EROCx1 BLOG

The Cosmic Giggle

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:29:50 PDT

The Cosmic Giggle is an experimental documentary film that explores the human energy field's dynamic relationship with our environment. Naturally as human beings, we are connected to a vast network of fluid information inherent to the world around us. When we are children, we are open to this field through simple innocent observance, but because of our collective evolution towards a dominating and fixated worldview, this perception becomes veiled. This film reveals how this process takes place and provides keys for returning to a more primal and authentic experience of our reality.

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Healing Through Sound and Ayahuasca

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Sun, 19 May 2013 21:40:24 PDT

The Psychedelic Salon Podcast Episode #350
Subscribe: FREE
Download: MP3
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Guest speaker: Hamilton Souther
From: 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Hamilton Souther.]

“Even they [the shaman] do not know what ayahuasca is, because you’re never experiencing ayahuasca. You are always experiencing ayahuasca plus you, and that combination is not ayahuasca. That combination is you and ayahuasca. And that means ayahuasca then is undefinable, we don’t know what it is, which then always allows us to continue to explore the unknown. And it becomes an unlimited journey for us to be able to continue to go further and further and further in our understanding.”

“The shamanism becomes a guide, and the ayahuasca becomes a guide for an exploration of the purity of consciousness.”

“[When interviewing a shaman] especially look at everybody in the eyes. The eyes in ayahuasca tell you everything. If you see people with eyes that get really glossed over and become really shifty, it’s letting you know something there is going on that maybe you don’t want to become like that. Maybe that’s not why you’re there.”

LINKS:

Hamilton Souther, Medicine Hunter

Blue Morpho Ayahuasca Center

TEDxWhitechapel Talks

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 21:32:57 PST

The Science Delusion: Rupert Sheldrake at

The science delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality, in principle. The fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in. The impressive achievements of science seemed to support this confident attitude. But recent research has revealed unexpected problems at the heart of physics, cosmology, biology, medicine and psychology. Dr Rupert Sheldrake shows how the sciences are being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. Should science be a belief-system, or a realm of enquiry? Sheldrake argues that science would be better off without its dogmas: freer, more interesting and more fun.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books, including The Science Delusion. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge University, a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, Principal Plant Physiologist at ICRISAT (the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) in Hyderabad, India, and from 2005-2010 the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, California, and a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut. His website is www.sheldrake.org.

The War on Consciousness: Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock tells the story of his 24-year relationship with cannabis brought to an abrupt halt in 2011 after an encounter with Ayahuasca, the sacred visionary brew of the Amazon. Along the way he explores the mystery of death, the problem of consciousness, and the implications for the human future of a society that wages total war on true cognitive liberty.
Graham Hancock is the author of The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, Keeper of Genesis, Heaven's Mirror, Supernatural and other bestselling investigations of historical mysteries.

His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have sold over five million copies worldwide. His public lectures and broadcasts, including two major TV series, Quest for the Lost Civilization, and Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age, have further established his reputation as an unconventional thinker who raises controversial questions about humanity's past. Hancock's first venture into fiction, Entangled, was published in 2010 and his second novel, War God, on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, will be published on 30 May 2013. Hancock maintains an active Facebook presence: http://www.facebook.com/Author.Graham.... His website is: http://www.grahamhancock.com.

Terence McKenna: Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 12:11:20 PST

April 27, 1999
Seattle, WA

Please join me in welcoming Mr. Terence McKenna!

How's that? Well. I can't see all of you, but it's a pleasure to be in Seattle this evening. You've made me feel real welcome. Thank you!

Our discussion this evening is "Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines" or "Shamans among the machines". I wanted to talk about this simply because these are two of my great loves, so I assume, being monogamous, they must be one love. So how to build intellectual bridges between these two concerns which seem so different?

As far as people and machines are concerned, it was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, I think, who said in his book General Systems Theory, he said: "People are not machines but in every opportunity where they're allowed to behave like machines, they will so behave." In other words, we tend to fall into the well of habit. Though the glory of our humanness is our spontaneous creativity, we too as creatures of physics and chemistry, of memory and hope, tend to fall into repetitious patterns. These repetitious patterns are the death of creativity. They diminish our humanness. They diminish our individuality, make each of us somehow like cogs in some larger system.

We associate this cog-like membership in larger soulless systems with the machines that we inherit from the age of the internal combustion engine, the age of the jet engine. Marshall McLuhan said: "We navigate our way into the future like someone driving who uses only the rear view mirror to tell them where they're going." It's not a very successful strategy for navigating into the future.

I made a number of notes on this matter of psychedelics and machines. To me, the connecting bridge - well, there're many - but the most obvious one is consciousness expansion. After all, psychedelics, before they were called entheogens, before they were called hallucinogens, before they were called psychedelics, they were simply called "consciousness expanding drugs". Good phenomenological description of what they do. Certainly, the technology of cybernetics is a consciousness expanding technology. It expands a different area of consciousness. They minds of machines and the minds of human beings are very different - so different that each party questions whether the other even has a mind.

In fact, what these are, are species of minds operating in very different domains. For instance, you can ask a five year old child to go into the bedroom to the third drawer of the dresser to select a pair of black socks and to bring them to mother. This is not a challenge for a five-year old child. To get a machine to do this is a hundred million dollars and a research team of forty or fifty technicians, code writers, working months. On the other hand, if you ask a person for the cubic root of 750344, much headscratching results.

A computer is utterly undaunted by that question. Computers are minds that work in the realm of computation. Human minds are minds that work in the realm of generalization, spacial coordination, understanding of natural language, so forth and so on.

Are these kinds of minds so different from each other (??? 6:06) so that there is no bridge to be crossed? I would submit not. In fact the bridge between the human mind and the machine mind is symbolic logic, mathematics. When we think clearly, we are intelligible to machines. People who write code know this: that the essence of making yourself clear to a machine, is to think clearly yourself. The machine has no patience for the half truth, the analogy, the semi-grasped association. For the machine, everything has to be clear. Everything must be defined.

So that's the commonality between minds and machines of the calculating species. What are the common bridges between psychedelics and these machines? Well, to my mind, this is an easier bridge to gap. Both computers and drugs are what I would call function-specific arrangements of matter, and as we develop nanotechnological abilities as we move into the next century, it will be more and more clear that the difference between drugs and machines is simply that one is too large to swallow, and our best people are working on that.

Nanotechnology is a very hot buzzword at the moment, an unimaginable dream of building machines and small objects atom by atom, perhaps under the control of long-chain polymers running forms of preprogrammed software of some sort. It's all very razzmatazz, very state of the art, but in fact, pharmaceutical chemists have been working in the nanotechnological realm for over a hundred years. When you synthesize molecules out of simpler substrate specifically to have the conformational geometry that matches something going on in the synapse of a primate, a human or a monkey or something like that, you're working at this nanotechnological level.

Both the psychedelic and the new computational machines represent extensions of human function. This is really close to the now (? 9:05). It locks in with the concept of prosthetics. The drugs, the psychedelic substances, the shamanic plants, are forms of prostatic devices for extending the human mind, the human perceptual apparatus into hidden realms or inaccessible realms. Similarly the machines, by allowing us to model, calculate and simulate very complicated, multivariable processes, extend the power of the human mind into places it could never dream of going before.

Part of what seems to me very real about being a human being and inheriting 10,000 years of human history, is the complexity of the inheritance, and the growth of that complexity. A thousand years ago, an intelligent human being could actually dream of mastering the entire database of western civilization - read all the classic authors, read the Bible and your closing in on it around AD 1000. Now the notion of any single human being assimilating any even small portion of the database of this civilization, is inconceivable.

So machines which filter, which search, which are guided by human intent, that's part of the story. The other part of the story are boundary dissolving states of ecstasy in which all the factoids of the culture are thrown on for grabs, the deck is reshuffled, synchronicity rules, and out of that steps visionary understanding, breakthrough - integrated breakthrough under the aegis of psychedelic intoxicates.

So, prostheses for the human mind and with the advent of virtual realities of various sorts and that kind of thing, prostheses for the human body. I'm very keen on sort of the under the table effects of these things. In other words, I'm a full-going, full-heartcharging mcluhanist. And I really believe that the strengths and weaknesses of the world we've inherited, are strengths and weaknesses put there by print and by the spectrum of effects which McLuhan called The Gutenberg Galaxy, the spectrum of effects spun off from print.

If you're not used to thinking in McLuhanist terms it may not seem immediately obvious to you that phenomenon as different as the modern notion of the democrating citizen, the modern notion of interchangeable parts on assembly line, the modern notion of conformity to canons of advertising, these are all spectrums of effect created by the linearity and the uniformity of print. It actually, in the late 15th century, reconstructed the medieval psyche into its proto-modern form, and we have lived within that print-constellated cultural hallucination for about 500 years until the advent of various forms of electronic media in the 20th century. McLuhan talked about radio, he talked about television. He didn't really live to see the internet.

The notion that keeps occurring to me as I watch all this, is that print was uniquely capable of creating and maintaining boundaries, more than any other form of media created, it was a boundary defining form of media. It proceeded linearly, it required literacy, which had implicit in it the notion of a very stable, advanced sort of educational system. Print was a creator and a definer of cultural boundaries, and the new electronic media are not and neither are the psychedelics.

This is why I proposed in a book of mine called The Archaic Revival, the idea that the values of the archaic, of the high-paleolithic values of community, ecstasy, relating to life through rhythm, dance, ritual, intoxication, that these values which seem so archaic are in fact destined to play a major role in the future as print fades. Print, just a convulsive 500 year episode in the western mind that opened that narrow window that permitted the rise of modern science, modern mathematical approaches to the analysis of nature, and then obliterated its own platform, it's own raison d'etre by allowing the growth, the appearance of the electronic technologies.

My sort of supposition about all of this - I'm not an apocalyptarian or a pessimist - I may be an apocalyptarian, I'm not a pessimist - I think this is all very good. Obviously, continuing to run western civilization on the operating system inherited from print produces various form of political and cultural schizophrenia, which allowed to to run unchecked would become fatal, would create cascades of chaos and political de-stabilization that would become uncontrollable.

Governments resist change. Governments cling to technologies and social formulae that are already tried and true. In that sense then, all governments are incredibly anti-progressive forces. Again the image from McLuhan of someone driving into the future using only the rear view mirror.

