My last day of being seventy has begun and so I ask myself what each decade was like. The clear ayahuasca vision of how, where and why I decided to warp into this world to begin with must forever remain with me locked in the vaults of ecstatic memory.
Besides it was just a hallucination, right? We did not have them in 1952. Hallucinations that is. Or did we? We knew approximately diddly squat about neuroscience then and had no concept of what we now call a ‘simulation’ of reality. We were stone cold sure that the brain generated electrical patterns to interpret data from the ‘outside’ world. Now the richest man on our planet, Elon Musk, says…
He thinks there's a "one in billions" chance that we're not living in a computer simulation right now, meaning Musk is a firm believer in the hypothesis that a super intelligent artificial intelligence created the universe as we know it.
He does not specify who created the AI though. In the 21st century I would later learn from scientist Stephen Meyers that information has to come from some sentient mind in order to code DNA. With great aplomb he notes that it is mathematically absurd to think that 13 billion years is enough time for random mutation to spurt out humans. The vast majority of mutation ends up with a Frank EnStein. So intelligent design seems statistically far more likely than artificial intelligence. But the simulation part could be right on. We will get to that appropriately at the end.
The grotesque proof of what Georgian mystic Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff described as ‘reciprocal mass destruction’ had completed its multiple rounds of the planet in 1945, just seven years previous to my first decade of experience here. My dear father had been in that war on a ‘destroyer’ of the British navy. Sure enough it got totally destroyed off the coast of France followed by Nazi Messerschmitt attacks on the paltry remainder of the crew, wildly swimming away from the carnage. It is my belief he was the only survivor. Now there is something to input into my own DNA! Seeing your buddies get their heads instantly fragmented from machine gun fire as you inhale engine oil on a burning sea surely must have been energetically transmitted via those slinky sperm methinks. I credit that bit of genetic inspiration to my getting across a frigid lake in Iceland at the age of sixty-five.
He might have seen something like scene below as he gasped for air into oil choked lungs on that swim to the French coast. One lung would later be removed entirely. The cancer had most probably developed from that trauma some of the family believes.
A very cool and hot queen was about to begin the longest reign in human history as I got my fledgling body to remain vertical in 1953. The whole world was about to move on and up and I was going to be along for the ride. The nineteen fifties! Scotland! Fellow Scot John Logie Baird had invented the TV two decades before but it took that long for the TV to get into working class homes like ours. I switched on the one channel: BBC of course…
A man and a woman sit on the edge of a boat and lean over backwards holding their masks on. At about age six I figured all the bubbles that blew out around them from their regulators meant they had been smashed into tiny pieces by the impact the first time I witnessed that image. Hans and Lotte Hass gave me my first vision of the future. I was going to be a deep-sea diver!
Hay’s lemonade bottles in the kitchen became my twin tank aqualung with tubing from my mother’s new hoover standing in for the breathing hoses that I clenched in my little jaw under the sofa. My mask was designed using a round rubber ring covered in cellophane tape and held on with string. Under the sofa was the Red Sea! I made heavy breathing sounds to mimic my Austrian heroes who were amongst the first to use underwater cameras. Jacques Cousteau was of course right up there with them in that pioneer realm.
The sea thus became my very first ‘other world’ to explore. These undersofa explorations led me to becoming one of the youngest divers in the British Sub Aqua Club. I was bold and rash and incredibly stupid at times. At the age of thirteen I surfaced alone in a thick fog off the coast of Scotland after a one-hour dive and briefly felt the dread of those about to die for the first time. I had no idea where to go in a flat calm, soundless sea. Norway was definitely the wrong way to swim towards. I thus had the first lesson in not freaking out which would serve me for an entire life. With ten minutes reserve air left I pulled on the metal ring connected to a long wire at the bottom of my tank and went back down to the bottom thirty feet below. I found the direction of the seabed slope and simply followed it to shore. Most diving deaths are caused by panic.
Rock and roll prepared the way for the next decade. The sixties brought me the Beatles, the Stones, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Dylan of course but a lot more fabulous music would erupt. By the end of a decade now characterised as being a time of great change and turbulence came another war. It would be in Vietnam proving Gurdjieff was right in his analysis of humanity’s need to reciprocally mass destroy other humans ad nauseam. By the end of that decade, I had read voraciously and left an elite school 750 years old to find out what Fyodor Dostoevsky and Henry Miller et al were all on about. To do that and to be a true artist there was only one way to find out. The road.
