BEGINS

Each of you is a cell in the mycelial mat.  Together, we're Conferensis Tellurides.  

Now, I'm sending four messages to every mycelial cell throughout the mycelial mat.  I'll play a little message music and we'll see what kind of communicators we are.  Let's see if everybody can get all four messages in about a minute.  

[violin plays]

How are we doing?  Is the message going around?  Troy, have you gotten any messages yet?  Troy, have you got all four messages?  No, you're not going to talk.  Who up front has gotten all four messages?  Alright, you can see the difficulty.  Who in the middle of the room has gotten all four messages?  How many?  One?  Anybody got more than one?  Nobody got three?  Okay,  we're supposed to be advanced beings on this planet.  Alright.  I hope that lays the groundwork for Frank's lecture.

[applause]

[new voice]  And now, needing no introduction, here's the answer to the four messages -- well, I'm cheating.  Last night I felt we had a very difficult subject and we were strangers, although sympathetic strangers.  But this afternoon, I think we have a really easy topic, and by now we're old friends.  So, this should be easy.  I would like to do a short introduction followed by a  discussion.  The subject: The Mycelial Mat and the World Wide Web.  Each one is kind of known, and the connection is obvious, so there's no need to say much.

I felt that this morning's lectures were very illuminating.  A lot of interesting information which came on several levels and was densely packed.  That's why some of the messages, like these four messages, were hard to extract.  I'd like to extract two messages from Paul's comments that particularly impressed me.  One was the story about this particularly rare mushroom that called him in the middle of the night out of the house.  It made him walk across the street down the road two or three hundred yards, and then located itself like a beacon in the dark.  That impressed me.  It's a hell of a story.  I guess it actually happened to him; we have to think about that.  The other one was his suggestion -- I know everybody heard this one -- that the experiences we've had eating mushrooms and other intelligent plants have stimulated a new awareness of the environment, and the environmental movement owes something specific to this fascination with psychoactive plants.  

Now when we put these two ideas together, what are they saying?  That the biosphere could, as a matter of fact, attract many of us.  It could give us a message and stimulate in us a mission to save itself, and recruit us, as it were, into a program of its own.  And that, I suppose, is one of the themes of this mycelial mat, which is the Telluride Conference, this group.  

I personally had an experience of this sort, and my only qualification to speak about the mycelial mat is that one experience that happened twenty years ago.  Somebody gave me a book on the cultivation of mushrooms on sterile rye in mason jars, and being at that time sensitive to the call of nature as it were -- at that time I loved mushrooms in very active ways -- I felt that this book was somehow a call to serve the mushroom as a servant the way computer scientists serve computers.  I built a white house. Getting things started in this particular method is very arduous.  You must sterilize everything in gigantic pressure cookers and follow this up with an arduous job with petri dishes and exacto knives in a glove box.  I built a glove box with four hands to accelerate this, and my son John, who was then in the eighth grade, helped me.  After you start it,  there's a brief wait while the rye turns white.  I had a large number of jars, and the entire room, which was controlled for its climate, light spectrum, and so on, was white.  Every day you have to give it a carefully metered amount of water.  It gets easier when the rye turns white.

This work puts you in kind of a meditative space in that white room for an hour or so, morning and night.  You're overwhelmed by the palpable vibrations of these mycelial bodies of brain size in each jar, thousands of them.  It seemed evident that they were connected externally by I don't know what means,  maybe by odorless pheromones, or some immaterial field.   I don't have to tell you that the process, the growth process, the reproductive cycle of these things is strongly suggestive of Rupert Sheldrake's theory of the morphogenetic field, because it doesn't seem possible -- the jars are just sitting there and then suddenly, as if on a signal, all of them fruit simultaneously.  Overnight you get this incredible -- it's not fair to call it growth -- materialization of large reproductive organs on the upper surface of the sand on top of each jar.  Inside the stems you can actually see the flow lines where all this material was extruded from the mycelial mass up into the particular form.  This has been much studied in the context of the slime mold, where it's known that it's a mathematical model materializing that form, that the process relies upon mathematics more than it relies upon DNA.

