Part 1 here.  As I mentioned in that earlier post, I'm putting this transcription out here now because I'll be referring back to some of the ideas over the next few weeks.  McKenna knew his McLuhan, and I think some of this notion of increasing novelty/complexification gives a starting point to consider what will the next McLuhan era be.  What has the relationship to the Electronic media that Electronic media has to print? 

Enjoy.  I take some liberties with the total recording....occasional tangents I've opted to skip over.  The full recording is available all over the internet, but my favorite source is the Psychedelic Salon podcast and website.

Now.

There's more to this than simply that . I think we all observationally could agree with what has been said so far.  An added wrinkle is that each advancement into complexity into novelty proceeds more quickly than the stage that preceded it.  This is very profound. because if accepted as a serious first principle,  it ends the marginalization of our own species to the level of spectator status in the universe that knows nothing of us and cares nothing for us.

But I say if in fact novelty is the name of the game,  if in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for,  then suddenly our own human enterprise previously marginalized takes on an immense new importance.  We are apparently players in the cosmic drama and in this particular act of the cosmic drama, we hold a very central role. We are at the pinacle of the expression of complexification in the animal world, and somehow this complexity which is concentrated in us has flowed over out of the domain of animal organization and into this mysterious domain which we call culture, langauge, consciousness, higher values. 

Each stage of advancement into complexity occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it. After the intial big bang there was a period of billions of years when the universe cooled, stars condensed, planetary systems formed.  And then the quickening process crossed an invisible rubicon into the domain of animal and biological organization. 

A single species - ourselves - has broken from the ordinary constraints of animal nature and created a new world... an epigenetic world, meaning a world not based on gene transfer and chemical propagation and preservation of information:   but a world based on ideas, on symbols, on technologies, on tools. On ideas downloaded out of the human imagination and concretized in three dimensional space as choppers, aeroplanes, particle accelerators, gene sequencers, spacecraft, what have you.

All  of this complexification  occurring at a faster and faster rate. and this brings me then to the second quality or phenomena that science has overlooked which is the acceleration of complexification.

The  early history of the universe proceeded with excruciating slowness, then life took hold in the oceans of this planet. A quickening of progress with evolution, but still things proceed on the scale of tens of millions of years to clock major change.  Then the conquest of the land, higher animals, higher exposure to radiation, faster changes with   species following species one upon the other.

Then 50 thousand,  a hundred thousand,  a million years ago -  anyway recently:   the crossover into the domain of culture, tool making, myth making, dance, poetry, song, story. And that set the stage for the fall into history.

The incredibly unusual and self-consuming process that has been going on for the past 15 or 20 thousand years, a biological snap of the finger, and yet in that time, everythingthat we call human, everything that we associate with higher values, has been adumbrated, elaborated, created, set in place by one species. Ourselves. This accleration of time or complexity shows no sign of slowing down. In fact within the fabric of our own lives we can almost daily, hourly, by the minute feel it speeding up, taking hold. Its a cliche that time is moving faster and faster. A cliche of the mass media.

But I want to suggest that this is not a perceptual illusion or a cultural mirage, that this is actually happening to the space time matrix. Time is in fact speeding up.  History is a state of incredible destabilization.  It's a chaostrophy in the process of happening.  It begins with animals kept in balance by natural selection and it ends with a global internet of electronic information transfer and a language-using species headed towards the stars. There is no reason for us to suppose that this process of acceleration is every going to slow down or be deflected. It has been a law of nature from the very beginning of nature. That this acceleration was built in.

What poses a problem to us as thinking individuals is that the speed of involution towards concresence is now so great that we can feel the tug of it within  the confines of our own lives . There has been more change since 1960 than in the previous several thousand years. There has been more change since 1992 than in the previous thousand years. Change is accelerating, invention, connection, adumbration of ideas, mathematical algorithms, connectivity of peoples social systems this is all accelerating furiously and under the control of no one.  Not the catholic church , the communist party, the IMF.  No one is in charge of this process. This is what makes history so interesting:  its a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.