone down our anger, and be more “amiable”, like Clegg. Better still, we could “let go” of our anger…

If you’re not angry—at least sometimes—at 99% of politicians today, you’re blind or numb, or both. And if you think the way forward is to publically make our emotions conform to the flattened landscape that is preferred by politics and corporations, where most of us are forced to live much of the time, you’re wrong. This public landscape, where spontaneous emotion is distrusted, and emotion and intelligence are forced apart, is the medium through which our catastrophic disconnection from nature and each other is expressed.

Anger isn’t a “solution”, and focused on to the exclusion of joy, sadness, compassion, and the rest of the spectrum (a reasonable working definition of “hate”), it can become as much of a distortion of humanity as its repression. But it’s precisely the amiable fuzziness, the tactical avoidance of anything uncomfortable or unseemly, of people like Clegg that has us continuing our trajectory towards ecological collapse.

The apocalypse is enabled with a whimper, not a bang.

Anyway, if you’ve not decided to be completely numb to the perils of climate change, this post by Alex Steffen is worth a read. Coming from such an avowedly positive-thinking source, this sort of news makes it crystal clear exactly how dangerously in denial politicians and the culture at large is.

Two important points. Firstly, there’s no easy way out:

There’s enormous pressure here in the U.S. on environmental groups, scientists and public officials; pressure to play ball, to support targets that are politically safe, to be moderate. But this is not a situation where such gamesmanship will help our cause. Incremental and limited gains in this situation are in fact disastrous losses.

Secondly—and this is mostly why I’ve posted this here—a call to all “cultural workers”. I’m sure I’m mostly preaching to the converted here, but it’s clear that there’s a vast responsibility on the shoulders of anyone communicating with larger, currently less engaged demographics.

We need to talk with people where they’re at on the issue, not where we wish they were. Somehow we need, in the next couple years, to guide millions of Americans through the progress of emotions—awareness, horror, despair, resignation, engagement, chosen optimism—that most of the people reading this site have gone through… and we have to do it in the next few years.

Such counselling or therapy is a mercurial prospect even on an individual level. We’ve got to do it en masse, quickly. And I’d expand on Alex’s optimism by adding that such wide-scale cultural action will be necessary even if we don’t turn this ecology-destroying economic juggernaut of ours around in time. Most things short of the miraculous aren’t going to be pretty, and we need to mitigate the ugliness with bold thinking, courage, and compassion.

I’ve decided to have another go with Christopher Hyatt’s excellent book of Sufi-Reichian-Zen exercizes, Undoing Yourself With Energized Meditation.

Not that it didn’t work first time. Back in ’95 the book helped propel me into what is probably my most intense, sustained period of “alteration” thus far in my life. But, despite Robert Anton Wilson’s revelation of a Secret of the Illuminati, his 23rd Law, in the preface (“Do it every day”), I only kept the routine up for several months. Every day—but only for several months.

It’s shocking for me to read now. The accompanying text—Gurdjieffian incitements, Learyesque evolutionary cheerleading and post-Nietzschean social critique—is calculated, in a fine tradition of roguish spirituality, to shock. But what’s shocking to me now isn’t how challenging it is to my unthinking reality-tunnels; rather, it’s how clearly I can perceive the book’s own reality-tunnels.

My recent reading of James Hillman and John Gray has deeply challenged the utopian euphoria that threaded its way through my ’90s education in radical thought. Terence McKenna, Norman O. Brown, Robert Anton Wilson and others all expressed a form of millennial, evolutionary hope that resonated deeply for me at the time. Hillman, Gray, and others, are equally radical and challenging in their attitude and approach, but their conclusions about human nature and the prospects of a revolutionary break in history are a deal more sobering.

To be sure, there’s a certain geopsychological element in there. Despite McKenna’s globe-trotting, Brown’s English origins and Wilson’s extended residence in Ireland, all were fine exponents of the American Dreaming, that utopian westward march which, despite all the bitter betrayals, still resonates for many radicals. Future-orientation, can-do pragmatism and an unshakable faith in progress.

Gray is very, very English. Hillman is American, but spent nearly three decades in Europe at the Jung Institute in Zurich. Gray’s sense of pagan cyclicity in history, his repeated deference to human foibles and limitations is matched by Hillman’s psychomythical allegiance to Classical Greek culture, and his sense of the way archetypes define and delimit human psychology and pathology.

The blinkered, booming ’90s were a fertile ground for the smooth rush of the American millennial vibe; post-9/11 finds me—and others I’m sure—a little more keenly aware of a more European sense of the messy ups and downs of history’s meanderings.

The core myth behind this sort of negotiation of historical movement, the archetypal scene that is so embedded in our culture that we define ourselves against it whether we like it or not, is of course the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man.

In the countercultural atmosphere I’ve grown up in, it has always seemed that the doctrine of “original sin” is one of the most pernicious myths possible. Magicians and activists alike usually agree that the Christian idea that we’re irrevocably fucked up is one of the most potent tools of psychological oppression going.

While there are many exponents of this view, Wilhelm Reich always seems to bubble up in my mind as a representative of it. Don’t get me wrong, Reich’s work is very important to me, and I think it’s still got a lot of relevance. His earthy, no-nonsense approach to sexuality and his commitment to the idea of openness and vulnerability as positive qualities have as much to contribute to our mass-mediated age of pseudo-liberation as they did to his time, where sexual and psychological liberation of any kind were just beginning to blossom.

But Reich’s model of the human has both potential for liberation and potential for delusion. It involved three “layers”. Here’s Danny Lowe’s explanation of Reich’s model:

The first of these is a “social” layer, a veneer of good behaviour and politeness with which we interact in the social world. If we see this layer as partially a product of armouring and learnt restraint, we can see that underneath it might lie a second layer—of frustration, anti-social impulses, rage and so on. Where Reich really showed his insight was that he posited another layer beneath this, a part of us which is open, loving and vulnerable. Reich argued that this “core” is naturally decent and moral.

Opposing “original sin” ostensibly involves the idea that we are inherently, at bottom, good. All that we consider evil or fucked up is the result of secondary, not primary, factors—society, civilization, etc.

I still have a certain amount of time for this view. I do think that agricultural and then industrial civilization entailed a “Fall” into history that, by most qualitative measures, worsened the lot of the human individual. This is a kind of primitivist reading of the Genesis myth, which has a lot going for it. Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden idyll of gathering and horticulture into the agricultural vale of woe, the world of Abel, the “keeper of sheep”, and Cain, “a tiller of the ground”.

The problem here is that the Genesis story is delusional. Transposing the Edenic paradise onto the prehistoric condition of human society does an immense disservice to any attempt to criticize agricultural and industrial civilization, setting up a fantasy realm free of suffering that can easily itself be criticized.

Eden is “a myth” in both senses of the word. Of course it’s a story used to make sense of the world; but because of Christianity’s literalism, and how this and its myths have infected our culture, it’s important for once to stress that Eden is also a falsehood. I don’t deny modes of feeling and existence where all seems perfect; but even though these experiences almost inherently carry a sense of eternity, an almost unshakable atmosphere of reality and permanence… they are transitory. I don’t mean they’re illusory, as I take all aspects of reality as transitory. I do mean that the anxious attempt to cling to this sense of eternal, fundamental perfection, when translated into the realm of living nature and society, is ironically the source of vast amounts of suffering.

The most pernicious part of the Genesis story isn’t the “sin”; it’s the fantasy of an original state of perfection. The “sin” follows from this; Eden requires the Fall, if this origin myth is to have any relevance to the world we actually live in.

The fact that the “sin” has been widely interpreted as sexual or lustful in nature has of course had catastrophic consequences for planetary health. But the existence of the pre-Fall paradise seems to undermine the supposedly fundamental nature of “original” sin. What is original, primary, in this myth is—as in Reich’s model of the human character—perfection and contentment. The Fall may have been used by Christian social controllers as a way of oppressing people’s spontaneous impulses of enjoyment; but equally, that lingering sense that things were, once upon a time, absolutely fucking fine, no problems in sight, has fuelled the eschatological fires in Christianity. Eden requires the Fall, and then creates the longing for Apocalypse—a return to paradise as cataclysmic as our expulsion.