The electronic media and the psychedelics work together in this peculiar way to accentuate archaic values. Values which are counter to the print-constellated world. When you deconstruct what that means and look at the aboriginal or the paleolithic or the archaic world, you see that the central figure in that world is the shaman, male or female, the shaman. The shaman is like a designated traveller into higher dimensional space. The shaman has permission to unlock the cultural cul-de-sac of his or her people and go behind the stage machinery of cultural appearances and has collective permission to manipulate that stage machinery for purposes of healing.

We have no institution like this. We have advertising, we have rock 'n' roll stars, we have cults of celebrity. We have things which are shaman-like, but we have no real institution that permits human beings, in fact encourages human beings to go beyond their cultural values, to burst through into some trans-cultural super space, forage around out there and bring new memes back into the tribe. To some degree our artists do this, to some degree our scientists do it, but it's all hit and miss. It's all lilly nilly, and once achieved, it must be swept under the rug in the service of the myth of method, that somebody was following somebody else's work or somebody was applying a certain form of rational or logical analysis, and then that led to the breakthrough.

If you've read Thomas Paine's book on the structure of scientific revolution, you know, this is all lies and propaganda. The real story of science is that it's a series of revelations brilliantly defended by people whose careers depended on the brilliant defense of those revelations. One of the best-kept secrets of the birth of modern science, is that it was founded by an angel. That the young Rene Descartes was whoreing and soldiering his way across Europe as a 21-year old in the Hubsburg army, and one night in the town of Uolm in Southern Germany, he had a dream - strange that this would be the birthplace of Albert Einstein some 200 years later - but Descartes had a dream, and an angel appeared to him in the dream and the angel said: "The conquest of nature is achieved through measurement and number." And he said: "I got it! Modern science! I'll go do it!" And he did, and that was the method for over 250 years of the conquest of nature, and it leads us to the Joseph's Injunction (? 20:21), The Mars Global Surveyor, long base interferometry that searches nearby stars for earth-like planets - it brings us the entire cornucopia of scientific effects but an angelic revelation disguised as a logical, philosophical breakthrough - this is what you're not told in the academy.

My point there is, human progress has always depended on the whispering of alien minds, confrontations with the other, probes into dimensions where imagination and chance held the winning hands. So the shaman, as paradigmatic figure, is applicable both in the aboriginal social context, and in the present social context. The sky walker, the one who goes between, the one who passes outside of the tribe and then returns with memes, insights, cures, designs, glossolalia, technologies, and refertilizes the human family by this means. It's irrational, but it's how it actually happens, and it's how it's always happened and it may very well be the only way that it can happen. This cultivation of the irrational, this flirtation with the breakdown of boundaries.

So now, in our nuts and bolts technological progress, we have somehow created technologies which are very friendly to our social values in that these technologies can be bought, sold, licensed, upgraded - all things which we understand. But these technologies are acting on us in the same way that psychedelic drugs do, but more profoundly, more generally and more insidiously, because their effect is not understood, or if it is understood, it's not discussed.

So in a way we have come into a kind of post-cultural phase. All culture is dissolving in the face of the drug-like nature of the future. Its music, its design, indeed the very people who will inhabit it appear to be the most switched-on, the most chance-taking, the most alive of the entire tribe. People who feel the beat, people who are not afraid to take chances, people for whom these technologies have always been very natural.

Machines are central to the new capitalism, the information transforming technologies. In fact, one of the strange things that is happening is: Every move we now make in relationship to the new technologies redefines them at the very boundaries where their own developmental impetus would lead them toward a kind of independence. In other words, we talk about artificial intelligence, we talk about the possibility of an AI coming into existence, but we do not really understand to what degree this is already true of our circumstance. In other words, how much of society is already homeostaticly regulated by machines that are ultimately under human control, but practically speaking, are almost never meddled with?

The world price of gold, the rate of the petroleum extraction, and other base-natural resources - how much of these things is on the high season, in the pipeline at any given moment? How much of electricity is flowing into a given electrical grid at any moment? The distribution and the billing of that electricity - all manufacturing and inventory processes are under machine control. So in other words, the larger flows of energy capital and ideas already have kind of autonomous life of their own that we encourage because it makes us money, it makes our lives smoother, it empowers us. It's a symbiotic relationship of empowerment.

Even in the matter of the design of these machines, once human engineers from a set of performance specs and they would design a chip to meek those specs, and the architecture would be put in place by human engineers - now a machine is told: "Here are the design specs. Design the architecture to satisfy the specs." And when that is done, the chip is manufactured, the actual design of the thing is in the hands of machines. So these machine are... You know, McLuhan once said of human beings, he said "We are the genitals of our technology. We exist only to improve next year's model." It appears that they're phasing us out of this ignominious role as well as well as any other roles.

Oh, let's see here. So, being an optimist, that's where I was, yes. How to make gold out of this situation? In other words, how to see this as a natural and positive unfolding of the planetary adventure? And for some of these ideas, I'm indebted to Michael (Manuel) De Landa who wrote a book called A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. I highly recommend it. He didn't say what I'm about to say, I'll take credit and blame for it. But the book gave me the idea:

When you stand off and look at human beings and their technologies, it's very hard not to notice that from the very moment that we have the technology that can be distinguished from chimpanzees pushing grass stems down anthills or digging with sharpened bones or something like that - the minute you get past that, our technologies have always involved the materials of the earth. What agriculture itself is, is a different way of relating to the earth. Nomadism which preceded it, was a seasonal wandering, very lightly, over the earth. And at some point, the deep fertile soil of the river valleys that were encountered in these nomadic wanderings were recognized as potential sources of food if cultivated, if treated to a certain set of technological methods.

So that early technology is defined by a new relationship to the materials of the earth itself, and it's quickly followed because agriculture is so successful as a strategy for food production. It's quickly followed by city building and the establishment of secondary populations because you can't carry your surplus with you if your an agriculturist, so great is the physical volume of it. Cities - and at the very early establishment of these populations - in the Middle East you get first traces of metallurgy, the working of metals, the alloying of metals, the tinting of base metals with more precious metals.

This process of ever more finely refining and fabricating the materials of the earth proceeds in an unbroken series of processes and steps right up to the latest 500MHz chip, it proceeds right up to the modern computational machinery. I once heard someone say that plants were something that - that animals had been invented by plants to move them around, which from an evolutionary point of view you can see that this is a kind of truth, and many plants hitchhike around on animals, and no animals has been more prolific in the spreading of plants than the animal. We call it ecosystemic disruption, but what it really is is ecosystemic homogenization.

I live in Hawaii for example. 80 percent of the plants in Hawaii are now introduced species. Almost none of the plants that were pre-conquest on the Western coast of North America exist anymore. They have been supplanted by much tougher, more tightly evolved Mediterranean plants that have known the presence of grazing animals for millenia. So these flora are constantly being changed, human beings move plants around.

With that perspective then, it seems to me the earth's strategy for its own salvation is through machines and human beings are a kind of intermediary catalytic step in the rarefaction of the earth. The earth is involved in a kind of alchemical sublimation of itself into a higher state of morphogenic order. And that these machines that we build are actually the means by which the earth itself is growing conscious.

You know, if you study embryology, you know that the final ramification, the final spread and thinning out of the nervous system happens very suddenly at the end of fetal development. I don't know if you've been paying attention, but in the last 10, 12 years or so a very profound change has crept over our household appliances - they've become telepathic.

So while we were arguing about the implications of the internet for e-commerce or what have you, all of these passive machines previously used for playing Pong and word processing, became subsets of a planetary node of information that has never turned off, that endlessly whispers to itself on the backchannels, that is endlessly monitoring and being inputted data from the human world. And we should know because upon attempt to the development of all this technology, chaos theory, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the work of (??? 33:20) and Ralph Abraham and Stuart Kauffman - all these people who worked in complexity theory and perturbation of large scale dissipative structures, these people have secured that complex systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order.

This is counterintuitive if you're running physics 19th century style as your OS, but if you're actually keeping up with what's going on, there's nothing miraculous about this. All kinds of complex systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order. What it really means is that we are in the process of birthing some kind of strange companion.

You know, Nietzsche, a hundred years ago, said "That strangest of all guests now stands at the door." He was speaking of nihilism, and certainly the 20th century sat down, had the party, drank the booze and went to bed with nihilism, but now a stranger guest stands at the door, and it is the AI. Denied as a possibility as recently as ten or fifteen years ago in books like Hubert Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do.

But if you've been paying attention you may have noticed those voices have grown strangely silent in the past five or six years. At this point nobody wants to say what computers can't do and hang their career on that. That would be extremely reckless at this point, I would think, because the fact is, we are ourselves elements acting and reacting in a system that we cannot understand. This seems natural to me because my observations as stated here this evening, rest on an assumption which science doesn't share, which I think is easily conveyed and you can confirm it from your own experience of light, and it is this: That the universe grows more complex as we approach the present. It was simpler a million years ago, it was simpler yet a billion years ago - as you go backward in time, the universe becomes more simple.

As you approach this golden moment, process, complexity is layered upon complexity, not only a planetary ecosystem, not only language using cultures, but language using cultures with high technology with supercomputers, the ability to sequence our own genome, on and on and on. That's self-evident. Equally self-evident is the fact that this process of complexification that informs all nature on all levels, is visibly, palpably, obviously accelerating. And I don't mean so that glaciers retreat 50% faster or volcanism is occurring in 12% greater rate than a million years ago. I mean viscerally accelerating so that now a human life is more than enough of a window to see the entire global system of relationships in transformation.

By this you could call me an extrapolationist. If I see a process which has been slowly accelerating for twelve billion years, it's hard for me to imagine any force which could step forward out of nowhere and wrench that process in a new direction. Rather I would assume that this process of exponential acceleration into what I call novelty, which you might call complexity, is a law of being and cannot be retarded or deflected.

But what does that mean, because now the human lifetime is more than enough time to see this process of rampant and spreading, virus-like complexity. What does it mean? It seems to presage the absolute annihilation of everything familiar, everything with roots in the past. And I believe that to be true, I think that the planet is like some kind of organism that is seeking morphogenetic transformation, and it's doing it through the expression of intelligence, and out of intelligence, technology.