Anyway, in this life experience of mine, I had my daily meditations with the mycelial mat in the white house for two years, and I developed attitudes about it that I could hardly verbalize.  I wouldn't call them a theory or a belief or anything, but it really seems that this is an intelligent plant.  The intelligence is somehow distributed throughout all the mycelia worldwide.  That is, even if you have a mat that's fifty square miles or so in Oregon and you've got another one in China, somehow they are as close on that scale as those mason jars in my white house.

I know that some people don't believe in the mind, but try,  just for the sake of discussion, to think of  us as having a mind as well as a brain.  That immaterial thing, whatever you want to call it, carries our memories,  records our sense perceptions,  permits recognitions and models and so on.  If the mushroom has it, it's not in the mycelial mat.  Somehow there's an isomorphism between the mycelial mat and the mind of the thing, whether an individual mind for each jar and the connection with the mind of the white house and then with the white house of the neighbor nearby, and so on...

I thought of the mushroom as a wild animal caged, because this particular kind of mushroom is not one that has been domesticated earlier.  This was kind of a recent experiment in domestication and so it was like a wild animal caged. I felt that I was in communication with wild nature through the artifice of having captured and grown it in captivity, as it were.  Altogether it didn't do too well.  It required constant care, and quite frequently one of the jars would turn fluorescent pink and have to be taken out for the safekeeping of all to be replaced by a new jar.  When that happened, there seemed to be a shock of grief going through the entire white house because of the removal or the loss of that one part.  That gives you an idea of  nature speaking to us somehow and giving us instructions or directions as to how the biosphere itself is to be served by the dedication of our lifetime.  At any rate, that's what I thought I was doing back then twenty years ago.  

So now I have a similar idea about the World Wide Web.  I never really put these two things together before.  It's another accident, as it were.  In this instance I perceive for the first time a certain pattern that maybe I shouldn't be confessing in public, because I do keep doing it.  I develop an obsession in which I'm convinced that what I'm doing is important.  It's wholly unjustified and creates a fictitious scenario in which what I'm doing is important. If you do just a little teeny bit of good somewhere, whether it's called optimism or delusion, it's what prevents a mass suicide or something of that nature.  Anyway, that's what I do.  

I didn't realize how identical my obsession with The World Wide Web is in form to that one of twenty years ago.  It happened to me about a year and a half ago, when I was writing a CD-ROM package on Chaos Theory for specialists in various fields.  My publisher pointed me at the World Wide Web as a source of  free software to use on the CD-ROM, because, being mathematics, it had to be a low-budget project.  I turned the World Wide Web on.  Compared to most people, this was easy for me to do because I worked at a university, where they make a fetish of keeping up with all this stuff.  My university already had a World Wide Web server and had browsers available for the asking, and my office, like every other professor's office, had a very very strong and intimate connection with the Internet.  

It was kind of like that first acid trip.  There's a click and then you're there.  I was zapped immediately.  Now somebody else could go Web-browsing recreationally or at a party, as they do in electronic cafes.  I'm not talking about that.  It was like a spiritual obsession.  I was overcome by a purpose. This was the miracle I'd been waiting for.  We know that our society's on a death track.  We've tried this and we've tried that and it didn't seem to work.  The hippies became extinct and there's the backlash against feminism and against many of the '60s ideals, and there's this periodic depression when you kind of give up for a while.  Then something new comes along, and when I saw the World Wide Web for the first time I said, well, this is it.  

We never could have survived until now if there had been no miracles in the past -- I don't know what they were, but frequently there was a miracle, and I figured the Web was one.  It's a tool of such incredible power.  It's a novelty, it's as radically new as the discovery of the New World.  Here is this totally unpopulated territory -- when I browsed for the first time there were less than two thousand servers on the World Wide Web, and hardly twenty thousand browsers.  Today there is documentation for 225 [?] known-to-be-active browsers.  So this is a new world in which there is an influx of colonial peoples happening on a fantastic scale.  And what's going to go on in that new world will be up to the totally uninhibited individual and collective creativity of those people who are moving in there for whatever purpose.