As John Gray has shown (most recently in Black Mass), the utopian belief that human nature can be remade, and that history can be culminated in a pseudo-spiritual state of perfection, has led to unimaginable suffering. Stalin’s Soviet Union, the Nazi Holocaust, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, all the horrors of the 20th century were emphatically not nihilistic in intent; they were all motivated by a fervent belief that a better, if not ideal world is possible. And what price wouldn’t you pay for the attainment of paradise on Earth?

The idea that humans are fundamentally flawed and imperfectible seems to me these days to be mere common sense. It’s vital, though, to separate this observation from our attitude towards it. I think it’s a Christian legacy for us, our feeling that this fact is “a downer”: bound up with our anxiety at Adam and Eve having supposedly screwed up their chances of eternal bliss, with us inheriting their guilt, and being burdened with the thirst for salvation and a return to this primal state of perfection. When the idea that we are fundamentally flawed is labelled “pessimistic” or “depressing”, you can be sure there’s some lingering fantasy of Eden lurking there, casting its unbearable shadow over the mortal world.

Think of the most open and honest conversations you’ve had with friends and lovers at points of despair. When our world has fallen apart and we try to hold each other together, we don’t tell ourselves that “one day everything will be wonderful”, or “everything’s OK”. Well, we do; but we understand this is a gesture, not a fact. Telling someone “everything’ll be fine” is a verbal comfort, a gentle, generous hug translated as best we can manage into clumsy words. Refusing this comfort with rational arguments about how obvious it is that not everything’s OK is to confuse fragile, temporary, yet life-sustaining moments of personal contact with abstract opinions about “reality”.

But generally, these conversations lead us to bear our suffering by accepting our flawed nature. “No one’s perfect,” we say, allowing ourselves some humility, some realism that isn’t grim and bitter, but open and accepting.

Christianity’s childish obsession with perfection, virginity, purity and innocence is, in the face of lived life, a cruel, bitter, and ultimately lethal inheritance. Life entails frailty, suffering and what are generally called “hard truths”. To collapse into pessimism on account of this is the weakness of those who have, on some level, bought into the myth of original perfection, not original sin.

We need an optimism that doesn’t depend on everything turning out OK, and I think this starts with humility, an openness to pleasure and pain that doesn’t try to impose some fevered vision of utopia on the world. And despite the apparently bullish positivity of Hyatt’s book, I think ultimately his exercises do help open this capacity up. The clue is in the book’s title: this work isn’t about constructing, building, making; it’s about undoing.

I believe there is a spectrum of forms of collapse. At one end is the ideal, optimistic future where we solve all our problems and we live happily every after. At the other end is catastrophic collapse. We have tended not to fill in all the spaces in between, but that’s actually where things might be very interesting. There may be some forms of disruption and crisis that will actually stimulate us to be really creative. Most importantly, they may allow us to get the deep vested interests that are blocking change out of the way. [...] My suggestion is that we’re not going to see fundamental shifts until we confront a major crisis. Whether we’re able to exploit such crises effectively will largely depend upon whether we’ve planned well in advance, whether we’ve thought through how we’re going to mobilize at those critical moments.

Thomas Homer-Dixon

I was about to just bookmark this excellent interview with Thomas Homer-Dixon on del.icio.us (thanks Kirsty!), when I stopped and wondered how the title would look in my “Quick links” in the sidebar of this site. “Is the Deadly Crash of Our Civilization Inevitable?” It’s a catchy kinda title, but not one that captures the important depth of Homer-Dixon’s main point.

At a glance, from that “just catch the headlines” kind of perspective that I’m as guilty of as anyone, it may very well trigger a response such as, “Ah, he’s still banging on about the end of the world.” Someone who’s not read my stuff before, someone highly informed and intelligent, may very well pigeon-hole me as a “doomer“.

There are, of course, a whole load of people out there with very skewed perspectives. (And they’re always “out there”, aren’t they?) Considerations of some form of collapse of civilization attract everyone on a spectrum from intelligent people with heart to nihilist fuck-ups. (And we often forget this spectrum is drawn through every human heart…) People wanting to keep their peckers up may understandably get riled at the nihilists; but in their zeal, they sometimes dismiss reasoned, compassionate, clear-headed insights, too.

Homer-Dixon’s voice seems incredibly valuable in this debate, and I urge every to read the above interview. He’s the clearest advocate I’ve come across so far of the idea that (1) collapse is inevitable, but (2) what form it takes and how bad it is depends on our admitting to this and dealing with it as soon as possible.

He rightly criticizes Jared Diamond for his view that collapse of as complex a system as Western civilization may be avoidable with enough creativity and effort. I found Diamond’s take to be analogous to Howard Bloom‘s implied argument in The Lucifer Principle. In this otherwise excellent book, Bloom seemed to me to be saying: “America should learn from history. Every empire in the past has become flaccid and complacent and fallen to barbarian hordes. If we recognise this, we may avoid such a fate.” The other obvious lesson to draw from history here is that America, too, will become flaccid, and fall.

This is felt by many to be “fatalistic”. It’s endlessly fascinating to me that not a small percentage of these people will be among those who place their faith (and I use that word provocatively as well as accurately) in science, and in most areas of life will defer to the scientific method of seeing how things have behaved in the past, and infer behaviour in the future from this. As Homer-Dixon points out,

When you look at research that’s come out over the last 15 to 20 years, the most complex adaptive systems in the world all go through patterns of growth and increasing complexity till eventually they become rigid and break down. Then they reorganize themselves, regenerate and regrow. All highly adaptive systems have breakdown in them at some point or other.

The parallel is also drawn to our individual experience, and the salient example of addiction and the “hitting bottom” phenomena. Most know from personal experience that when we slip into a destructive furrow, collapse of this condition can be postponed, but not avoided, if our compass is to be reset.

Our hope has always been that the greater unit that we’re part of will fulfill the longings for immortality that—religious fantasy and brainwashing notwithstanding—always seem so futile for our selves.

The fact is, it merely has a longer lifespan.

The Apocalypse has Four Horsemen: climate change, habitat destruction, industrial agriculture, and poverty. Each Horseman holds a whip called Growth in his hand. None can be stopped unless all are stopped.

David Foley

A quote from the comments of a must-read WorldChanging.com post by Alex Steffen. I have my disagreements with some of his attitudes, but reading this I realize the disagreements are minor compared to the common ground. Alex is right on the mark here.

We look at the current debate on climate change and find a little relief in the fact that the scientific basis for it, the reality of the matter at hand, is no longer a debate; all that is debated now is how to tackle it. Steffen points out that this is just one aspect of the problem we face, and too narrow a focus on it—however important it is in itself—will leave us prey to the kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

We still need to build another consensus; one that will inevitably entail subsequent debates about how we approach the issue, but as with climate change, we need to reach a basic agreement about the reality of the matter. This reality is the complexity, subtlety, dense interconnectedness, and multiplicity of the world we live in. Ecological thinking, where any narrow focus is merely a temporary expedient, and where appreciation of delicately interwoven, mutually influential patterns is the core, needs to become widespread, quickly.

Any regulars here will know that I feel the root of our blindness in this matter is found in the suppression of polytheistic animism by monotheism, and that, without “going back”, we need to re-awaken this archaic heritage, to pour this aged wine into the skins we wield these days, in order to dissolve the hardened, blinkered inheritance of the One God. This reduction of the world has been perpetuated by the linear causality models of science. Endless, pointless debates about whether X or Y or Z causes something… with a quiet voice somewhere trying to suggest that each is a factor.

It’s time for that quiet voice to become louder.

The stand-out item so far has to be McKenna’s telling of a then very recent tall tale from the psychedelic information ocean. It’s a kind of Gnostic alternative history, obviously chiming with Philip K. Dick and Grant Morrison’s fictional truths in the same vein. It has an appropriate mixture of vivid, bewitching detail and convenient vagueness (although you get the impression McKenna’s download of the information could have been unpacked to a much finer degree if anyone had given him the chance). In short, it’s as paradoxical as the man himself: flipped one way, it’s blatantly McKenna’s own historical wet dream; flipped the other way, it’s an oddly beguiling possibility with a delirious grandeur of its own. I thought it was worth transcribing in full. He starts in response to someone’s questions to him:

You’re such a skillful questioner that you’ve brought yourself to the doorway of my most recent mania. Maybe I should unburden myself briefly about it. One of the weird things about growth, or trying to make your ideas always become new, is that you always assume you’re going to know what the next step is. That even though you’re going to become more and more enlightened, there won’t be any surprises. So, a few weeks ago I was meditating in my usual fashion, and I began to get this “new idea”, which was so weird that I immediately shifted into, “This is not the truth, this is not a transmission about the nature of reality. This is a plot for a science fiction novel that I should write!” I tried to hold that as my defence, that was my shield against the onslaught of this thing.