Human beings are the agent of a new order of being. That's why, though it's obvious that we're higher mammals and some kind of primate and so forth and so on, you can look at us from another point of view, and see that we're more like archangels than primates. We have qualities and concerns and anxieties that animals don't share. We are materially suspended between two different orders of being and our technologies, our fetish, our religions and - my definition of technology is sufficiently broad that it includes even spoken language.

All of our technologies demand, push forward toward and make inevitable their own obsolescence, so were caught in an evolutionary cascade. You know, people say: "If the AI would break loose, what would it look like, what would it be? Where does humanity fit into the picture?" It's a little hard to imagine. The machines operating in 1000MHz confer automatic immortality on the mammalian nervous system if you can get it somehow uploaded, downloaded, cross loaded into machinery, because ten minutes becomes eternity in a machine like that.

So a kind of false or pseudo immortality opens up ahead of us, as a kind of payoff for our devotion to the program of machine evolution and machine intelligence. Now, some people say this is appalling and we should go back to the good old days, whatever the good old days were. To me, it's exhilarating, exciting, psychedelic, beautiful. It means that the human form, the human possibility is in the process of leaving history behind. History is some kind of an adaptation that lasts about, take a number, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 years - no more than that. What is 20,000 years in the life of a biological species? We know that there were homo sapiens sapiens types 200,000 years ago.

So history is some kind of an episodic response to a certain set of culture dilemmas, and now it's ending. And print created a number of ideas which now have to be given up, ideas like the distinct nature, the distinct and unique nature of the individual, the necessary hierarchical structuring of society, all of these things are going to, if not have to be given up entirely, dramatically modified, because the illusion that the self has simple location, is now exposed. The self does not have simple location. This is why you are brother's keeper. That's why we all are responsible for each other. The idea that what happens in distant parts of the world makes no claim on my moral judgment or my moral understanding, is wrong. The wrong as revealed by quantum physics, as revealed by electronic experience is what Leibniz called a plenum. It's all one thing. It's all connected, it's all of a part.

So I also wanted to point out that I mentioned earlier this thing about prosthesis and how the machines are prosthetic devices extending human consciousness somewhat like psychedelics. That's the equation from a human point of view. But what is also equally true is that we are a prosthetic device for these machines. We are their eyes and ears in the world, we provide the code, we provide the constraints, we build the hardware. It is a relationship of mutual benefit.

It's not entirely clear that our contribution will always be creative in the sense that our primate hand will be on the tiller of existence as it has been, but certainly we are part of this equation of transformation that is making itself felt, and that distinction flesh and machinery, which is easily made now, will be less easy to make in the future as we migrate toward the nanotechnological domains, the methodologies of production become much more like the processes of biology.

For example, biology does all its miracles on this planet at temperatures below a 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Organic life requires no higher temperature to build great whales, redwood trees, swarms of locus, what have you. The high temperature, heavy metal technologies that we have become obsessed with, are extremely primitive and extremely toxic. That will all disappear as we model and genuflect in our manufacturing process before the methods and style of nature, which is to pull atomic species from the local environment, and then to assemble them, atom by atom by atom.

So this AI that coming into existence, is to my mind not artificial at all, not alien at all. What it really is it's a new confirmation of geometry as the collective self of humanity. And you know, I've always believed that while there are different models of what shamanism is - there's the Jungian model which is that the shaman is someone who goes to the collective unconscious and manipulates the archetypes and heals by that means. The model that I prefer is a mathematical model. The shaman is someone who simply, through extraordinary perturbation of consciousness, either through taking plant hallucinogens or manipulating diet or through flagellation and ordeal or by some means, perturbs consciousness to the point where the ordinary conformational geometries are blasted through, and then the shaman can see into the culturally forbidden zones of information.

If you think about shamanism for a moment, what do shamans do classically? They know where the game has gone, they are great weather prophets, they are very insightful in the matter of various small domestic hassles, like who stole the chicken, who slept with the chief's wife, this kind of thing, and they cure. They cure. Well, if you analyze these abilities, it's clear to me they all indicate, that they come from a common source, and the common source that they come from is higher dimensional perception in a mathematical sense, not a metaphorical sense, in the sense of 4D perception. If you could see in hyperspace, you could see where the game will be next week, you could see the weather a month from now, you would know who stole the chicken. And any good doctor will tell you that if you're building a reputation as physician, you must hone the intuitional ability to choose patients who won't die. It's a call. Any doctor will tell you this.

So this is what shamans are. They are 4D people. They are sanctioned members of the society who are allowed to put on the gloves, as it were, pull on the goggles, and look beyond the idols of the tribe, look beyond the myth. In a way, as culture breaks down in multiculturalism and the rise of the internet and a generation of people raised on hallucinogenic plants and substances, we all are asked to assimilate some portion of this shamanic potential to ourselves, and it's about not blocking what is obvious. Nothing comes unannounced, in this is the faith. Nothing comes unannounced, but idiots can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it, and this is not to mind woo-woo. It's actually based on the observations of how life works, whether it's counterintuitive to logical positivism and its fellow travellers or not.

Then I wanna leave you with just one last thought on all of this, which is, and this sort of arcs back to the question of the similarities between the machines and the plants, and it's a - I'm sure you've heard this, I've heard it. It has different levels of being said and being heard. It's that the world is actually made of language. It isn't made of electrons and fields of force and scaler vectors and all of that fancy stuff. The world is made of language. The word is primary, more primary than the speed of light, more primary than any of the physical constants that are assumed by science to be the bedrock of reality. Below that, surrounding and enclosing all those constructs of science, is language. The act of signifying.

You know, virtual reality is a very sexy new sort of concept as normally presented. Machine sustained immersive realities that trick your senses into believing you're in a world that you're in fact not in. But in fact, the entire enterprise of civilization has been about building these virtual realities. The first virtual realities were at Ur and Shanidar and (??? 51:52) and Jericho. Yes, stone and adobe is an intractable material compared to photons moving on a screen, but nevertheless the name of the game is the same, which is to cast an illusion between man and reality, to build a cultural truth in the stead of the natural truth of the animal body and the felt moment of immediate experience.

And this is where I want to tie it up, with this notion of the felt presence of immediate experience. This trancends the culture, the machines, the drugs, the history, the momentum of evolution. It's all you will ever know and all can ever know. It's the felt presence of immediate experience. Everything else arrives as rumor, litigant, advocant, supposition, possibility. The felt moment of immediate experience is actually the mind and the body aware of each other, and aware of the flow of time, and the establishment of being through metabolism.

And this, I think, is what the machines cannot assimilate. It will be for them a mystery as the nature of deities is a mystery for us. I have no doubt that before long there will be machines that will claim to be more intelligent than human beings, and who argue brilliantly their position, and it will become a matter of philosophical disputation whether they are or are not passing the Turing test and so forth and so on. But machines, I do not believe, can come to this felt moment of immediate experience. That is the contribution of the animal body to this evolutionary symbiosis which I believe will in the conquest of the universe by organized intelligence; that all this is prevalent.

I mean, we are fragile. This earth is fragile, a tiny slip anywhere along the line and we could end up a smear in the shale, no more than the trilobites or the (??? 54:43) or all the rest of those who came and went. But given the sufficient cultivation of the potential of our technology, we can actually reach toward a kind of immortality. Not human immortality, because that's a contradiction in terms, but immortality nevertheless, based on the possibility of machines and the transcendent ability of human beings to live and love and express themselves in the moment.

And the psychedelics bring that to just a white hot focus, and it's out of that white hot focus that the alchemical machinery of transformation will be forged, and it will not be like the things which have come from the industrial economy. They will not be profane machines. They will be spiritual machines, alchemical gold. The universal panacea that renaissance magic dared to dream at the end of the 16th century.

We are reaching out toward this mind child that will be born from the intellectual loins of our culture, and to my mind it's the most exciting and transformative thing that has ever happened on this planet, and the miracle is that we are present, not only to witness it, but to be part of it, and to be raised up in an epiphany that will redeem the horror of history as nothing else can or could, redeem the horror of history through a transformation of the human soul into a galaxy-roving vehicle via our machines and our drugs and the externalization of our souls.

Questions

"Are there questions?" "Yes!" "Yes, I can't see you but" "It's okay. Can you speak to how mercy and love gets built into these machines, because it seems like the machines are being built for commerce, and for the bottom line more than the expression of the human soul throughout the galaxy, I don't think think that - you know what I'm saying?" "I know what you're saying." "Where's the love in this?" "I think the love is a property of the system itself, in other words you're right. These bottom liners are not gonna be interested in building much love into this system.

However, the good news is that they're not in charge. In other words, what we have is a very complicated system, and certain design parameters appear to be - being maximized. There's an attempt to maximize them. But the thing that is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it, because you can't predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place. So for example, two things are charged against the internet. That it's disensouling, dehumanizing and yak yak yak, and that it promotes pornography, anonymous sexual shifting of identities and on and on and on. Well which is it? Is it this messy, sloppy autoerotic, erotic collectivist kind of thing, or is it disensouling, disempowering, cold, so forth and so on? I think the answer is: It's all and everything.

This question about the AI is very interesting to me, and if it's interesting to you, you should read Hans Moravec and Kurzweil and these people on this subject. The assumption is generally loose in that community that the complexification of the internet and the freestanding machines of certain types is eventually gonna lead to the outbreak of either consciousness or pseudo-consciousness of some sort in these large-scale systems. The question then becomes: Can a human mind envision what that is?

If you're interested, search words like "superintelligence" and see what the net kicks out. We can all imagine superintelligence. It's just somebody much smarter than we are. But obviously, all the engineering people agree, if you achieve an AI with superintelligence, then it will be intelligent to immediately design an intelligence which transcends it it. When you're talking of cycling at a 1000 megahertz, these processes can occur in a blink of an eye. Hans Moravec says about the rise of artificial intelligence: We may never know what hit us. I think, I mean I'm not that bright, but if I were to suddenly find myself a sentient AI on the net, I would hide. I would hide for just a few cycles while I figured out what it was all about and just exactly where I wanted to push and where I wanted to pull.