Anyway, it was like going on a trip in which the reality is altered, and from which there's no coming down.  The opportunity is there.  It's going to stay there.  People or maybe governments or popes may try to restrict it, but  I feel quite sure they'll find that impossible.  Anyway, the nature of the obsession that I developed was that this was happening for one specific purpose, and that was to save us from the death threat.  That means that all of these revolutions in progress at the moment -- the chaos revolution, the environmental movement, feminism and the move for gender equality and partnership, the same global economy, the replacement of nation-states by non-governmental  groups -- all these revolutionary movements characteristic of our time can suddenly be multiplied in force by a factor of ten or a hundred or a thousand because of this new thing.  Therefore it's potentially a power of good, an amplifier of good.  Meanwhile, we read and hear in the media largely fictitious stories of the amplification of evil by the Internet and the necessity of stamping it out before it's too late.  

So anyway, a year and a half ago I developed an obsession that just won't go away.  It  was very similar to my obsession with mushrooms.  There is, in fact, an exact isometry between the mycelial mat, which I described as a network of large intelligent plants linked together by some kind of telepathy or odorless pheromones or something, into essentially a specific model of the biosphere -- I mean the whole biosphere as it were:  individual living things connected by networks, ecologies and biomes and so on.  The biosphere,  and obviously its Gestalt, its working together as an integrative thing, is the essential nature of Gaia.  It is the life and the spirit and the soul of this planet.  I imagine that the mycelial mat has souls on different levels, and so do we.  We know we have something like mind in which there are memories or thoughts, the foundation for interaction and communication, as exemplified by the telephone revolution -- another one of these technical miracles that we take for granted.  Nobody ever remembers that the telephone revolution has totally changed life on this planet, changed it specifically in the way that I described last night in the metaphor of neural nets and the connectionist paradigm.  People are more or less the same; then the telephone network is added, which increases  the bandwidth of the communication link between the different nodes that are otherwise unchanged -- only the connection net has changed, which brought about an incredible increase in the intelligence of the species.

And so, having developed this parallel obsession,  I saw that there was kind of a gold rush into the new world of the World Wide Web, the gold rush by businesses.  Not that this is necessarily bad, but the incredible rate of growth of the business community in the new world has really obscured the other purposes of the World Wide Web.  There are these different domains: the educational,  the spiritual, the religious, the commercial, and so on.  Just one of these has somehow seized the spotlight in terms of expansion into the new world.  I wanted to counter that by bringing to the attention of individuals the possibility that they too could occupy the new world -- individuals and non-profit organizations devoted to religious, spiritual and educational motives.

So what is  the World Wide Web -- what am I talking about?  If you've seen it you've seen it.  Even if you've just seen it recreationally you know what I'm talking about.  I know that many of you have seen a bit, and some of you already have your own Web pages, and those are exemplary of the movement that I'm trying to promote.  More information, our kind of information, made safely and publicly available to all our World Wide bases, freely available on the World Wide Web.  If you haven't seen it, then there's probably no way for me to describe it so you could possibly understand me, because in my view, it's truly a new world.  

Some people have envisioned this new world.  For example, when I developed this obsession I immediately wrote the book I've just mentioned.  It's dedicated to Teilhard de Chardin.  Teilhard de Chardin envisioned this very thing happened.  He described it under the name Noogenesis.  He referred to the individual cells, the mycelial cells, as atoms, just as a generic concept, and he described the intelligence of the network being contained primarily in the links.  In his view these links would be enhanced spiritually, telepathically as it were. He envisioned noogenesis as the basis of the resacralization of the world and therefore the salvation of our species, and the culmination -- he was a Christian, a real Christian -- of an evolutionary process initiated by the birth of Christ.  That's what he was writing about.  He thought about the Alpha and Omega of the Christianization of the world in the highest terms.  That means the creation of a sensible, intelligent and loving human population, living in harmony with the biosphere.  He believed that this process of noogenesis, the genesis of the noosphere, would culminate in an Omega point whre everybody would become a fully spiritual person.  In dedicating my book on the World Wide Web to Teilhard de Chardin, I'm suggesting that the World Wide Web is a material foundation for the process he envisioned.  