I’ve never been one for Atlantis, or Lemuria, all these invisible prehistoric lands and places that people enjoy so much, but I was told a very funny thing, which I will share with you. It’s a funny idea. Let’s see, how does it go? It has two versions, one of which speaks a scientific language, the other speaks a mythological language. So the scientific language goes something like this…

There’s something in the universe called a “Fractal Soliton of Improbability”. This means it’s a unique event, it only happens once in the lifetime of a universe. You can think of it as a wavelength with one wave; that’s why it’s called a soliton. These things move, not in ordinary three-dimensional space, but in some kind of much higher spatial manifold. And when they collide with a planet, or when one collides with a planet in a universe, the time-stream of that planet is divided, and two copies of that planet spring into existence, without either having any knowledge of it. It’s just something which happens. So, this voice was telling me that this had happened to the Earth, and that this was the secret that we were all striving to understand; that an event in the past had actually divided our time-stream, and that a twin of this planet had come into being in another dimension.

OK, so that’s the scientific explanation. So the mythological explanation was, that the universe is Gnostic. The universe is the creation of the Demiurge, not the highest expression of divinity, but a kind of demon, a fallen creature. This Demiurge was able to coax itself into being, actually incarnate into history as a human being. And when this happened, this was the mythological expression of the Fractal Soliton of Improbability. When it happened, the time-stream split. The time-splitting event had to do with the career of Christ, who was an extraordinary manifestation of energy in the historical time-stream; not to be confused with a Buddha or a Mohammed or a Zoroaster, who were great saints—this was something else. It was in some sense what it claimed to be—but in some sense.

So at the moment of—and you can choose either the Immaculate Conception or the Resurrection, depending on which side of the bed you got up on today—at that moment, the time-stream split, and this other place came into being, without having any awareness of it. They were identical at that moment, these two worlds.

What I forgot to say was, this event, the Fractal Soliton of Improbability, has this quantum-mechanical half-charge, so in one of the universes it happens, and in the other universe it doesn’t happen. So everything about these two worlds was the same, except in one of them the Immaculate Conception or the Resurrection had not taken place. Now, because Christ had no children, in the world in which he was absent, it was not a genetic line that was missing, it was an ideological line which never received expression. And consequently, as time passed, first decades, and then centuries, the absence of this particular intellectual influence in the world changed the world radically, in the following way: Greek science did not suffer the suppression that occurred with the conversion of Constantine; the Academies were not closed; the Hermetic knowledge was not repressed. Conversely, the Empire was stronger, and was able to repel the barbarian invasions of the 2nd to the 5th century, and mathematics, which had halted in our world at Diophantus, proceed through his disciple Hypatia to develop a calculus by AD 370. So that the millennium of Christian stasis that occurred in our world did not occur in that world.

As time passed, and engineering advances occurred, by around 850 they had ships that were able to cross the Atlantic Ocean. And they encountered the Mayan civilization reaching its fullest flower in Guatemala and in the Yucatan peninsula. In fact, in this vision I saw the Roman Emperor Cosmodorus the Fifth make a pilgrimage to Tikal in 920 to be present at the coronation of a king at the end of Baktun 8. Anyway, this Greco-Roman imperial culture immediately recognized the genius of the Mayans in mathematics and astronomy, and Europe was… transformed, into an amalgamation, a Greco-Mayan civilization, and this civilization continued to develop.

Now one of the influences which the Mayans brought into Europe around the year 950 was their extremely sophisticated psychopharmacopeia, and shamanism. And this mated with Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, so that rather than science developing as it developed in our world, a kind of magical, psychopharmacolytic technology of thought and understanding was what was developed over the centuries. And in later centuries, centuries before it happened in our world, they contacted the Orient, and the dynastic influence of the Sung poured itself into the creation of a global civilization. Such that, by around 1200 AD they were able to land on the moon, and create a cybernetic global civilization similar to the kind we have now.

They continued evolving, with all this psychotronic and shamanically-derived… well, by now you can imagine it was an unbelievably exotic and alien civilization compared to our own. The fruits of their psychedelic and psychoanalytic investigations into higher space was the discovery of our world. They found out what had happened. They figured it out, by studying dreams, and by making deep journeys into the psychedelic space, they were able to discover our sleeping unconscious, with its repository of the legacy of the Christian centuries under the reign of this Demiurgic ideology. And they conceived of the notion of saving us. And it has to do with this whole thing about the UFOs, and influencing dreams, and astral travelling… and the Other Side is actually the manifestation of this bizarre Greco-Mayan, postmodern star-faring civilization, trying to reach across the dimensions to save us from the momentum of our history, by making us aware of, first of all their existence, and also their technology, which is evolving toward a point where I think around the Mayan millennium, around 2012, we will flow past the time island, and the two time-streams will be rejoined. And we will make peace with this civilization that is now a thousand years more advanced than us, with this totally different cultural history, and this completely different take on reality.

So, this came to me in the space of about fifteen seconds…

[A discussion ends in a question about our destructiveness to plant ecologies versus what might have happened in the other world...]

They were developing and exploring technical options many hundreds of years ago, and they discovered the theoretics for nuclear fusion and fission, but they never used it. Until a few hundred years later, one of their great theoreticians—this was after they had discovered our time-stream—made the prediction that the physics of atomic explosions were such that they would cross the time-stream. And so they performed an experiment by detonating an atomic device in what is our year 1907. And this was the Tunguska event! And then, by monitoring the dreams of Siberian shamans, which they had in clear focus, they saw, “Aha! This explosion which we set off actually did occur in both time-streams.” And at that point, they became very interested in monitoring our time-stream, because they were picking up the dreams of a Swiss telegraph worker, who seemed to be pushing toward an unimaginable conclusion… So now there is a certain amount of urgency, because if we explode our atomic stockpiles, it will wreck the place that they call Home World. It’s not self-preservation, because they now have starflight, and encompass many systems, but preservation of Home World, which on the other side is a vast botanical and ecological preserve from pole to pole. It’s a sacred site of pilgrimage; it’s the home of the species, the Earth. And the notion that suddenly great parts of it will be blown apart by leakage from hyperspace of one of our atomic wars is impelling them now to attempt to open the doorway, and re-join the time-streams. We’ll be allowed a few years inside the botanical park to acclimate, and then most people will ship off for the stars, I imagine.

I also noted a couple of quotes from the series in which he talks with Nicole Maxwell about Amazonian shamanism, the first from MP3 1B, the second from 5A (wow, remember tapes—they had sides).

I have an obsessive need to create a certain kind of closure, so excuse me for about five minutes while I do it. It’s to satisfy an itch of mine. It’s the need to tie it all together, to make some kind of sense of it.

And then, discussing the Taoist aesthetic:

Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, language. You just have to live in this state of dynamic disequilibrium, which, if sustained long enough, and in sufficient taste, becomes a life well lived.

On the one hand we see the paradox at the heart of his 2012 / Timewave theory, the positing of a colossal endpoint in a theory derived from the I Ching, itself the fruit of flow-obsessed Taoism. On the other, we see his all-too-human contradictions: a flawed nature that he never hid, to his credit, and which is a valuable antidote to over-seriousness about the theories he espoused.

Anyway, thanks for the ideas, Terence.

The Christian-positivist vision of linear progress toward a total overhaul of our worldly lot has crept into most corners of modern life. It animated two of the great political projects, two of the great horrors of the 20th century: the Nazi attempt to initiate the Third Reich and Soviet efforts to rapidly collectivize and industrialize Russia. It also animates the now-dominant political model of neo-liberal free-market globalization. The negative consequences of this third push for ever-denser industrialization and “development” are—thanks to its more distributed, less centralized nature—a little harder to judge than for the previous two. It seems to me, though, that its political short-sightedness and mystical economic faith in the market may soon leave us stranded on a shore at least as repellent as those on which Nazism and Soviet Marxism ran aground.

