Allen Ginsberg on William Blake continues from here. “If the doors of perception…”)
The class continues here and concludes tomorrow.
Allen takes up a dialog with a student
AG: What were you going to say?
Student: (I was just going to say) I was thinking science-fiction stuff … If they sped up the synapses, like what they’re talking about.. In the future with, like, chemical arrangements, or understanding (of science) as being the key (factors)…for aging and immortality, through the brain computer, and through diagramming processes, and through other processes, as things speed up and become more and more accessible and.. (things that (Alvin) Toffler and other people kind of touched upon) .. (that could mean) the arrangement of (a) new mind, in the sense that you could break up the 1/64th per second ratio of synapses and chemical (and) electrical jumps so, that time would possibly be seen differently, in the same way that…
AG: Well, apparently, apparently.. …
Student: (See what I’m describing is) the technology..
AG: One moment. Apparently, apparently, L.S.D. does perhaps speed up those reactions, and that’s why….
Student: Yeah, (but). what it did was it rearranged it with a sense of accidental….
AG: I’ve seen some theory that L.S.D. speeds up those chemical reactions.
Student: It made it jump
AG: Or it doubles it.
Student: It made it jump.It made it jump randomly, (or not randomly but a way that was idiosyncratic to the person’s structuralization of their…)
AG: I heard it was just a speed-up. Just a simple speed-up.
Student: It can speed up…
AG: More information coming in.
Student: (It can also be more metabolic), it can.. jump differently.
AG: We’re talking about L.S.D., not (Arthur) Rimbaud. (“dérèglement de tous les sens”)
Student: No, I’m not talking about L.S.D.
AG: I thought (we were).. Oh, well – I was.
Student: I wasn’t talking about L.S.D., I wasn’t talking about Buddhism …
AG: Okay.
Student: … I was just saying that there could be a multi-dimensional universe breaking through time….
AG: “The Eye altering alters all.” [Editorial note – Allen is, of course, quoting Blake here, from “The Mental Traveler“]
Student: Or in a gravitational route.
AG: Yeah, “The Eye altering alters all.”
Student: So that a system … but it wouldn’t be the eyeball.
AG: Well, that means the senses.
Student: It’d be the whole body … it’d be like “Star Trek”.
AG: The measuring instrument – the body – “altering alters all”. That’s what Einstein said.
Student: What did you say again?
AG: The measuring instrument altering, alters all. So any portion of the senses that alter, or any part of the body that alters, will alter the appearance of the phenomenal universe. That’s Blake’s whole point, that we create the universe.
Student: Right and we can re-diagram the body as a measuring instrument.
AG: Well, that’s a Urizenic notion. It was Urizen that wanted to rediagram the body according to his smart ideas, I think. You’d have to take into account your feelings, your heart …
Student: I didn’t say….
AG: … you have to take into account your body. and you’ve got to take account of your imagination, too.
Student: I said the imagination first. Firstly.
AG: Yeah, I have a feeling that you’ve got a broken arm – i.e., abuse of the body.
Student: I don’t know what you’re talking about, personally.
AG: That your system, as you’re proposing it, would abuse the body a bit. You’d wind up falling out of a window or something and not noticing where you were because of the speed up. Or fewer emotions, because of (those) not (being) a balance of the four. It wouldn’t be in synch.
Student: In other words, the same thing with (Chogyam) Rinpoche, (Buddhist teaching). when you synchronize body and mind and you’re within that reality system, that consciousness …
AG: Yeah.
Student: … And I was just proposing a different synchronization of body make-up, understood from its system projected outside of itself as technology.
AG: Yeah, and I was saying that’s a Urizenic idea.
Student: No, it’s an imaginative one.
AG: Ah, I think more Urizenic than imaginative, but we could go on imagining and arguing forever. And it’s eight minutes of…
Student: I’ve got an announcement.
Audio for the above can be heard here here, beginning at approximately ninety-eight-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at approximately one-hundred-and-one-and-three-quarter minutes in