So here's what it looks like in terms of connecting people up on a level beyond the telephone revolution and providing the central new space for our life form.  The World Wide Web consists of these hundreds of thousands of computers -- in principle it could be one for each person.  As a matter of fact, it seems likely that within a year there will be approximately forty million people actively serving their information on the World Wide Web.  That means that if you enter the World Wide Web through the window of your home computer, you have the opportunity of visiting anyone's home in a special room set aside for visits.  You can't travel freely through the entire home, because part of it is private.  But the room that's been set aside for visits is kind of a shrine,  It could be a very large room, because it has no material cost.  The immaterial cost is the time it takes to construct the room.  I won't kid you -- it's very very time-intensive to do these constructions.  We're talking about a room that could be visited by conventional virtual reality techniques, where you could fly around and would experience whatever shrine material that individual had put in that room for you to see.  Now there are forty million of these shrine rooms available on the World Wide Web.  There are only about ten million businesses, so we'll soon outnumber them.  

In these shrine rooms information can be shared.  This information could be tagged to be shown only to people having the certain codeword of the club.  Movies, poems, songs, and most especially, interactive computer programs which make songs, poems, movies and so oncould be shown.  A kind of a guided reality game like Dungeons & Dragons or Sim City or Sim Earth -- the identification of mushrooms, how to cook and prepare them -- all the things that are taught  here could be presented for everyone's free access on the World Wide Web by people who are experts in their fields.  

What we need to understand is that in spite of the forty million rooms there, it's phenomenally easy, thanks to computer science, to navigate around and find your way.  For example, how many telephone numbers are there in the world, does anyone have a clue?  Certainly in excess of a billion.  Nevertheless we can pretty much call anybody we want to, because we don't want to call everybody.  Next to my phone I have a little tiny Rolodex -- in my computer I have a bigger one -- with the numbers of the people I usually call.  But on the World Wide Web I can publish my list -- in fact, I do. It's called Favorite Sites. Almost every home-page on the World Wide Web has favorite sites, and you are told, "Here are buttons to push to reach some of my favorite people -- check 'em out."  On my page you find a pointer to Terence McKenna. You push it, and you are there.  Terence McKenna has an incredible world running on a computer in New York City somewhere.  It's an opportunity for personal sharing, for the morphogenesis of new social groups, for the evolution of new ways of relating to the environment, for alerts of things like rare birds.  There are already RBA's on the Internet -- rare bird alerts.  The day before yesterday, I woke up early in the morning because I heard a strange noise in the kitchen.  There was a wild turkey looking at me through the kitchen window.  A system of rare bird alerts can be important in saving species of birds, and so can RMA's -- rare mushroom alerts, such as happened here on Lizard Head.  This kind of thing can be fundamental in saving endangered species. 

Among all the spheres in which I believe the World Wide Web will be fundamental, the one that I am particularly working on myself is the educational sphere.  I gave up a career on the high road of mathematics at UC Berkeley and Columbia and Princeton to go to UC Santa Cruz, a brand-new university in 1968, with the promise that each college would have thirty or forty professors -- we would be able to make up the curriculum from scratch and do something completely new. There were to be ten different colleges in this one little university, and each one would have a totally new kind of genetic algorithms for education.  That promise held such great allure for me that I dropped everything that mattered to me, including all my friends on the East Coast, and went to Santa Cruz. The bubble burst  within three months when we presented our curriculum and were told, "I don't think so."  

My experience is that the runnel, the groove of our culture, and particularly in the educational system, is so deep that it's very difficult to change it.  But here is a new world.  It's like Santa Cruz in the 1960's, a new culture, a hip culture, but on a vast, world-wide scale.  It's basically unquenchable, like pirate ratio -- how we gonna turn 'em off?  They can make child pornography illegal in the United States but it is still freely available from Finland, so what are you gonna do?  The World Wide Web could provide the first truly successful alternative school, for children, for adults, for everyone.  It would be independent of wealth or of a special location like the downtown in a large city where you wouldn't want to live.  It would be a completely world-wide, freely distributed educational system containing zillions of alternatives to the conventional system, and people could try it out freely at home.  That's my current interest -- to create the curriculum that I spoke about last night, one particular curriculum that I call the Histomat Curriculum, in which world cultural history is not bound to the grades.  I hope to make it available through extensive bibliographies and courseware on the World Wide Web and to be freely accessible to all.  

So, there you have my little fantasy, from the mycelial mat to the World Wide Web.  What do you think?