(I’d like to pause to direct the attention of any reader who now thinks I’m a “doomsayer”, or whatever simplistic pigeon-hole you have handy, to the word “may” in the last sentence. Thank you.)

After spending a while heavily influenced by the eschatology of people like Terence McKenna, Norman O. Brown and Robert Anton Wilson, I ended up nurturing what I think is a healthy cynicism towards them. Most people with a strong positivist bent would—understandably—criticize the vision of someone like McKenna as being too passive and mystical. The idea that there’s some cosmic teleology at work in the world is anathema to the humanist vision of self-determination, of history being “in our hands”.

But then, in looking at the extreme humanism and self-determination of, say, Stalinism, I find myself thinking that some sort of balance between a positive, activist approach, and a larger vision of the limits of our powers within the system of nature is advised.

The pressing issue of our collective response to our huge ecological problems is the main arena in which I’ve been seeing this interplay between positivist activism and… heck, is there a word for it? For an acceptance of the existence of natural limitations (with room for debate on what they are), a non-human-centric view that isn’t confused with the resignation or despair of nihilism? Animism is certainly related, but far from accurate for what I’m trying to label. I’m sure there’s a fair few pejorative terms for the view, though I can’t even think of them off-hand. I suppose this just demonstrates further how removed from this philosophy our culture is. We can’t even refer to it easily. For convenience here, I’ll call it (with tongue firmly in cheek) “Grayism”.

The dark sides of both views can be found in Alex Steffen’s bold, generally well-reasoned “problem statement”, ‘Winning The Great Wager’. He talks of responses to the burgeoning planetary population, and discusses the “die off” idea: the proposal that we are living out a natural cycle, that humans are animals, and like many animal populations in the past, we have blindly overshot the capacity of the ecosystem to support us, and when we reach the limits of the resources we need, balance will arrive in the form of loads of people dying.

This strikes the heart of the positivist vs. Grayist clash. Positivism holds that science elevates us beyond the blindness of animals. Within this framework, the idea that we still bound by natural ecological cycles is a heresy. As positivists hold that we are masters of our destiny, Grayists are seen as actively choosing the distasteful limits of such cycles.

The die-off plan isn’t discussed much in liberal polite company. That it’s ever discussed at all—at the tail end of a century that saw the Nazis, the killing fields of Cambodia and ethnic genocides from Armenia to Rwanda to Bosnia—is disgusting. It rings like jackboots on cobblestones to imply that a large number of one’s fellow beings shouldn’t be here, or may not be able to survive.

Steffen makes no direct reference to the specific “die-offers” he’s responding to, so certain distinctions are lost. No doubt, there are people who think “those of us in the wealthy part of the world ought to hunker down, arm ourselves and let everyone else die off.” However, most people I know who consider “die off” as a plausible future scenario see it as a wholly abhorrent possibility to be mitigated by all means: a reality that may have to be faced, not a plan than should be put into effect. The reference to the atrocities of Nazism and the Khmer Rouge neatly forgets that the ideologies driving these regimes were positivist attempts to actively change social destiny. Passive acceptance of natural limits was the furthest thing from the minds of the architects of these slaughters.

We should also note how in the last sentence, the two positions (“that a large number of one’s fellow beings shouldn’t be here”, or that they “may not be able to survive”) are conflated using the jackboot image. The former is judgement, the latter speculation. But positivist humanism doesn’t allow speculation: we are in control. (There’s an obvious clash—or, more charitably, dynamic—here within positivism, between the active nature of humanism and the observational nature of science, but that’s another story.)

Having decided on everyone’s behalf that the concept of “die-off” can only be an active plan, not an observation of possibility, Steffen ends the debate in the strongest possible terms:

No, we need to table all talk of die-off, altogether, forever. In fact, as Bruce Sterling says, we ought to be compiling dossiers on those advocating inaction for use in later trials for crimes against humanity.

I shall have to tread carefully here. One wrong move and I’ll be executed in the future by a sci-fi writer! While I assume there’s at least a hint of humour in there, the zeal of good intentions gives me pause. There’s certainly some repellent attitudes involved: the assumption that one’s own vision of causality, in a matter as complex as the interactions between our entire species and the entire biosphere, is accurate enough to entertain the idea of legally judging people; and the totalitarian idea of punishing verbal advocacy as if it constituted an actual deed.

Well, let’s pass that bit off as relatively harmless over-enthusiasm. To me the key point is that Grayist die-offers who are genuinely nice people with enough integrity to consider negative as well as positive future scenarios generally tend towards strategies of mitigation. We’re going to hit natural limits, there’s nothing we can do about that. But we can choose how we respond to it. We can curtail our economic growth voluntarily to meet the limits with some dignity, rather than tripping right over them.

This, though, is clearly a form of positivist vision. Instead of remaking human nature in order to transcend natural limits, to make them irrelevant, the idea is to remake human nature to actively foresee and harmonize with natural limits. Is this not also a delusory idea that we can remake human nature on rational foundations?

OK, so it’s a bit positivist—though of a Gaian rather than Christian tone. While positivism has a definite place in human life, it will always be forced to interact with the realities of the natural limitations around us, and the instinctual foundations within us. Both are subject to change, but neither are wholly within our hands. Our free-market economies ignore both, to an extent, in their belief that mere market demand can conjure things out of thin air, and in their belief that anyone who buys stuff is a “rational economic actor”. Such fanciful notions can only fail miserably in the end.

Hopes and dreams are part of our nature, our foundations; an extreme Grayist position of trying to do without them denies its own philosophy. But history shows that they shouldn’t be allowed free reign, even—or especially—when faced with bleak situations. On the personal scale, the Milgram experiment suggested that obedience to authority, not aggressive self-assertion, lay behind the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. But was it not the entrenched, unquestioned positivist hopes of fascist nationalism (in Germany) and scientific progress (in Milgram’s America) that fuelled such devastating conformity? Possessed by the demon of hope, a demon which may rage all the more violently for being trapped in a corner, we are capable of terrible things. Let’s not banish the demon of acceptance too far from our midst.

by Gyrus

So many people have asked me in consternation: "Why aren’t you doing the last part of Towards 2012?" Well, I’ve decided to include ‘Apocalypse’ as a section at the back of this issue for a few reasons. When I initiated and planned out this project in 1995, I had no idea that it’d become a tome of these proportions. Those of you with a copy of the first issue will be able to see that I optimistically set the release date for the last one at April 1997! At the rate it’s been going, that’s over 2 years off course. It’s been a great project to do, but frankly I don’t want to be still doing it this time next year. Other Things beckon…

That’s a mundane reason. Beyond that, my ideas and feelings about the whole ’2012 scenario’ have radically changed in the past three years. I’m still influenced by most of the people I absorbed my postmodern eschatology from—Terence McKenna, William S. Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, Arthur Koestler, Norman O. Brown, Philip K. Dick, Wilhelm Reich—but I simply wouldn’t feel honest and passionate now about doing a whole issue devoted to apocalyptic ideas. As it is, I’m very happy that’s it’s ending with ‘Paganism’, as this is where the larger part of my heart has been all along.

Naturally, the most common question I’ve been asked has been: "So what’s all this ’2012′ business about then?" Sometimes I’ve actually been stumped! To be honest, it’s actually been quite a while since I was really interested in why this could be such a ‘special’ date, and I’ve had to trawl my memory and summon up enthusiasm to explain it on occasions. Cue expressions of mystification at why someone who spends all their time doing a mag called Towards 2012 goes "Er…" when asked what the title means!