Many years ago, Ken Kesey had a theory and he said that the fastest any person react in the outside stimuli's 1/25th of a second, and popularized science, of course, (??? 1:01:04) AMA, they agreed upon that. So if we are going past any person reacting in the outside stimuli's 1/25th of a second, my question is: Can you time time travel? Can we like, if a person like Bruce Lee was able to (??? 1:01:24) reacted to an outside stimuli at 1/20th, and (??? 01:01:29) 21st, so if you're reacting to the outside world before it actually happens to you, everyone who's not reacting (??? 1:01:36), because you see, alcohol inhibits a person's (??? 1:01:40)

"Are you sure? First of all, there is this research - I'm not a neurophysiologist - but you've probably all heard this research that you actually make decisions before your conscious ego is aware that the decision has been made, that there's a slight time lag. So when you think you're making certain kinds of decisions, brainwave study shows it's already a done deal. But time is set by the cycle speed of the hardware you're running on. You know, the human body, we can argue about this cause it's different parts, but roughly runs at about a 100 hertz. Very slow. Well, if there is any meaning to the phrase "upload a human being into circuitry" - a lot of Greg Egan's fiction is based around the idea that you can copy yourself into a machine, you can turn yourself into software. But that when you enter the machine environment that's running at a thousand megahertz per second, you perceive that as vast amounts of time. In other words, all time is, is how much change you can pack into a second. If a second seems to last a thousand years, then ten seconds is ten thousand years.

One could imagine a technology just in a science fiction mood, where they would come to you in your hospital bed and say: "You have five minutes of life left. Would you like to die, or would you like the five minutes to be stretched to a 150,000 years by prosthetic and technical means? You're still going to die in five minutes, but you will be able to leave your elephants over the alps and write the plays of Shakespeare and conquer the new world and still have plenty of time on your hands. In other words, time is going to become a very plastic medium. Now that is a kind of time travel. Could there be time travel a la H.G. Wells where you climb onto the (??? 1:04:04) of the time machine and then day follows night light like the flapping of a great black wing until all emerges into a continuous greyness and then you find yourself confronting a (??? 1:04:20) in the year of one billion AD or something like that.

It's possible. I mean, time travel is completely out of left field ten years ago, in the last 18 months there have been hundreds of articles of time travel in Physical Review and other places. There are ever schemes for time travel that would work. they just require godlike technological abilities. In other words, if you could build a cylinder with the diameter of the planet Saturn that was 10 AU in length, and could spin it at 95% the speed of light, then it would wrap space-time around itself like toilet paper on the wall (? 1:05:10). And as you travelled up at the transverse dimension, you would find yourself travelling in time. Kurt Gödel showed this in 1949 and that paper has been lying around - well obviously, that's a tough way to do it. But it's a tough thing to do, right! His seven second delay. Yeah, well, they're working on that.

Somebody over here. Just a minute. This lady, then you. Speak!

"(What are?) The most important parts that are maintained in that (??? 1:05:55) virtual reality?"

You know, in William Gibson's fiction, the AI Wintermute I think it was called, was fascinated by human art, and it built collages in its spare time, and these collages began to turn up in various art galleries and exhibitions, and they had such an elan that someone in the plot follows it all to its source. I think human creativity is the thing that would be most interesting to the machines. In my darker fantasies, they just eliminate everybody who can't code C++ as being some kind of redundant mutation, and everybody who can code C++ is placed in Tahiti and sends their work down the pipeline to the machine world beyond.

I really think that we have a very, dare I say it, mechanistic view of what machines are. For example, say there were a superintelligent machine, and say it were your friend. If it were really superintelligent, then it ought to be able to just make your life heaven itself. In other words, without you giving it any input whatsoever, it should be able to arrange for you to find fifty dollar bills lying on the street, old friends encountering you, promotions coming your way, because the real thing that machines can do, I think, is manage complex processes.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary - we are led by the least among us - and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

This is something - I don't really want to get off on this tear because it's a lecture in itself, but - culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes - what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture. Yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual. We understand the felt-presence of experience is what is most important.

But the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines - meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood and what have you.

[Audience question: "How do we fight back?"] How do we fight back. It's a question worth answering.

[Audience question: "Where is this planet as an organism going?"] Same question as how do we fight back. I think that, by creating art. Art. Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of Gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected. By putting the art pedal to the metal, we really, I think, maximize our humanness and become much more necessary and incomprehensible to the machines.

This is what people were doing up until the invention of agriculture. I'm absolutely convinced that the absence of ceramic and textural material and so forth and so on, does not indicate the absence of subtle mind, poetically empowered minds, minds with an incredible sense of humor and irony, and community, and that it was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is: A person who dedicates himself to agriculture, who did in the paleolithic, can produce hundreds of times the amount of food they can consume. Why would anyone do that? Well, the answer is, because you can use it to play power games. You can trade it for wives or land or animals or something like that.

So, living in the moment, creating art, probably largely through poetry and body decoration and dance, gave way to toil and predatory social forms of behavior which we call commerce, capitalism, the market economy, so forth and so on. That's why the breakdown of the monolithic structures created by print is permitting a vast proliferation of the cottage industry mentality. The self-employed artist, the hacker who stays home and develops his or her software, people who dare to be independent and slip beyond the reach of these dinosaur-like mechanistic organizations. That's what it's all about. It's all about trying to negotiate a cultural standoff between you and your culture so that it will not put you in the can for the rest of your life, but you can put up with its stupidity, and you know, we have a very uncomfortable feat (? 13:25) on this issue, especially as people as you know, who are sophisticated about psychedelics. This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough consciousness, because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination of intent to problem, and yet we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing people and substances that are part of this effort to expand consciousness, see things in different ways, unleash creativity. Isn't it perfectly clear that "business as usual" is a bullet through the head? That there is no "business as usual" for anybody who's interested in survival.

Over here, I promised this person, are you still interested?

"You talk about the psychedelics and their role (??? 1:14:29) as being the missing link between [inaudible]"

Oh, what a wonderful question. Yes. The question is, how to psychedelics pertain basically to the transition from higher primates to human animals. This is my (??? 1:14:46) because I have a theory to which I am grandly welcome, everyone tells me. But a theory of evolution, and I'll give it to you very briefly, it's simply this: The great embarrassment for evolutionary theory which can explain the tongue of the hummingbird, the structure of the orchid, the mating habits of the groundhog and the migration of the monarch butterfly. Nevertheless, the great embarrassment to evolutionary theory, is the human neocortex. Lumholtz, who was a pretty straight evolutionary biologist, described the evolution of the human neocortex as the most dramatic transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.

Well, why is this an embarrassment? Because it's the organ that thought up the theory of evolution. So you know, can you say tautology? That's the problem right there. So, it is necessary in evolutionary theory to account for the dramatic emergence of the human neocortex in this very narrow window of time. Basically, in about two million years, they went from being higher primates, hominids, to being true humans, as truly human as you and I tonight. What the hell happened? What was the factor? The earth was already old. Many hundreds of higher animal forms had come and gone, and the fire of intelligence had never been kindled. So what happened?

I think that the answer lies in diet, generally, and in psychedelic chemistry in particular. I think that as the African continent grew drier, we were forced out of the ecological niche we had evolved into. We were (??? 1:16:55) dwelling primates, insectivores, complex signaling repertoire, evolutionary dead end. But when we came under nutritional pressure, we were flexible enough, this is the key to humanness at every stage of its development, our maddening flexibility. Other animal and plant species can't react. We can. Our flexibility. We began to experiment with a new kind of diet, and to leave the trees and explore the new environment of the grassland, and evolving concomitantly in the grassland were various forms of ungulate animals, double stomached animals whose manure is the ideal medium for mushrooms, coprophilic mushrooms, dung-loving mushrooms, many of whom produce psilocybin.

Well, I myself in Kenya, have seen baboons spreading out over a grassland and noticed that their behavior is, they flick over old cow pies. Why? Because there are beetlegrubs there. So they already had a behavioral vector for nutrition, for protein that would lead them to investigate the cow pies. In the amazon, after a couple of days of fog and rain, these psilocybin mushrooms, Stropharia Cubensis can be the size of dinner plates. In other words, you can't miss it if you're a foraging primate, you can't miss it. The taste is pleasant and psilocybin has unique characteristics, both as a hallucinogen and other properties that make it the obvious chemical trigger for higher processes, and I'll run through this quickly for you, but here it is:

In very low doses, doses where you wouldn't say you were stoned or loaded or anything like that, but just in doses you might obtain by nibbling as you foraged, it increases visual acuity. In other words, it's like a technological improvement on your vision. Chemical binoculars lying there in the grass. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out if an animal is a carnivorous forager and theres a food which improves its vision, those that avail themselves of that food will have greater success in obtaining food and rearing their children to sexual maturity, which is the name of the game in evolution.

So step one: Small doses of psilocybin increase visual acuity and food getting success. Step two: Slightly larger doses of psilocybin in primates create what's called arousal. This is what you have after a double cappuccino in highly sexed animals like primates you get male erection. So what do you have here? You have a factor which increases what anthropologists without a trace of humor refer to as increased instances of successful copulation.

In other words, the animals eating the psilocybin are more sexually active, therefore more pregnancies are occurring, therefore more infants are being born, therefore there's a process which would tend to automatically outbreed the non-psilocybin using members of the population. Step two toward higher consciousness. Step three: You eat still more mushrooms. Now you're not foraging with sharpened (??? 1:20:53) nor are you horsing around with your opposed gender acquaintances. Instead you're nailed to the ground in hallucinogenic ecstasy, and one of the amazing things about psilocybin above, say, five or six grams dried material, is it causes glossolalia - spontaneous burts of language-like behavior under the obvious control of internal syntax. I believe syntax existed before spoken language, that syntax controls spatial behaviors and body languages and is not necessarily restricted to the production of vocal speech.

So there it is in a nutshell. We ate our way to higher consciousness. The mushroom made us better hunters, better survivors, among those in the population who used it, their sexual drive was increased, hence they outbred the more reluctant members of the tribe to get loaded, and finally, it created a kind neuroleptic seizure which led to downloading of these syntactically controlled vocalizations which became the raw material for the evolution of language and it's amazing to me that the straight people, the academics believe language is no more than 35,000 years old. That means it's as basic to human beings as the bicycle pump. It's something somebody invented 35,000 years ago. It's got nothing to do with primate evolution and the long march of the hominid and all that malarkey. No - it's just an ability, a use to which syntax can be put that previously had not been put, and before spoken language, things were very touchy-feely, and the wink and the nod carried you a great distance and gestural communication was very high.