The seventies dawned with me living in a hippie commune in London. There would often be at least three or four in bed with me at any one time. Sleeping of course. George Orwell inspired me with Down and Out in Paris and London. Work? No, discovery of oneself was the whole point. For that I would need to test myself with a few wee adventures. Seventy-five countries later, hitch hiked across, through and beyond and nearly all done alone and penniless provided such adventures aplenty. Sleeping in freezing Yugoslavian railway tunnels, in the African bush surrounded by hyenas making that god awful sound or on baked Indian pavements only went to prove that the road was the real teacher.
With no idea of how any one day would unfold amidst total insecurity and quite often real physical distress (dysentery and typhus come to mind) I got the best training ever in Stoic philosophy minus the university of Aberdeen. I now see universities as the worst ever invention for a soul’s evolution. Just when all your male energy is about to peak, they lead you away into your brain to get qualified to be a what?
I did become a professional diver by the way-cleaning boat hulls and recovering lost property from the harbour murk. That one period of work gave me the funds to get to the place this decade would finally put on the map as people like Steve Jobs and Gary Snyder had shown us. Jack Kerouac had earlier suggested it to be the ultimate cultural and nay spiritual hub of the planet. And zen, Japan!
By the end of the seventies I could speak, read and write Japanese well enough to pass the national license exam in oriental medicine. I had to figure out this ‘vital energy’ thing they called KI. Classrooms have no way of doing that, of course.
I entered the eighties with a young family, a LOT of work and a degree as an acupuncturist. I loved the culture. I practised martial arts, sat zazen and watched the West from afar as the technological revolution really took off. I put a floppy disc in a mammoth computer in this decade for the first time and discovered how to use it. I drank sake, wore geta on my feet and totally forgot about the West. India was a psychic Disneyland. Gurus were for advanced twits like the Beatles. Zen was for grown-ups. Your only job is to face the wall called yourself in the full lotus. Religion eat shit! Oh, the vanity of youth that only aging can ever fully repair.
By the end of this decade, I was burnt out supporting a family working seven days a week and drinking sake every night to deal with it. I definitely did not get enlightened. However, I must add here that a particularly violent hangover on a Japanese train led to my deep realisation on glancing at a tree, that the universe is kept together not by gravity or electromagnetism but by love.
I got terminally fed up with that very old and very conservatively conditioned culture with its anal retentive ‘we the Japanese’ attitude. I swapped my kimono for a kilt and took off into the nineties as an emigrant, complete with three kids, a Japanese wife and an Irish setter born in Kyoto. Meanwhile Japan was buying up real estate all over the planet and inventing technology that would change our lives. Sony!
The nineties began on wild Vancouver Island where I had been a labourer for the first six months or so. Orcas and eagles, mountains and sea were the salve I needed after fifteen straight years of shugyo. That means discipline in Japanese. Nose to the economic grindstone and intense study of language, movement and soul were followed by heaving rocks, dump trucking and digging. The air was much deeper there, the environment so much more alive with energy. By the end of the decade, I had already completed a short-lived career as an investment consultant for all those Japanese who wanted real estate in Canada. I then saw it crash with the Japanese economic bubble bursting and so began a new career as a writer and lecturer in Japan and all because I saw that.
Silently hovering above me a bright and beautiful light. Nine years it kept coming back, almost every night in fact. It was beyond any zen koan. None of the ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping’ variety. This was totally impossible and impenetrable. It was a super duper mind fuck. It arrived by my daring the universe to get its act together after my company crashed and Humpty Dumpty could never be put back together again. Meanwhile I saw the first browser ever in a lab at the leading technology centre of Tsukuba university. I was floored. The net had arrived.
The thing was a real mystery and deserved a real attempt at understanding how the mind meshes with matter. The thing in the sky forced me into studying science, philosophy, anthropology and ancient cultural artifacts which were more familiar with, the thing. I crisscrossed the world almost monthly with Japanese groups on adventure expeditions along with my wife. We went into the jungle. We drank the vine of the dead. The thing had pointed the way at every step. The nineties ended in a small mountain town in Eastern British Columbia. We called it Avalon.
I had already crossed the Pacific dozens of times to lecture in Japan and gather people for my really adventurous tours. Where else could you go to climb down into Machu Pichu after a four-day trek before being catapulted out of your body in the selva called Madre De Dios? One Japanese doctor dropped off his cancer in that jungle. One Japanese woman lost her uterine cysts in three days of ceremony with the great shaman from the village of hell, Infierno. God bless Maestro Don Ignacio who also gifted my teenage daughter with the voice of angels drinking his famous dark ayahuasca. Those were heady days. We did over fifty tours around the world in the nineties alone.