When I sat down to write this piece, I was all set to just reel off my reasons for not being really taken by the ’2012 scenario’ anymore. Ironically, within days I was more fascinated by McKenna’s theories than I had been in years! So for those of you still baffled by the title, here goes…

Amazonian time & the I Ching

In 1971, Terence McKenna, then a former student radical and wanted hash smuggler, made his way into the depths of the Amazon jungle with a small group of friends, including his brother Dennis. They had intended to search for a rare plant psychedelic containing dimethyltryptamine (DMT), but ended up mostly feasting on Stropharia cubensis, a type of psilocybin mushroom. A bizarre psychoactive experiment was formulated between the brothers, wherein they attempted to bond harmine DNA (harmine is another psychedelic compound they used synergetically with the mushrooms) with their own neural DNA, through the use of vocal techniques(!). This, they reasoned, would give them access to the collective memory bank of the species, as well as manifesting the fabled alchemists’ Philosopher’s Stone—which they visualized as a UFO-like hyperdimensional union of spirit and matter. If you want to see what did happen, read McKenna’s excellent True Hallucinations. For now, it’s enough to know that McKenna’s experiences led him to spend night after night gazing at the stars pondering the nature of time (it comes to us all), and this in turn led him to study the ancient Chinese divinatory system, the I Ching, for a few clues about time from the Orient.

His basic conclusion was that the sequence of hexagrams in the I Ching are ordered in a highly structured, artificial way—one that codified the nature of time’s flow in the world. A hexagram is a combination of six lines, each being either yin or yang (example to the right). There are 64 hexagrams in total, in a set sequence. McKenna mapped out the inner structure of the sequence by calculating how many lines changed from yin to yang, or vice versa, from hexagram to hexagram. He then filtered this data through a complex series of tables and graphs, and finished up with a wave-form that he called ‘Timewave Zero’ (figure 1, below). This is all laid out in detail in The Invisible Landscape.

Figure 1. A section of the Timewave. The boxed portion to the right encloses a sub-section that figures 3-7 are fractal correlates of.

I have to admit that the precise reasoning behind this process eludes me; even more beyond my comprehension is the mathematical formulation of the theory, put together by Peter Meyer for the software. I think you have to be pretty well-versed in maths to understand—and hence criticize—the underpinnings of the Timewave. I asked Terence about the slightly elitist nature of this situation, and he simply replied: "Go back again and study it carefully, it’s quite straightforward." Either he was being a bit obnoxious, or declining educational standards have affected me more than I thought!

There are actually several variations of the Timewave. The Timewave Zero software is based upon the numerical series originally generated by McKenna from the I Ching, as documented in The Invisible Landscape. When analysing the construction of the original timewave from the I Ching numbers in 1994 Peter Meyer found a step, named by him "the mysterious half-twist", which McKenna had not mentioned (and of which, when asked, he said he knew nothing). The deletion of this step produces a slightly different timewave (named after the mathematician Matthew Watkins, who also made a study of the timewave which was severely critical of its foundations).

Proceeding from a quite different perspective, John Sheliak developed an alternative series of numbers, which gave rise to what McKenna called "Timewave One". McKenna described this as a "correction" of the original Timewave; however, Peter Meyer regards the Sheliak construction as unfounded and erroneous. Presumably, in a speculative arena such as this, with no orthodox laws to govern the ‘correct’ way of doing things, we should see alternate versions of the wave as just that, alternatives. There is yet another alternative set of I Ching numbers that generates what is known as the "Huang Ti" wave. All work here is based on the Timewave Zero software (called "Fractal Time" in its final 1999 version), but I don’t think the discrepancies between this and other versions will affect my general criticisms.

The Timewave graph is supposed to depict the ebb and flow of ‘novelty’ and ‘habit’ in the universe. When the timeline climbs up, habit (routine, convention, ruts to get stuck in) increases. When the line dips down, novelty (creativity, connectedness, weird shit) increases. An in-built feature of the wave is that at a certain point it hits the bottom of the graph—it goes off the scale. Novelty is maximized, as far as the variables of this system (the universe) go.

With this graph in his hands, McKenna tried mapping it onto the historical record, looking at key points where things seemed to have really taken off, and matching them to the big dips in the line. Specifically, he opted for the bombing of Hiroshima as an unarguably ‘novel’ event. The structure of his Timewave dictated that extremely novel events unfolded in cycles of 6 x 64 x 64 = 24,576 days (67.29 years). Adding this sum to the date of Hiroshima gave him an end-date in November 2012 CE. It was well after settling on this date that he found out someone else had come to a very similar conclusion. The calendar of the time-obsessed Mayan culture appears to come to the end of a 5,125-year cycle on 21st December (the winter solstice) of the same year, and McKenna adjusted the end-date to conform with this venerable tradition.

The Novelty of End-Times

What will actually happen on 21/12/2012? Many possibilities have been suggested: time travel, ‘universal enlightenment’, alien landings, the Second Coming… If McKenna’s theory is correct, we won’t be able to even conceive of the event until it arrives. An easy way to understand this is to make a graph with an exponential curve on it—here’s one I made earlier (below).

Figure 2. A simple graph showing how in the Timewave, novelty (or the acceleration of evolution) proceeds at an exponentially increasing rate.

I’ve made the vertical axis increase in value as it goes down to correspond to the Timewave. Novelty in the Timewave graph ebbs and flows, with peaks and troughs, but overall it increases. This increase is shown in the simplified curve in fig. 2. The increase does not proceed at a steady rate—it increases faster and faster and faster and faster… until it eventually ‘goes vertical’, corresponding to the Timewave line going off the scale.

Now, imagine that the line on this simplified graph is a tube, and you’re inside it, hurtling along like some crazy species trying to escape from the dead weight of the past… How far can you see ahead? There’s always a certain view down the tube before it bends round out of sight. But as you approach the vertical part—where novelty keeps on increasing despite the flow of time having ‘ended’—you never really see around the corner until you’re on top of it.

But to truly understand the Timewave, you have to grasp its fractal nature. Look at figure 1. At the far right of the wave, there are two tiny peaks, huddling against a slightly larger one. If this bit is magnified and stretched out a bit, you get something like this:

Figure 3: The last 6 billion years as seen through the Timewave. Key events depicted here are the formation of Earth and the rise of life. The box to the right is shown with an arrow to indicate that the next graph, figure 4, is a magnification of this portion. Dates are shown in years before present.

The section of the wave in fig. 1 can be seen again (though not in much detail) as the near-level part on the far right. So you can blow up that very last bit again and get the same shape, describing a much shorter span of time. These descending nests of fractal hierarchies carry on ad infinitum (or rather, ad 2012). This is the part that really got me into it again. The Timewave gives a shape to history and, whether it’s the ‘true’ shape or not, playing around with it got me much more fascinated and excited by the past than I’ve ever been with a ‘flat line’ image—time as ‘simple duration’—informing my idea of history’s form.

So does the Timewave’s description of "the ingression of novelty into the universe" tally with what we know about the appearance of novel events in the past? Look for yourself.

Figure 4: The last 94 million years: the emergence of humans. Dates are shown in years before present.

Figure 5: The last 1.5 million years: the development of human culture. Dates are shown in years before present.

Figure 6: The last 23 thousand years: agriculture, metallurgy, writing, civilisation and the genesis of world religions.

Figure 7: The last 360 years: the Industrial Revolution, telecommunications, atomic energy and space travel.

These snippets of ‘key events’ in history are naturally a bit selective; and because the unfolding of evolution on Earth has proceeded at an ever-accelerating rate, it is natural that in each snapshot of the wave, many significant events are bunched up on that last little plateau. But some very interesting correspondences emerge.

According to Timewave theory, each section of the wave resonates with every other section that has an identical structure. So the development of the first tools among pre-hominid apes, and the emergence of our ancestor Homo habilis (figure 4) resonate with the first recorded deliberate deposition in a human burial, and the ‘Human Revolution’—which saw Homo sapiens spreading across the globe and developing art (figure 5). Likewise, the first appearance of Homo sapiens and the first recorded human-built structure (fig. 5) archaic ploughing sceneresonate with the rise of dynastic Egypt and the flowering of European megalithic culture (figure 6). Perhaps most significantly, the first glimmerings of human intervention in nature for food production, i.e. the start of the Agricultural Revolution (fig. 6), occupies the same ‘novelty trough’ as the Industrial Revolution in figure 7.

Criticism time!

These are just a few examples of the Timewave’s ‘successes’, and there are many more—just pore over the graphs for a while, and maybe grab a few of those dusty history books off your shelves. But does it trip up at all? McKenna’s said that if it fails once, it fails utterly; so let’s check it out.