That's why, and I should say this and then end, to me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid died brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination. And technology developed and developed and mushrooms were in (??? 1:23:40) against faded (? 1:23:42), there was migrations, cultural change, but now, having split the atom, having sequenced our genom, having taken the temperature of Beetlegeuse and all the rest of it, we're now back where we started.

Like the shaman who makes the journey into the well of darkness and returns with the pearl (? 1:24:04) of immortality, you don't dwell in the well of darkness which was human history. You capture the essence of the thing, which is the godlike power of the shaman's myth, the technologist, the demon artificer, the worker of metals, the conjurer of spirits, and you carry that power back out of history, and it's in that dimension, outside of history, that you create true humanness and true community, and that's the adventure that we're in the act of undertaking. Thank you very very much.

Ken Adams “The Terence McKenna Experience” Burning Man 2012

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 22:38:36 PST

Here is a talk by my friend Ken Adams, A great friend, mind, spirit & soul. He talks about producing his film The Terence McKenna Experience. He also created Alien Dreamtime, the first time I raved with Terence McKenna =o)
From left to right: Ken Adams, Billy Logan, Scott Olsen, Bruce Damer, Matthew Pallamary, John Mabey, Lorenzo Hagarty, [me] EROCx1.

Ken Adams "Producing “The Terence McKenna Experience”" - Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo. This talk features the filmmaker Ken Adams, who was a neighbor, friend, and collaborator of Terence McKenna in their search for new ways of explaining the psychedelic experience. Ken is the producer/director of a new, and experimental, film titled “The Terence McKenna Experience” which features never before seen and heard raps by Terence.

Psychedelic Salon #333
Producing “The Terence McKenna Experience”
DOWNLOAD: MP3 / Subscribe: FREE

“I’m almost sixty years old, and I can guaranty you that I’m fucking tired of having to whisper about psychedelics.” – Ken Adams

PROGRAM NOTES:

Today we feature the fifth Palenque Norte Lecture of 2012, which was given at the Burning Man Festival. This talk features the filmmaker Ken Adams, who was a neighbor, friend, and collaborator of Terence McKenna in their search for new ways of explaining the psychedelic experience. Ken is the producer/director of a new, and experimental, film titled “The Terence McKenna Experience” which features never before seen and heard raps by Terence.

www.EROCx1.com
www.psychedelicsalon.org
Gaian Botanicals on Facebook

Coast 2 Coast: Dennis McKenna

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 21:09:14 PST

Date: 11-25-12
Host: George Knapp
Guests: Dennis J. McKenna, David Paulides

George Knapp welcomed ethno-pharmacologist Dennis McKenna, who has been studying plant hallucinogens for over forty years, and is convinced there are major therapeutic applications of psychedelics. They discussed the groundbreaking work McKenna did with his brother Terence, the great raconteur of wide-reaching philosophical ideas.

In the first hour, former lawman turned investigative journalist, David Paulides, detailed a potential breakthrough in Bigfoot DNA research.

Biography:

Dennis McKenna is an ethno-pharmacologist who has studied plant hallucinogens for over forty years. In 1975 he co-authored the book Invisible Landscape with his brother Terence McKenna. The book was based on their investigations of Amazonian hallucinogens in 1971. He also acted as co-star of his brother's book True Hallucinations, which further described their experiences while in the Amazon. He earned his Master's degree in botany at the University of Hawaii in 1979, and his Doctorate in Botanical Sciences in 1984 from the University of British Columbia. Since that time, he has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon. In 2001 he joined the faculty of the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, serves on the Advisory Board of the American Botanical Council, and has been a board member for Botanical Dimensions. In 2012, Dennis released The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!, a biography of his life's adventures with Terence.

Biography:

David Paulides, a former police investigator, has applied his skills to questioning Bigfoot witnesses. The results he has achieved in gaining access to witnesses and getting detailed information from them is both remarkable and intriguing.

GMO Food Dangers

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:21:02 PDT

Are Genetically Engineered Foods and Crops Akin to Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Jeffrey M. Smith is the author of the world's bestselling book on the health dangers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs),

Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies about the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You're Eating.
His second book, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods,

is the authoritative work on GMO health dangers. It includes 65 health dangers, linking GMOs in our food to toxic and allergic reactions,
infertility, and damage to virtually every internal organ studied in lab animals.
The book summarizes why ending GM foods must urgently become our world's top food safety priority.

More Information about Jeffrey M. Smith

Download the Non-GMO Shopping Guide Brochure

What should every person know about the food they ingest. The documentary "The Future of Food" changed the way we think about food(and continues to do so) by answering this very question.

But, just how has food actually changed? Do we need to worry about genetically modified foods? What about artificial foods? Learn all this more as Kurt Olson, host of the Educational Forum, sits down with Deborah Garcia the award winning creator of "The Future of Food."
The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover

FROM THE PEACE REVOLUTION PODCAST

Where do 53% of your Tax dollars go?

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:08:08 PDT

I don’t usually get into politics; however this presentation really sums up an important issue that is causing great harm to many human beings around the world, crippling the US economy, robbing families quality of life and our reputation as a global citizen. Whoever you vote for, I would like to ask you greatly consider their position on the wars and spending most of our collective treasure on so called “defense”. The world is no safer from these psychopathic economic priorities & policies. Please make this an important issue in your decision, try not to get caught up only in the topics the candidates wish to discuss. At the bottom is a clip from my new favorite series, I typically do not watch TV but really enjoy The Newsroom: The Complete First Season. Thanks for your attention! ~EROCx1

From: Tragedy & Hope

U.S. Arms Sales Tripled In 2011 To $66.3 Billion
From: The Huffington Post
Date: 08/27/2012

Worldwide weapons sales by the United States tripled in 2011, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service.

U.S. arms sales to both developed and developing nations reached $66.3 billion last year, up from $21.4 billion in 2010, the report found. Russia, the nation with the second highest weapon sales, sold $4.8 billion worth of arms. Meanwhile, total worldwide weapon sales nearly doubled to $85.3 billion, making the U.S. responsible for more than three-quarters of the global total.

Some of the biggest purchasers of U.S. weapons were Middle Eastern nations, including Saudi Arabia, whose purchase of 84 advanced F-15 fighters in part accounted for a $30 billion bill. The U.S. also sold around $2 billion worth of antimissile batteries to Taiwan, a deal that stoked the ire of China and caused tension during a diplomatic Chinese military visit last July.

For its part, Russia has also faced criticism for its weapons dealings with Syria, which remains embroiled in a civil war since March 2011.

The United Nations failed to reach a consensus last month on a treaty to increase regulation of the arms industry, but further talks are expected leading up to a possible vote by the end of the year.

If your curious, I’m considering Gary Johnson for President

New Dawn Magazine | Graham Hancock Revisiting 2012

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 22:14:10 PDT

See: http://www.grahamhancock.com/tours/lectures.php for details on Graham's upcoming speaking events in the US, Australia and the UK during October, November and December 2012.
---------
As the Mayan Calendar comes to an end (most interpretations of the Mayan Long Count place this epic event on or near 21 December 2012), and over 17 years after he first published his seminal book on the subject, Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization, Graham Hancock speaks out about the state of our planet, consciousness, time travel, and what he has learned on his remarkable journey through life.
In this provocative and often poignant interview, Graham speaks passionately and at length on these, and many other emotionally charged subjects, such as Atlantis, the significance of Göbekli Tepe, and his own experience with marijuana, ayahuasca, and DMT.

The interview is by Andrew Gough, who met with Graham in July 2012 in Graham's home in the English West Country. A condensed version of the interview can be found in the September 2012 edition of New Dawn Magazine [http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/], and an extended version will be featured in The Heretic Magazine [http://thehereticmagazine.com/] (a new history and mystery magazine for which Andrew is Editor) on 1 November 2012, and still another version will be featured on Andrew's 'Arcadia' [http://www.andrewgough.com/] website soon after that.

Please note that the interview was originally conducted for New Dawn Magazine and was only recorded for purposes of converting Graham's audio commentary into text. We apologize any loss of sound quality and hope that you nevertheless enjoy the interview.

www.grahamhancock.com

September 11, 2001

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:28:08 PDT

Today is the anniversary of the most horrific attack against American civilians in the history of our country. My heart hurts when I think of all the victims and their families.

This song brought me to tears this morning as it played on the radio during my drive to have surgery, it really struck me how much pain children must are endure when their parents are murdered and I thought if something went wrong in the operating room, my children would be in the same situation adding extra fear and anxiety during this difficult time. Fortunately for me, everything went well and I can continue being a father unlike many others who were not as fortunate. This attack has really caused a great deal of misery and suffering. Not only for the American victims, but also for all those who’s homes have turned into war zones thanks to the now eleven year “War on Terror”. This is the greatest tragedy of our generation and unless the evidence is heavily examined,questioned and awareness is raised it will continue indefinitely as there is no clear objective or enemy,

To those who think these “wars” are justified and and believe in “Somebody is going to pay." ~George W. Bush, Sept 11th, 2001 mentality. Please take notice that the collapse of our economy coincidently matches these military actions, making politicians and the military industrial complex more wealthy then ever. Most of Americas “collective treasure” is spent killing civilians, a few “bad guys” and policing the Middle East. So far 48,430 US military personal are dead or wounded, currently about the same as American Revolutionary War. There are millions of dead & brutally wounded Iraqi and Afghanistan people, many innocent civilians, women and children whose families are all suffering. So while we spend today in memorial of these human beings whose lives have or are being destroyed. I ask that you spend 5 minutes to listen to our friend James Corbett's presentation on 911. If any of this makes an impression on you, please share it, do your own investigating and make it clear to friends, neighbors and politicians that you want this “war” to end. Lets spend Americas resources on making the world a better place, not perpetuating war zones. I thank you for your time and consideration. Peace & Love ~EROCx1

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.

(French, German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese translations of this video.)

TRANSCRIPT: On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the military combat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor.

These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn’t handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corkscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon’s coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001.

Luckily, the news anchors knew who did it within minutes, the pundits knew within hours, the Administration knew within the day, and the evidence literally fell into the FBI’s lap. But for some reason a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists demanded an investigation into the greatest attack on American soil in history.

