the timboucher experience

Man, Terence McKenna is the shit. I listened to a ton of lectures by him a couple weeks back, and just came across another one tonight that is amazing. It’s called Ordinary Language, Visible Language and Virtual Reality. The whole thing is worth reading, and it’s not overly long, but I’ll quote my two favorite passages:

“The starships of the future, in other words the vehicles of the future, which will explore the high frontier of the unknown will be syntactical. The engineers of the future will be poets. This is what virtual reality holds out to us - the possibility of walking in to the constructs of the imagination. In a way culture is that. I mean our cities, bridges, highways, airliners and art galleries are condensations out of the imagination, but at tremendous cost because we must make them out of matter. Once we can make them out of light, out of electrons, then we won’t build skyscrapers a hundred and twenty stories high, we’ll build them as high as we want.”

I originally found this article a year or so ago when I was walking home one day, thinking of movies that were entirely computer-generated. And about how you are never actually looking at anything that is real, or was real, or would be real in the physical world. What are you looking at then? You are looking at numbers, words, programming, syntactical & logical structures. And that’s fucking amazing.

This quote is really shockingly incredible too, I think:

Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a tranformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, ‘that’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird,’ instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock irridescent transformative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words.

• If you’re in Baltimore, you’re invited!
• You’re no help at all!
• Reducing things with words
• A word of explanation…
• Ladies, you’re in luck!