In his own work he’s highlighted the trough starting at 14,000 BCE (fig. 6) as showing the ‘Magdelanian Revolution’, the explosion of cave art in the late Palaeolithic. Yet some paintings at Lascaux date back to 17,000 BCE, and this date, along with the invention of Mesolithic tools, appears near the peak of a steep climb into habit. Perhaps these acted as catalysts for the impending plunge into novelty?

Well, this brings up what I feel to be a major glitch in Timewave theory, which I came across while searching for historical correspondences. Look at the last large peak of habit in fig. 6. On the tape that comes with the Timewave software, McKenna says that Homer’s epic poetry appeared here as a trigger for the steep descent into novelty—classical Greek civilization, a prime catalyst for the modern world. A similar type of event may be seen in fig. 7, where the invention of the telephone in 1876 seems to plunge us into an increase of novelty, which only abates twice before the full bloom of global telecommunications in the late 20th century.

Isn’t this having it both ways? When a novel event appears at the bottom of a trough—like cattle domestication in 6000 BCE—that’s fine, novelty’s high at that point. But when one appears on a ‘habit peak’—Bell and the phone, Homer and his epics, or the appearance of Mesolithic tools—that’s fine too. It’s a ‘trigger’ for the next descent into weirdness. You can’t lose!

By the way, it’s important to note that ‘novelty’ doesn’t necessarily imply ‘good’. The first atomic bomb being detonated in 1945 was pretty novel, but not so great. So novelty maximization in 2012 could end up being something like the sun exploding!

Given that the wave is derived from the proto-Taoist I Ching, I also find it strange that the Timewave has a definite end built into it. To my understanding, Taoism, before it developed into a full-blown formal religion, was profoundly anti-eschatological—not at all bothered about ‘final destiny’ or ‘a singularity at the end of time’. It’s deeply concerned with change, yes; but the ‘maximization of novelty’ points to something more than just ‘the next step’. It hints at something ‘final’ and ‘complete’—notions that don’t seem to fit well into the Taoist sense of flow.

McKenna’s pretty consistent these days in his cheerleading for the Eschaton, but such was not the case when he was laying the foundation for his philosophy. In The Invisible Landscape, he and his brother write:

As moderns and necessarily skeptics, we have assumed that although the hypothesis points toward an eventual involution of the temporal manifold, a concrescence, there is little likelihood of such an event occurring in the immediate present.

Some pages later we find them saying: "The nearness of a major concresence to our own time is a self-evident fact…"!

We also find a potentially refreshing self-critical line being taken:

The question of the moment of this true rupture of plane is difficult; it seems most millenarian speculations decode as giving critical importance to the age in which they were composed.

But nothing is ever made of this. Obviously, for this point is probably the best objection to apocalyptic thinking there is. The End is always just around the corner, from where you’re standing—making it a pretty subjective affair, not ‘universal’ at all.

As it stands, the Timewave’s predictions for the run-up to 2012 are staggering. Comparing our own age in fig. 7 to the other graphs, we can see that the start of the 90s resonates with the emergence of life onto land 400 million years ago, and the hominids’ debut 4 million years ago. And we’ve just entered a 5 year period that resonates directly with the Human Revolution (fig. 5), when sea-faring and art first crystallized. Furthermore, McKenna states that, due to the acceleration of novelty’s ingression, about half of the total evolution of our 72-plus-billion-year old universe will occur in the last 0.3 seconds before 6.00am on 21/12/2012! If we take the formation of the cosmos, the rise of life, or the discovery of language as examples of key ‘barriers’ that universal evolution passes through, McKenna’s calculations tell us that thirteen such barriers will be passed in the last 0.0075 seconds!!

This theory is staggering, unimaginable, and inspiring in a way that’s intense but very hard to grasp (until you smoke DMT I suppose). It’s also amazingly ‘West-centred’ (never mind human-centred). Post-industrial cultures appear to be going through an ever-intensifying series of changes that could point to a major transformation in the next 15 or so years. But what about ‘undeveloped’ cultures, and those whose religious/calendrical systems have nothing special on the cards for the near future? Were the hidden forces that dish out the inspiration for sacred calendars having a laugh when they gave these people ‘wrong’ time-scales? "Look at those dorks, they don’t know what’s gonna hit them!" And what about the (admittedly very few) indigenous tribes still relatively untouched by the ‘progress’ of the last 10,000 years?

McKenna’s answer to this at his presentation of the Timewave at the ICA, London, in 1996 was that "history isn’t politically correct"—i.e. it’s untouched by our liberal concern for humans who haven’t been caught up in its vortex. Well, neo-Nazis aren’t PC either. What makes History—as in the evolution of technology since the Agricultural Revolution—worth going along with unto its final conclusion?

History is an angel
Being blown backwards
Into the future
History is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back
And fix things
To repair things that have been broken
But there’s a storm blowing from paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards
Into the future
And this storm
This storm is called Progress

Laurie Anderson, ‘The Dream Before’

Time & Tantra

You may have noticed that all the people I listed at the start as inspirations for my eschatological leanings were men. Is eschatology a gender issue? It’s not really discussed, is it? I’d be interested to find out about any exceptions, but as far as I can see, all the cultures and religions that are big on apocalyptics are pretty patriarchal.

The idea of a point at the end of history, or the universe—McKenna’s "concrescence of novelty"—is the flip-side of everything exploding out from a singularity at the beginning. The Omega Point and the Big Bang are like bookends of unification at either end of the flow of time. They can also be seen as Vast Ejaculations (now there’s an album title). Douglas Rushkoff first pointed out to me the masculine sexuality underlying apocalyptic ideas. And as I created that ‘simplified curve’ graph in fig. 2, I noticed the sexual innuendo in the idea of human knowledge ‘going vertical’ (fnarr, fnarr). The Big Bang isn’t really that far from Egyptian creation myths where gods bring things forth by beating off. And the Timewave is breakneck rush towards a crescendo of connectedness and barrier-dissolution—a Cosmic Climax.

This all sounds great, but I also wonder: where’s the female orgasm? What about continuous waves of full-body, non-linear ecstasy, with no focal point and no singular ‘explosion’? Not that all women experience this, or that it’s exclusive to women. (Then again, ejaculation isn’t strictly exclusive to men, but let’s not complicate our metaphors more than necessary!) Such experiences of wave-orgasm are the focus of most sexual mysticism, for both sexes. There’s no Point to this ecstasy, but it ain’t ‘pointless’! Does it have no place in eschatology? Would the concepts of the Omega Point, the Apocalypse, Judgement Day, Timewave Zero, etc. even exist if this experience was more common than the "sneeze in the genitals", as Alan Watts has called the average male orgasm? Well, there’s only one way to find out!

Are we yearning for a quick and catastrophic explosion to relieve the tension—the tension of information overload, the tension of tightly measured time, the tension of too much undigested history? Dare we step back for a moment amidst this frantic rush towards the Climax, and question the assumptions behind linear masculine eschatology—even as we approach the Deadline? As Mogg Morgan says,

If you feel yourself approaching the point of ‘no return’, maybe ask your partner to pause, and make any adjustments necessary to prevent ejaculation or climax . . . . As the urge for ejaculation or release subsides, you may feel the warm sexual glow spreading throughout your whole pelvic region, opening out other energy centres sometimes called chakras. A strange thing happens: you become like an erotic landscape, a sea of sensation. Try to regard the time you have spent in this ‘build up’ to ejaculation as part of the orgasm. Viewed this way, perhaps you can see that an orgasm, for both men and women, is actually a lot more intense than those few moments of ejaculation or climax.

‘The Erotic Landscape‘

The aim of sexual mysticism and magick isn’t always the total inhibition of coming—it’s more to do with intensifying the orgasmic trance through diffusing the ‘explosion’ of coming throughout the body, and relaxing more fully into every nuance of psycho-physical sensation that arises. A key part of it is perhaps one of the great Keys to Magick—avoiding Lust of Result, a.k.a. attachment, goal-oriented consciousness, striving, or ‘pushing the river’. Paradox time again. Orgasmic trance is more intense if you don’t try to intensify it, or even try to reach orgasm at all. This is the heart of Taoist philosophy: wu wei, ‘not pushing’.