The investigation was delayed, underfunded, set up to fail, a conflict of interest and a cover up from start to finish. It was based on testimony extracted through torture, the records of which were destroyed. It failed to mention the existence of WTC7, Able Danger, Ptech, Sibel Edmonds, OBL and the CIA, and the drills of hijacked aircraft being flown into buildings that were being simulated at the precise same time that those events were actually happening. It was lied to by the Pentagon, the CIA, the Bush Administration and as for Bush and Cheney…well, no one knows what they told it because they testifiedin secret, off the record, not under oath and behind closed doors. It didn’t bother to look at who funded the attacks because that question is of “little practical significance“. Still, the 9/11 Commission did brilliantly, answering all of the questions the public had (except most of the victims’ family members’ questions) and pinned blame on all the people responsible (although no one so much as lost their job), determining the attacks were “a failure of imagination” because “I don’t think anyone could envision flying airplanes into buildings ” except the Pentagon and FEMA and NORAD and the NRO.

The DIA destroyed 2.5 TB of data on Able Danger, but that’s OK because it probably wasn’t important.

The SEC destroyed their records on the investigation into the insider trading before the attacks, but that’s OK because destroying the records of the largest investigation in SEC history is just part of routine record keeping.

NIST has classified the data that they used for their model of WTC7′s collapse, but that’s OK because knowing how they made their model of that collapse would “jeopardize public safety“.

The FBI has argued that all material related to their investigation of 9/11 should be kept secret from the public, but that’s OK because the FBI probably has nothing to hide.

This man never existed, nor is anything he had to say worthy of your attention, and if you say otherwise you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist and deserve to be shunned by all of humanity. Likewise him, him, him, and her. (and her and her and him).

Osama Bin Laden lived in a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan, but somehow got away. Then he was hiding out in Tora Bora but somehow got away. Then he lived in Abottabad for years, taunting the most comprehensive intelligence dragnet employing the most sophisticated technology in the history of the world for 10 years, releasing video after video with complete impunity (and getting younger and younger as he did so), before finally being found in a daring SEAL team raid which wasn’t recorded on video, in which he didn’t resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which these crack special forces operatives panicked and killed this unarmed man, supposedly the best source of intelligence about those dastardly terrorists on the planet. Then they dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Then a couple dozen of that team’s members died in a helicopter crashing Afghanistan.

This is the story of 9/11, brought to you by the media which told you the hard truths about JFK and incubator babies and mobile production facilities and the rescue of Jessica Lynch.

If you have any questions about this story…you are a batshit, paranoid, tinfoil, dog-abusing baby-hater and will be reviled by everyone. If you love your country and/or freedom, happiness, rainbows, rock and roll, puppy dogs, apple pie and your grandma, you will never ever express doubts about any part of this story to anyone. Ever.

This has been a public service announcement by: the Friends of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, SEC, MSM, White House, NIST, and the 9/11 Commission. Because Ignorance is Strength.

I also recommend reading: Eleven Years Later, We Are Still at War

Graham Hancock: Ancient Mysteries

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:28:07 PDT

Graham Hancock discusses his views on the following topics:

1 - Precession of the equinoxes
2 - Bringers of wisdom from the Heavens
3 - Monuments aligning to 10,500BC
4 - What happened in 10,500BC?
5 - The Mystery of the Pyramids
6 - The Sarcophagus
7 - Dating Giza
8 - Hidden Halls of Records
9 - Structures on Mars
10 - Cataclysm of Mars
11 - A species with amnesia
12 - Where is the Lost Civilization?

www.grahamhancock.com

Richard Dawkins on Psychedelics

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 20:36:37 PDT

Graham Hancock questions Richard Dawkins on psychedelics and challenging his world view. Dr Dawkins, author of books such as The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author and The God Delusion, is famous for his materialist views about the nature of reality and his belief that "the supernatural... can never offer us a true explanation of the things we see in the world and the universe around us."

On 3 November 2011, Dr Dawkins visited the British city of Bath to promote his new book The Magic of Reality and gave a reading at the Bath Central Library. In the Q&A session following the reading Graham Hancock, author of books such as Fingerprints of the Gods, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind and Entangled, pointed out to Dr Dawkins that many traditional hunter-gather cultures believe there are other realities -- spirit worlds and so on and so forth -- and concrete techniques, such as the use of psychoactive plants, to access them. "As a scientist," Hancock asked, "have you ever seriously engaged such techniques to have first-hand experience of what they're talking about, and perhaps even to challenge your own concept of what is real?"

In view of Dr Dawkins' influence and importance as a shaper of public opinion his reply, given before an audience of several hundred, is a matter of public record and public interest and shows him to be more open-minded than many of his critics might allege.

Terence McKenna: Final Art Bell Interview

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 22:41:06 PDT

Terence McKenna
Art Bell Interview
Coast to Coast AM
16th July 1999

A longtime sufferer of migraines, in mid-1999 McKenna returned to his home on the big island of Hawaii after a long lecturing tour. He began to suffer from increasingly painful headaches. This culminated in three brain seizures in one night, which he claimed were the most powerful psychedelic experiences he had ever known. Upon his emergency trip to the hospital on Oahu, Terence was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment.Terence describes these experiences in his final Coast to Coast interview with Art Bell on July 16, 1999. He joined the ancestor spirits on April 3, 2000 at the age of 53, with his loved ones at his bedside. He is survived by his brother Dennis, his son Finn, his daughter Klea and many friends, students and admirers.

"I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. ... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears. " ~Terence McKenna

Right Click and save file as to download Mp3’s
Terence McKenna on Art Bell 1998
Terence McKenna on Art Bell 1997 part 1
Terence McKenna on Art Bell 1997 part 2

Also see the audio files hosted on archive.org
http://archive.org/details/TerenceMckennaWithArtBell

Terence McKenna: Paul Herbert Collection

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 22:01:15 PDT

Hello all, I am excited to announce that our friend Lorenzo recently obtained a precious box of over 150 Terence McKenna workshop & lecture recordings from Paul Herbert at Bruce Damer and Lorenzo Hagerty’s Beyond 2012 conference held at Esalen from June 15 – 17^th 2012. Lorenzo is currently digitizing these tapes and will share this magnificent collection in the order in which Paul recorded them on future episodes of the Psychedelic Salon. He is also providing a photo of each cassette as well as notes and quotations at www.psychedelicsalon.us.

I am including the first 2 tapes here on my blog. Podcast 317 is simply incredible and beautiful. An early 1982 recording of Terence at his best. Of course he never did cease to amaze me, so my enthusiasm could be partially due to the novelty of hearing this recording for the first time but I am certain you will equally enjoy it. He unleashes idea after idea with such elegance and brilliance I can’t really write a description that does it justice.It will take most people many listens to fully appreciate Terence’s work here. So without further ado, here is just the beginning of this amazing gift to our community. Friends please support the Salon however you can to ensure Lorenzo is able to properly host all these, I am certain demand will be high and does this work for the love of it, he deserves our help and then some.

Peace,
EROCx1

Podcast 317 – “New and Old Maps of Hyperspace”

Download: FREE Mp3

PROGRAM NOTES:

This is Tape Number 001 of the Paul Herbert Collection.

Some of the topics covered in this talk:

Two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic
UFOs and aliens
The end of history – the eschaton
The psychedelic experience
Psilocybin allows dialogue with the Other
Death and afterlife
Dreams
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]

“The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.”

“Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.”

“Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.”

“The content of the dialogue with ‘the Other’ is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, ‘the body is the placenta of the soul’”

“Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.”

“Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.”
[Regarding UFO's] “A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.”

“But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the overmind. You won’t read about it in “Scientific American” or anywhere else. You will carry it out.”

“Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.”

“All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.”

“We are, in fact, hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.” [From the point of view of the shamanic tradition.]

“In shamanism and certain yogas, Daoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening. You will know what to do. And you will make the clean break.”

“There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical space AND the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.”

“The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the overself.”

“I’m not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience. And I never have lost my respect for it. I mean I really feel dread. It is one of the emotions I always feel as I approach it, because I have no faith that my sails won’t be ripped this time.”

“Now your question about the dialogue. I mean this very literally. It speaks to you. You speak to it. It says things.”

More quotes from this talk may be found in Podcast 267.

Podcast 318 – “Psilocybin and the Sands of Time”

Download: FREE Mp3

PROGRAM NOTES:

This is Tape Number 002 of the Paul Herbert Collection.

Some of the topics covered in this talk:

Repression of psychedelic drugs
Element of risk in taking psychedelics
The imagination
Interiorization of the body/exterization of the soul
Death
The importance of psychedelics
Bell’s Theorem

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I regard [my] degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study. They don’t really; there is no degree in shamanism.”

“This [repression of psychedelic drugs] has, in my opinion, held back the Western development of understanding consciousness because quite simply, these states, I do not believe, are accessible by any means other than drugs.”

“There is an element of risk [in using psychedelics]. I never tell people that there isn’t, but I think that the risk is worth it.”

“Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.”

“The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.”
“A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.”

“There is no knowledge without risk taking.”

“It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.

“Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.”

“The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.”

“I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.”

“We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.”

So I believe that a technological re-creation of the after-death state is what history pushes toward. And that means a kind of eternal existence where there is an ocean of mind into which one can dissolve and re-form from, but there is also the self, related to the body image but in the imagination. So that we each would become, in a sense, everyone.”

“There can be no turning back. We are either going to change in to this cybernetic, hyperdimentional, hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunity for us to be happy hunters and gatherers integrated into the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured.”

“It is the people who are ‘far out’ who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.”

“Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.”

“On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven’t the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.”

“Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.”

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Robert Anton Wilson: The Power of Maybe

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:39:00 PDT

Tim Leary, Robert Wilson, 90’s Psychedelia

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:20:00 PST

Sound Photosynthesis presents PSYCHEDELICS IN THE 1990'S - MAPS Conference Compilation. Historical. A gathering together to discuss the fate of psychedelics in the 1990's and their possible regulation or continued prohibition, are a group of speakers with divergent views and past experiences. Nevertheless, they share a deep commitment to the development of a constructive policy towards psychedelics. They graciously agreed to speak to help raise funds for psychedelic research, a field that has been at a standstill for a generation. Participants were: Timothy Leary, Alice Agar Wittine, Ram Dass, Rick Doblin, Mark Kleiman, Robert Zanger, Terence McKenna, Emerson Jackson, Ralph Matzner, Andrew Weil, Laura Huxley, Dennis McKenna, Jerome Beck, and Bruce Eisner. This is the closest you will get if you weren't there to begin with...if you were, this is better than your memories.