2000! A new century! My sixth decade began at age 58. I am an expert in rebuilding and refurnishing myself. I am a Jack of all trades and definitely master of none but that. In this decade I would make a documentary film, create three companies in Japan and become a large gaijin fish in a small Japanese pond. Fame is overrated. Ask my wife what a pain in the arse I was after appearing on prime-time Japanese television. 15% of the entire nation tuned in to a few comments about ancient civilization and how we had clearly got it all wrong. The later to become infamous Graham Hancock was on one of the shows. Clearly, he was right and the Tokyo university archaeologist could not see the artificial blocks underwater simply because it could not be so. No wander I spurned university. Can the ocean create a stone turtle? Natural erosion methinks!
Dozens of books to my name but none really close to my heart had been published by now. The biggest psych-op in history (before Covid) hit early on in the decade and we were asked, nay instructed to believe that two large buildings would collapse after burning for a wee while, a feat previously never seen anywhere on the planet, ever. I knew by then that my life would more and more have this weird sister at the edge of its stage. Her name was conspiracy and I was right on her track. Thanks to 9/11 I learned how the information revolution would move forward in leaps and bounds from one absurd parable to another. I was living in the age of materialism is baloney as one great philosopher I would later interview penned. Dr. Bernardo Kastrup had knocked the shit out of this sad old story once and for all. Can you truly believe a thought is a thing?
Science had become a materialist parable and philosophy had become a spineless couch potato. What to do? A massive tsunami in the next decade would call me to be a witness to nature and people as never before. When you see buses on top of resort hotels it changes your perspective. When you smell what an earthquake and an angry sea leave behind in their wake you appreciate your coffee all that more. I was back in love with Japan but now close to sixty driving through total devastation held together with so much sheer grace. I was on the front line as a free-lance journalist trying to get into Fukushima on the very day when the exclusion zone was made effective. Japan had given me, everything! Delivering nappies to old folks homes in a five ton truck, enduring constant aftershocks that set my cellphone off daily (you get a fifteen second heads up on the highway before you start to sway) was my way of saying arigato yo.
This boat is one kilometer inland. Photo by author
The next decade, this one, began back in Japan with rumours of a virus. I flew out of Tokyo on the last flight for a long time in April 2020 with my wife and our cat Popen. Driving in a completely deserted Victoria the sense that we are living in some kind of a dream was palpable. And the thing was there waiting for me as if decades had never happened. Have they? Do we actually understand time, aging and experience if as I wholly suspect we are not physical beings at all? We are dreams of ourselves. Thus, the simulation. People like Musk need to seriously grapple with the fact that any AI simulation needs a materialistic motor to drive it. Go see the Matrix again. Machines built the matrix, not minds. The whole idea of an artificial reality controlled by whatever is almost entirely absurd. Until it hits you that YOU are the machine behind all this. Materialism is clearly the worst idea we ever had the gall to coax into reality.
I continue to sit zazen every day except Sunday. I am still a Catholic despite all apparent evidence to the contrary. On this the last day of my seventieth year I remember the vision in Madre De Dios (mother of God). I chose these decades because I somehow knew I would see more accelerated change in my life than any other human ever has. Artificial Intelligence has a great first name. Do remember that.
This is what AI says:
“From the perspective of philosophical idealism, the reality we experience is fundamentally constructed by the mind. In this context, artificial intelligence can be viewed as an embodiment or projection of human intellectual capacity and consciousness.
Idealism might characterize artificial intelligence as a human creation that transcends the material world, pushing the boundaries of the mental construction of reality. This is because AI is a direct product of human thought and creativity, designed to mimic, augment, or even exceed human cognitive abilities.
However, there's a critical nuance: AI does not have subjective experiences or a mind of its own (as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021). In this sense, idealism could argue that AI lacks a fundamental quality of being: consciousness. While AI can process information, make decisions based on algorithms, and even learn from data, it does not possess self-awareness, a sense of self, or consciousness in the same way a human does.
On the other hand, some versions of idealism might argue that AI reflects back to us our understanding of consciousness and cognition. AI could be seen as a tool for exploring what it means to think, to learn, and to understand, even if the AI itself doesn't possess consciousness.
In a broader philosophical context, the emergence of AI challenges our understanding of intelligence, consciousness, and even what it means to be human. As such, the study of artificial intelligence can have significant philosophical implications, including within the realm of idealism.”
Well said you wonderfully artificial bastard!
There is nothing to compare to a human life anywhere any time. It is surely the greatest dream of all. If only we could remember whose dream, it is…
Today I turned 71. The essay is complete. Enough said.
Happy Solar Return birthday! Thank you for sharing your personal evolution with your unique viewpoint. Your anecdotes are the antidote of boringness.