McKenna’s well aware of all this, but here I’m trying to address the general way that our goal-oriented culture reacts to impending mega-events. There’s also the issue of whether McKenna’s right in his assumption that the creators of the I Ching believed in some sort of grand concrescence at the end of time. He argues in The Invisible Landscape that the I Ching originated with proto-Taoist shamans in Neolithic China, and functioned as a lunar calendar system as well as a divinatory device. His arguments here are convincing, as is his insistence on the importance of fractal-based models and resonance to the developers of this oracular artefact. Not quite so convincing is the idea that the shamans who gave birth to Taoism would have put a Full Stop or an Exclamation Mark at the end of their universe, and carefully knitted it into the structure of their sacred symbol system. A Comma, maybe—or a Question Mark?

This isn’t to say I think that there definitely is not a stupendous hyperdimensional object hovering 14 years ahead of us, inexorably drawing all matter and consciousness into its pulsating heart of light. When I decided to make this ‘Apocalypse’ bit a mere section at the back of this issue, I jokingly told a friend that I had ‘Cancelled the Apocalypse’. He told McKenna this when he met him, and the reply was, "That’s a bit presumptuous!" And that it is. Well, I haven’t really cancelled it. I’ve merely tried to stop pushing the river.

Let it flow…

End and goal.— Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow

Books used

• The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching by Terence & Dennis McKenna
• Timewave Zero software & documentation by Terence McKenna & Peter Meyer
• Synesthesia by Terence McKenna & Tim Ely
• True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna
• The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna
• Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu
• The Book of Life edited by Stephen Jay Gould
• Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonization by Clive Gamble
• Encyclopaedia of Dates and Events by L.C. Pascoe & B.A. Phythian
• The Cassell Atlas of World History (I highly recommend this, especially the Atlas of the Ancient World section, covering 4,000,000 to 500 BCE, which is, like all the other sub-sections, published in a separate, affordable edition.)
• The Way of Zen by Alan Watts
• Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture by Chris Knight
• The Prehistory of Sex by Timothy Taylor

Note from Peter Meyer: The Timewave Zero software is no longer available, but you can read Dr Matthew Watkins’ essay Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination?.

An Interview with Douglas Rushkoff

by David Kendall

David: How did you get into this?

Douglas: I was a theatre major in college. I went to Princeton, which is a very traditional kind of school, and the theatre people, the music people and the weird people in general hang out together. We were the sort of psychedelic crowd. I moved out west and a lot of the people, the most involved in alternative culture, were also deeply involved in computer software, computer programming, doing high level stuff up in Silicon Valley and I really wanted to find out if all these computer people were like that. I’d remembered computer kids in school, as you know, pocket protector wearing nerds.

David: We have the same image here. You must have picked the most interesting and the most literate specimens of their kind. [The same with] Role players, over here they’re dorks obsessed with power. You don’t get kids saying, "I’m into another hyperspatial reality," interconnecting with another world.

Douglas: You don’t think so? Dungeons and Dragons?

David: Oh yes, they don’t mind a bit of rape and pillage but that’s basically feudal economics.

Douglas: Right, but they don’t have to understand what they’re doing to be doing it. They’re involved in a non-linear reality. They’re involved in roleplaying, without knowing, "Oh, we’re experimenting with other fields of reality."

David: Mmm, I sort of expect that from McKenna and Leary. I read Food of the Gods and enjoyed it. After reading your book I was a bit more sceptical. How did you find him?

Douglas: I think he’s a brilliant guy but he’s got a kind of fundamentalism that bothers me. What he talks about is that there’s a bottleneck effect at the end of time, and that humanity’s going to take this leap into hyperspace. First, I think it’s going to happen but it’s going to be much more subtle than that. It’s not like zoom, we’re out of the physical reality, and two, the problem is, he says that if you have the DMT or psychedelic experience you’ll make it, if you haven’t had that experience you won’t. That’s kind of fucked up. Because that’s exclusionary. To me what the psychedelic experience says to me is that All is One, either we all make it or none of us make it.

David: Yeah, like in Cyberia, a technophobe’s nightmare. If you’re not on the Net, without a computer you can’t get a job, effectively you’re not literate. I’m not sure if it will become like that, any new medium finds its niche. Literacy was an exception, it took over completely, I don’t know about computers. You could become dependent on the Net for all information, all support.

Douglas: But if what you’re saying is true, and the Net becomes the overculture, then the counterculture will go onland. Right now the counterculture’s online and mainstream culture’s in space. And what will happen is the counterculture will be people doing real things.

David: Reading Cyberia, I thought there was a bit of a time lag. Britain seems to be more Pagan than Techno.

Douglas: Well House comes to San Francisco and we incorporate the Pagan thing into technology, it comes here and you guys incorporate technology into the Pagan thing.

David: Yet the way you put it over in Cyberia, it seems much more passive than say Chaos Magick in Britain, which exercises more will than that needed to turn on a computer or drop an acid tab. Plug into the Net and surf Chaos, click your way around the world, and you’ve got "freedom of information," that’s just crap. That’s just an excuse to lay back and enjoy what’s been given to them by sixties radicals.

Douglas: Fine. Even Genesis P-Orridge talks about the ‘bliss’ response. You know, to get the kid into the club you don’t have to let him know he’s coming to a Pagan thing, that he’s coming to unlearn his Christian ethic, question his parents, the Queen and the Pope. The music’s cool, the girls are pretty, everybody’s wearing black make-up or whatever. They come in and they have the bliss response, after they’ve had that I think a different set of desires emerge. I think it’s OK for a first stage. You drop acid for the first time you’re thinking…

David: …mystical thoughts.

Douglas: Yeah, you’re thinking Wow!, but then after the fourth or fifth hour when you’re starting to come down some people get a desperation, how am I going to bring the reality of the state, how am I going to bring all this one consciousness into reality. In the United States that did get downloaded as the environmental movement, the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement.

David: But it wasn’t just acid that did that though.

Douglas: Not just acid, no.

David: By itself what is in Cyberia is not going to produce a revolution [of thought]. I really think it’s another cog inside a wheel that’s turning slowly. [...]

[We shift onto Mayan time.]

Douglas: He [McKenna] sees 2012 as the end of Mayan time, then we go out of history into chaos. We’re in this small intermittent period of control in this vast period of chaos and we’ll go back to it. I think when there’s a fundamental shift in the way people perceive what’s around them, it creates the environment where the sort of changes we’re talking about can happen. It is passive in that sense, feminine whatever. All these people are doing is tilling the soil. They’re not activists in that sense. They’re creating a state of readiness. I mean Rupert Murdoch and the corporate control machine, consumer whatever, they’re the ones who put the wires out there. They’re the ones that created television, telephones, all of that. They had no idea that people were going to start talking out through these things. So you can even look at consumerism, or even the patriarchy, feudalism, all those horrible things. You can look at all of these as the build-up to the release from all that stuff.

David: Mmm. It’s also an escape route for thousands of would-be students who would like to be would-be rebels, by latching onto this they feel they’re rebelling without actually having to go on the streets. A lot of this seems to be to do with image, it’s very important to have the right image—whether that’s all part of a big scheme and in the end our individual worries will be proved groundless, this new reality will appear and we’ll have been shitting ourselves all the way through it and yet it comes about whether we want it or not. I hope it does.

Douglas: In America it’s tricky, because the media reality, the simulacra, and the physical reality are intertwined. People have a hard time telling the difference between the two, people believe that if I buy products from a company that supports a ‘sustainable’ land thing, then I’m supporting the environment. That may not be true but on the other hand I had a journalist talking about just this, people fixing the rainforests and how the rainforests were the lungs of the planet, how they were being destroyed, how we should be down there standing in front of bulldozers and if you’re on the Internet you’re not doing that. Meanwhile, she’s sitting there chainsmoking cigarettes, and I said to her, "If you want to take a fractal approach on the whole thing, I would say, you stop smoking, and the rainforests’ lungs will take care of themselves." Who’s right? I don’t know.

David: Is that enough?

Douglas: From my point of view, from the Cyberian point of view, if the world is a self-similar, fractal kind of thing, then her smoking a cigarette is bulldozers chopping down rainforests. It’s one and the same. Not just in a visible tangible this-cause-leads-to-that-effect. We live in a world where, if our intellectuals are smoking cigarettes, then they are powerless to stop the destruction of the rainforests.