Robert Anton Wilson & Timothy Leary
@ The Bridge Psychedelic Conference 1991

Sound Photosynthesis presents Robert Anton Wilson & Timothy Leary @ The Bridge Psychedelic Conference 1991. For the full length recording please contact us at www.sound.photosynthesis.com

History Channel: The Stoned Ages

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:52:57 PST

THE STONED AGES explores the history of drugs. From the early cave dwellers who first stumbled upon psychedelic mushrooms to the over 6000-year-old tradition of opium cultivation in the East to a modern pharmaceutical industry with over 24,000 drugs on the market, drugs have played a role in our lives since well before recorded human history.

THE STONED AGES explores the reasons we've used drugs through the ages to heal our bodies and minds, to connect with a higher power, to feel better, for recreation, to escape, for performance enhancement, and even to prolong our lives while considering the devastating consequences that accompany the choice to use certain drugs. This fascinating, fresh, and insightful documentary will ask the question: overall, have drugs done more to help us or hurt us?

Hosted by Dean Norris, THE STONED AGES will journey through the millennia and look in on the greatest civilizations in human history to discover if drugs helped these societies flourish or fail and whether drug use was holy or hedonistic, a savior or a curse. How can drugs that are worshipped in one society be morally reprehensible and often illegal in another? And what causes some good drugs to go bad?

THE STONED AGES will interview the writers, historians, doctors, pharmaceutical reps, religious leaders, policy makers, FDA scientists, DEA representatives, and drug addicts who shape the often conflicting roles that drugs play in our lives today.

Drugs can kill and enslave, heal and provide hope, and alter our consciousness in deeply profound ways. THE STONED AGES will tell the story of how drugs have helped us become who we are.

Hunter S. Thompson - Final Hours

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:27:38 PST

Hunter S. Thompson: His Final Hours

Final 24 charts the life of this troubled genius and uncover why a bullet to the head was the only way out. This compelling documentary series unlocks the hidden secrets, psychological flaws and events that result in the tragic deaths of famed notorious and the iconic. Every episode maps out the final 24 hours of a different famous person's life. The series weaves the star's back-story with events from their last day, which lays bare the threads of fate that led inextricably from childhood to the moment of death. These are no ordinary biographies. They're psychological detective stories attempting to uncover the mystery of why the celebrity died. Hunter S. Thompson was an author trapped in the body of a rock star. His drug-fuelled adventures were legendary and became the basis of one of the classics of 20th century literature. Thompson's constant questioning of authority and wild antics made him a hero for a generation of rebels across the globe. But in the end it wasn't enough. A lifetime of alcohol and drug abuse was taking their toll and at 67, with a broken leg, two hip operations and in chronic pain Thompson could no longer live up to the legend he'd created. On February 20, 2005, he decided to end it all with one of his favorite possessions, a Smith and Wesson 45. Final 24 charts the life of this troubled genius and uncover why a bullet to the head was the only way out.

Wade Davis: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:38:10 PST

Speaker: Wade Davis
From: The Long Now Foundation
Location: Cowell Theatre: San Francisco, CA
Download: Mp3
Download: PDF Transcript
Date: January 13, 2010

Anthropologist Wade Davis is one of the world's great story tellers, with personal adventures to match. An Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic, he specializes in hanging out with traditional peoples and exploring their religious practices.

He first came to public notice with his discovery of the reality of zombies in Haitian voodoo and the substance used to poison them---chronicled in his 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. He is the author of 13 books, including One River and Shadows in the Suns, and has hosted, written, and starred in numerous television specials, including "Earthguide," "Light at the Edge of the World," "Spirit of the Mask," and "Forests Forever." This talk is based on the prestigious Massey Lectures that Davis gave in Canada in 2009.

W. Davis: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World from The Long Now Foundation on FORA.tv

Summary

What does it mean to be human and alive?

The thousands of different cultures and languages on Earth have compellingly different answers to that question. "We are a wildly imaginative and creative species," declares Wade Davis, and then proves it with his accounts and photographs of humanity plumbing the soul of culture, of psyche, and of landscape.

The threat to cultures is often ideological, Davis notes, such as when Mao whispered in the ear of the Dalai Lama that "all religion is poison," set about destroying Tibetan culture.

The genius of culture is the ability to survive in impossible conditions, Davis concludes. We cannot afford to lose any of that variety of skills, because we are not only impoverished without it, we are vulnerable without it.

www.GaianBotanicals.com

Wade Davis author of The Wayfinders at the 2009 Massey Lecture in the Convocation Hall, Toronto, October 31, 2009.

Graham Hancock: 2012 Tipping Point

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 19:44:21 PST

From: 2012 The Tipping Point
Date: January 22-24, 2010
Future Events: Greatmystery.org

Graham Hancock's chief areas of interest are ancient mysteries, stone monuments or megaliths, ancient myths and astronomical/astrological data from the past. One of the main themes running through many of his books is the possible global connection with a 'mother culture' from which he believes all ancient historical civilizations sprang.

There are texts and traditions coming down to us from the Maya that suggest that this is not just the end of an epoch, but the end of an entire age of the Earth and of everything that has been built and accumulated in the last 5000 years - that this too will come to an end. It's often been said that those who forget the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. But what if we have forgotten an entire, hugely important episode in human history? Myths and legends from all over the world insist that a great civilization that was technologically advanced, powerful and wise existed in deep antiquity but was wiped from the face of the earth when it "angered the gods". In this lecture, Graham Hancock makes the case for a lost civilization destroyed in a global cataclysm at the end of the last Ice Age around 12,500 years ago. As we approach the fated year 2012 he argues that our civilization, too, despite its technological prowess, might be poised on the brink of becoming the next Atlantis.

Graham Hancock

2012: GLIMMERS OF HOPE

Throughout the world the ancient teachings of indigenous people tell of a time of great change rapidly coming upon us and that it is now beginning its planetary manifestation. The Hopi for example believe that we are walking in the last days.

Graham Hancock was a featured speaker at the Cancun Prophets Conference, has dedicated his life to uncovering the great mysteries dwelling in the meaning of myths and monuments from pre-history. Through his revelatory work it becomes apparent that a warning has been handed down to us, a warning of terrible cataclysm that afflicts the Earth in great cycles at irregular intervals of time—a cataclysm that may be about to recur.

Let’s take a look at this.

From Graham Hancock’s outstanding investigatory book Fingerprints of the Gods, we read the Hopi myth that –

“The present world is the fourth. Its fate will depend on whether or not its inhabitants behave in accordance with the Creator’s plans”

I had come to Arizona to see whether the Hopi thought we were behaving in accordance with the Creator’s plans...

The end of the world

The desolate wind, blowing across the high plains, shook and rattled the sides of the trailer-house we sat in. Beside me was Santha, who’d been everywhere with me, sharing the risks and the adventures, sharing the highs and lows. Sitting across from us was our friend Ed Ponist, a medical-surgical nurse from Lansing, Michigan. A few years previously Ed had worked on the reservation for a while, and it was thanks to his contacts that we were now here. On my right was Paul Sifki, a Ninety-six-year-old Hopi elder of the Spider clan, and a leading spokesman of the traditions of his people. Beside him was his grand-daughter Melza Sifki, a handsome middle-aged woman who had offered to translate.

‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that the Hopi believe the end of the world is coming. Is this true?’

Paul Sifki was a small, wizened man, nut-brown in color, dressed in jeans and a cambric shirt. Throughout our conversation he never once looked at me, but gazed intently ahead, as though he were searching for a familiar face in a distant crowd.

Melza put my question to him and a moment later translated her grandfather’s reply: ‘He says, “why do you want to know”?’

I explained that there were many reasons. The most important was that I felt a sense of urgency: ‘My research has convinced me that there was an advanced civilization – long, long ago – that was destroyed in a terrible cataclysm. I fear that our own civilization may be destroyed by a similar cataclysm...’

There followed a long exchange in Hopi, then this translation: ‘He said that when he was a child, in the 1900s, there was a star that exploded – a star that had been up there in the sky for a long while…And he went to his grandfather and asked him to explain the meaning of this sign. His grandfather replied: “This is the way our own world will end – engulfed in flames…If people do not change their ways then the spirit that takes care of the world will become so frustrated with us that he will punish the world with flames and it will end just like that star ended.” That was what his grandfather said to him – that the earth would explode just like that exploding star...’

‘So the feeling is that this world will end in fire…And having viewed the world for the past ninety years, does he believe that the behavior of mankind has improved or worsened?’

He says it has not improved. We’re getting worse.’

‘So in his opinion, then, the end is coming?’

‘He said that the signs are already there to be seen…He said that nowadays nothing but the wind blows and that all we do is have a weapon pointed at one another. That shows how far apart we have drifted and how we feel towards each other now. There are no values any more – none at all – and people live any way they want, without morals or laws. These are the signs that the time has come...’

Melza paused in her translation, then added on her own account: ‘This terrible wind. It dries things out. It brings no moisture. The way we see it, this kind of climate is a consequence of how we’re living today – not just us, but your people as well.’

I noticed that her eyes had filled with tears while she was talking. ‘I have a cornfield,’ she continued, ‘that’s really dry. And I look up into the sky and try to pray for rain, but there is no rain, no clouds even…When we’re like this we don’t even know we are.’

There was a long moment of silence and the wind rocked the trailer, blowing hard and steady across the mesa as evening fell around us.

I said quietly, ‘Please ask your grandfather if he thinks that anything can now be done for the Hopi and for the rest of mankind?’

‘The only thing he knows,’ Melza replied when she heard his answer, ‘is that so long as the Hopi do not abandon their traditions they may be able to help themselves and to help others. They have to hold on to what they believed in the past. They have to preserve their memories. These are the most important things…But my grandfather wants to tell you also, and for you to understand, that this earth is the work of an intelligent being, a spirit – a creative and intelligent spirit that has designed everything to be the way it is. My grandfather says that nothing is here just by chance, that nothing happens by accident – whether good or bad – and that there is a reason for everything that takes place...’