David: Fair enough, but to move to cyberpunk and the computer culture, do you not think there’s a tendency to see the whole world as a binary organism? Using the computer metaphor is OK but it seems people are getting confused between the map and the territory. It’s like Newton’s ‘clockwork universe’, a way of looking at the world, but it’s not the ‘real’ world.

Douglas: I think this is in Cyberia. You know the argument between a surfer and a cartographer, the cartographer would say where are you, above or below a certain degree of latitude, the surfer would say, "I don’t know, I’m on the wave." I would say the surfer is right but he’s using a different map, the chaos map.

David: But a map isn’t the same as the actual environment itself. The computer is just one in a progression of hopefully more accurate maps of the world.

Douglas: Maybe, but there’s what the computer maps and there’s what the computer does. I think what’s valuable about the computer is that it allows people to have a very non-linear experience, allows what feels like a very ancient/psychedelic/pagan experience through technology and in a very safe way. When you log on you really travel.

David: Yeah, but surely nothing in paganism is completely safe.

Douglas: But is it safe? It’s safe to you as a biological organism, but it’s not safe to culture as a discreet control operation. I mean they’re making raves illegal, what’s this called?

David: Criminal Justice Bill.

Douglas: And the right to silence has gone.

David: So do we surf this cultural wave or get out and protest?

Douglas: Is going out on the Internet sitting back, or is it extending out in a way that’s extremely dangerous for those who would control the information we get?

David: For the Cyberian image, they have to believe they’re dangerous to maintain that. There aren’t that many people in England on the Net. Some people can barely afford the phone, so on a purely economic level it seems only a small minority will get it. The Net has to have everybody linked up to be effective.

Douglas: The thing about the Net is that, unlike people who got television sets, they didn’t think, "I want everybody to have a TV so they can all watch this programme," when they get online, they really do want to reach out to other places, so in a way, the way that Rupert Murdoch or whoever is providing this service is going to provide a better and better service. You can talk to people in Somalia, you can talk to people all over the country. If it’s where the money’s to be made, and I don’t know what you’d call me, a libertarian anarchist or something, if it’s where the money is to be made then the Rupert Murdochs of this world have to be there.

David: So it’s going to get cheaper and cheaper and everybody can get linked up.

Douglas: In the States they’re giving away computers.

David: The Net is a displaced power to some extent but you have very little control over it.

Douglas: You don’t want control. You want access.

David: Yes, but your access is limited by factors you can’t control, the phone companies whatever, until you have control over the entire system, when it’s free to use and free of censorship, then you have something approaching a free network. At the moment you’ve got a Net with very few people on it. There’s no guarantee of an intelligent conversation just because you can phone America.

Douglas: I see the Net as very, very new right now. It’s certainly a cheaper way for me to have a conversation with you than on the telephone.

David: Yeah, but I’d just write to you.

Douglas: You could but it’s slow.

David: Yes, but writing gives you more time. My phone conversations are relatively boring, you don’t have the time to create something really interesting like you do in a letter.

Douglas: I’ve heard literally hundreds of arguments against the Net, parents saying, "My kids can go online and get pictures of naked women, get molested by someone virtually or something."

David: That’s true of any technological advance. The first thing that gets printed is pornography.

Douglas: There’s a lot of possible very bad trips that can be had, but there’s also tremendous potential with this stuff. It’s actually pretty cheap, and what I think our responsibility is to envision the way in which this can work to society/civilisation’s favour and then enact it. [...] I think it comes down to two questions: is human nature changing, and if so, is it changing for the better, or is human nature essentially good but worth moving forward? If it’s not, then no amount of cybernetic movement is going to change that. [...] Cyberia is aimed at Middle America and whatever Middle England is. People who have never gone online, who think that kids going to raves are crazy, would never touch a psychedelic in their lives, and think that the Internet is for weird nerds to talk to each other about Star Trek. My purpose is to say; it’s not. This is a vibrant community of people with some very interesting bright aspirations for the future. While they may sound off the wall and overly optimistic, I spent a couple of years with them, and I like them. There’s something worthy that they’re trying to communicate to us. If nothing else they do have a inkling of a new way to organise reality, to organize the way we look at things that might be better than what we’re using.

David: Maybe it’s because I come from up North, I always felt some sympathy for the Luddites. I don’t really like machines that much.

Douglas: That’s good. You see, I think there is a natural evolutionary force against change and there should be, if human beings changed too quickly they wouldn’t recognise themselves.

David: Well the Luddites lost. If they’d won, change would still have come but technology might have been subservient to people needs, rather than the other way around. Will we need the equivalent of the Luddites now, or will the change come gradually, allow people to acclimatise themselves? [...] Being able to confirm or discount a newspaper article about Somalia, say, by contacting someone on the Net out there, is a nice idea, but it doesn’t remove any of the power bases, it simply spreads them out a bit.

Douglas: As I see it, the reason we have powerbases, controllers, people in charge, is because we as a people ask for it, we want it. As a civilisation we are a civilisation of children, who like parent figures to set boundaries for us because we’re scared to make decisions and choices on our own.

David: Is that conditioning or would you say that it’s inherent?

Douglas: It’s both. It’s inherent and we have people condition us because that’s the way we want to grow up. I like to think we are on the brink of our societal adolescence.

David: That’s not too good a prospect.

Douglas: It’s rough, there’s a lot of raging hormones. There’s a time when a kid listens to his parents, he doesn’t like girls he thinks they’re gross, has his own stuff, my this, my that. Finally because he wants to contact another person he breaks down some of his barriers, he reaches out, and I think that’s what happening on a cultural level, people are going, "Well, I’d rather reach out to other people than just take it from up there."

David: But in reaching out down a phoneline or whatever, it gives people confidence, they can be someone else, but in the end they’re going to have to meet them, have social contact.

Douglas: Yeah, this is play, this remedial help for a society that has lost the ability to communicate with itself.

David: I find that easier to believe; that it’s therapy we all need rather than The Answer.

Douglas: It’s not the answer. It’s a stage. As any good pagan knows, this is something we could be doing anyway. We don’t need a fucking computer to contact the entire Gaian mind, all we need are the right drugs, the right ritual or the right state of mind. But I think we have to convince ourselves of that, through a kind of play period.

David: So in a way the computer is a toy, a learning toy like giving a kid a toy to help them read.

Douglas: And that’s why it’s alright now that only the first world has them, because as far as I’m concerned it’s only us that need to learn this. I don’t know if people in Somalia need to learn the same lessons as we do.

David: Only problem is, it’s people in Taiwan or wherever that are making the damn things. The Internet is going to be supported by more exploitation of other worlds, it needs the cheap labour.

Douglas: Every silver lining has an awfully big cloud. [...] It’s a slow process.

David: What sort of reception are you getting in America?

Douglas: Fear but different fears, not fear of Somalia not getting computers. Not fear of there not being enough intention. I get fear that kids are going to get addicted to teledildonic sexuality online, they’re not going to listen to their teachers anymore, they’re not going to listen to their parents anymore, that rather than watching public television getting their stories that way, they’re going to talk to some weird radical person and find out about world events through people who’ve no right telling them how they are.

David: Sounds reasonable.

Douglas: Yeah. These are the parents’ fears for themselves.

David: I can see the Net as a good tool to bring people together but there needs to be something else. Travel used to be considered a good thing, you travel the world and you become this wonderful mature person. Now it’s lovely and cheap to travel, people whizz around Europe, station to station, they come back and they’ve learnt nothing; to learn a culture you have to experience it, that’s why I think the Net is too easy, just click your way around the world, no face to face contact. I’m not sure that matures you.

Douglas: I’m not either but it is training. Some person living in a remote region who doesn’t have anyone to share his opinions with, who can’t find anyone to agree with him, he’s reading Noam Chomsky or something. If he gets online he’ll be able to find a community of people who can say, "If you like Chomsky, read this." If a person begins to get positive feedback to their point of view, for what seems like radical wayout ideas in the country they’re living in, then I think they’re more willing to go to the pub or caf� and say, "Well you know, this is the way it is."

We live in bedroom communities in America. We’re so desocialised. So many people have opinions but they’re too scared to speak out against conformity. It has to be the first step to something else. It’s not an end all.