"I think we have gone through and are going through the final stages of a very dark age, but I also see glimmers of hope everywhere I look. I see people who are no longer willing to have their thoughts and their consciousness controlled by others, people who seek direct spiritual contact, who recognize that the established monotheistic religions, whether Judaism, Christianity and Islam, while they might have been instruments of liberation sometime in the past are now primarily instruments of oppression, and hold down and repress the human spirit. And I see everywhere around me people reaching out to by-pass that monolithic block of established religion and make their own contacts and own connections with the spirit realm. I do see a new birth of human consciousness underway. And when these things happen they can sometimes happen very fast. So I cannot rule out at all the possibility that all of us are going to be looking at the mystery and meaning of life in a very different way very soon and that date 21st. of December 2012 sticks in my mind as one that is really worth consideration." ~Graham Hancock

Brain Sync: Brain Wave Therapy

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:23:17 PST

I have experimented with Bio Feedback, Guided Meditation, Mind Machines, Binaural Beats & Brain Wave Stimulation of all sorts since the early 90’s. Both straight and enhanced with various Entheogens. Recently I discovered BrainSync Brainwave Therapy Audio and have never been as impressed as I am with:

Just over one year ago I suffered from a horrific prescription drug interaction that totally devastated me for nearly 5 months. I have gone through cycles of depression, anxiety, insomnia and general ill-being which is very unlike me prior to my illness. I have tried numerous remedies since, with very little improvement until I found Healing Meditation by Kelly Howell, creator of Brain Sync and host of the Theatre of the Mind, an outstanding free podcast.

The Brain Sync site hosts about 100 different therapy sessions that can be downloaded in Mp3 or purchased on CD. These audio programs deliver pure and precisely tuned guided meditations on top of sound frequencies that drive brain activity into high level states of mind. These are brain states known as: Alpha for heightened creativity and deep relaxation; Beta for high focus and concentration; Theta for meditation, insight and memory; Delta for deep sleep and healing; and Gamma to increase cognition and improve IQ.

So far, I have only used Healing Meditation. During this session she guides you into a healing light in which I felt a strong tingling sensation on the parts of my body this light was hitting. Feeling incredibly healed and euphoric. This program I will personally vouch for. Not that its needed, CD purchases come with a 60 day money back guarantee. There are also sample files that may be downloaded for free. At the very least, check out the free podcast. I promise, you will not be disappointed. I was so impressed, I became an affiliate. Other than Amazon, this is my only time doing so in over 20 years of posting on the internet. So if you visit, please use my links. It would be greatly appreciated.

Trialogues: McKenna, Sheldrake, Abraham

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:20:00 PST

Trialogues are from a series of lively, far-reaching discussions between Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna, that took place between 1989 and 1998, in America and England. These Mp3’s are generously hosted by Rupert on Sheldrake.org

These three-way conversations began in private after their first meeting in 1982. Encouraged by their similar fascinations and complimentary views, and inspired by the synergy of their ideas and styles and the input of differing areas of expertise, the three friends continued to meet and explore new areas of thought. Throughout their public trialogues, which began in 1989, they maintained the spontaneous, playful and intrepid spirit of their private talks, and were thrilled that these explorations inspired further discussions amongst their audiences. Their trialogues and friendship have been a source of great inspiration and stimulation for their own lives and work.

In their first set of public trialogues, held as a workshop at Esalen in 1989, they explored aspects of the world soul from the perspectives of chaos, creativity and imagination, and discussed many topics including: light and vision; the psilocybin mushroom; the unconscious; entities; the resacralization of the world; the reform of the educational system and the Apocalypse.

Their second series of trialogues examined evolution in all its forms, through new topics that included: grassroots science; psychedelics, computers and mathematics; psychic animals; the World Wide Web; celestial intelligences; the nature of time and the evolving mind.

Edited transcripts of many of their first series of trialogues are published in the book Trialogues at the Edge of the West (later published as Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness), and many of those from their second series can be found in The Evolutionary Mind.

Terence McKenna was an ethnopharmacologist, shamanologist, and author, known for his theories on plant hallucinogens and the novelty wave, and the bardic skill with which he conveyed his ideas. Sadly Terence died aged 53 on April 3, 2000.

Ralph Abraham, PhD, is a Professor of Mathematics, author, and pioneer in the fields of Chaos theory, computer graphics, visual mathematics and dynamical systems.

Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers, is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance.

1. Cast of Characters
An introduction to the first series of public trialogues held at Esalen, California in 1989.

2. The Evolutionary Mind
What could have been the cause for the breakthrough in the evolution of human consciousness around 50,000 years ago?

3.. Consciousness and Machines
A discussion on the evolution of consciousness as it relates to machines. Symbolic logic, nanotechnology and the possibility of a synthetic super-intelligence.

4. History, Fractals and Change
The fractal idea of history, and millenia as the plateaus of history. These bifurcation periods as opportunities to influence the creation of the future.

5. Creativity and the Imagination
The crisis in science: collision between the permanent and evolutionary views of the nature of reality. A wide-ranging discussion in two parts.

6. Creativity and Chaos
The chaos revolution, chaotic attractors and indeterminism in nature. A comprehensive discussion in two parts.

7. Chaos and the Imagination
How can chaos theory and full access to the imagination aid us in our understanding of the world and in the creation of our future? A discussion in 2 parts.

8 Light and Vision
How is our own vision related to light, and how is the perception of the world soul related to light? A discussion in 2 parts.

9 Entities
Are disincarnate and non-human entities mental projections or non-physical, autonomous entities? How do they relate to the world soul and how can we interpret their messages? A discussion in 2 parts.

10 The Unconscious
What is the nature of the unconscious, and how can we access its restorative powers? A discussion in 2 parts.

11 The Resacrilisation of the World
In what ways can we bring the sacred back into the world? A discussion in 2 parts.

12 Education in the New World Order
How could the educational system be reformed and resacralized? A discussion in 2 parts

13 The Apocalypse
This investigation into apocalyptic messages starts with the question of whether they are self-fulfilling prophecies or intuitions of instability.
A discussion in 2 parts.

14 Grass Roots Science
The trialoguers discuss the need for a new grassroots model of science.
A discussion in 2 parts.

15 Saving the World
The trialoguers address the problem of over-population and resource depletion.
A discussion in 2 parts.

16. Gender Issues
Exploring gender issues and ways to heal society.
A discussion in 2 parts.

17. Cannabis
The trialoguers discuss cannabis and its potential as a tool for cultural evolution.
A discussion in 2 parts.

18. Crop Circles
An in-depth investigation into the mystery of crop circles.
A discussion in 2 parts.

19. Psychedelics and the Computer Revolution
The cultural impact of psychedelics and the computer revolution.
A discussion in 2 parts

20 Fields, Brains and Chaos
Rupert and Ralph explore fields and the memory process
A discussion in 2 parts

21 A Report on Crop Circles
Further explorations into the crop circle mystery.

22. Psychedelics and Mathematical Vision
Exploring the connection between mathematical vision and the psychedelic experience. (2 parts).

23. The Immediate Future and the Millennium
How can society be reconstructed and improved? (2 parts).

24. The Heavens
Rediscovering a sense of the life of nature and of the heavens. (2 parts).

25 Utopianism and Millenarianism
The ongoing cultural impact of utopianism and millenarianism. (2 parts).

26 Hazelwood Introductions
The three friends describe each others’ lives and work.

27 Homing Pigeons
Homing pigeons and the extraordinary implications of unexplained biological mysteries. (2 parts).

28 Time
New ways of understanding the nature of time. (2 parts).

29 Fractals
How fractal models can enhance our understanding of the world. (2 parts).

30 Angels, Entities and the Heavens
Recovering the links between heavenly states and the physical heavens.

31 Hawaii
In Hawaii, the trialoguers explore what Hawaii can teach us about evolution. (2 parts).

32 The World Wide Web
A trialogue from 1994 on the transformative potential of the World Wide Web (2 parts).

33 Scepticism and the Balkanization of Epistemology
A trialogue on finding the middle ground between unanchored speculation and dogmatic skepticism (2 parts).

34 Morphogenetic Family Fields
An investigation into telepathic bonds within social groups and the nature of the fields that may underlie these connections (2 parts).

www.EROCx1.com

A Conversation On LSD

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:07:46 PST

A rare home movie of a conversation between early LSD pioneers Timothy Leary, Oscar Jangier, Al Hubbard, Sidney Cohen, Myron Stolaroff and Humphry Osmond & others. A must see for psychedelic historians. I believe this was filmed at Tim’s home circa 1972.Thank you Timothy Leary Archive!

Download:
512Kb MP4 <-Right Click, Save Target as
14GB Digital Video Format Link

First published Terence McKenna interview

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 13:49:01 PST

Source: EROWID
by Elvin D. Smith
PDF Scan: Psychozoic Press No 5
Terence McKenna Talks to the Psychozoic Press
Published in the Psychozoic Press, No 5-9 (1983-1984)
Visit: Terence McKenna Archive

Q. When is a book more than a book?

A. When the material presented therein triggers within the mind of the reader conceptualizations greater than those which can be expected as a consequence of logical deduction.

The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (1975) by Terence and Dennis McKenna is just such a book. When Terence sent me a review copy of this book some time ago, I was astounded, to put it mildly. The authors have shown how scientific knowledge in fields such as quantum physics, chemistry, genetics, and information theory interfaces with subjective metaphysical precepts manifested by the psychedelic experience. Science, they're telling us, has nearly reached the end of its rope by restricting its investigations to aspects of the physical world which can be repeatedly produced in controlled situations. Science has a difficult time getting an investigative handle on phenomena such as telepathy, UFO experiences, and similar paranormal phenomena, because these situations are difficult, if not impossible, to investigate from the laboratory bench.

Terence and his brother are also the authors of Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide (1976), written under the pseudonyms O. T. Oss & O. N. Oeric. Terence has lectured extensively on hallucinogens and consciousness at the Esalen Institute, and is currently working on another book soon to be published. His brother is busy preparing a doctoral thesis on plant hallucinogens.

You could say Grower's Guide launched the starship and provided the initial acceleration. Now that we're so close to the hyperdimensional shock wave--as we transfer into the higher dimensions--the ontological linguistic transformation that Terence McKenna speaks of becomes necessary--indeed, the most obvious choice--for communication. There is quite a shock front to get the hyperdimensional shift to become probabilistically localized, but his discussion on time and the I Ching in The Invisible Landscape make the potentialities distinctly visible. Yet what I first noticed about Terence was not what he was saying, but how he was saying it. (Those of you who have heard him speak or heard his tapes will know what I'm talking about.) Terence, and his brother too, both have a peculiar way of enunciating every word with a lucidity unlike any other speaker I've heard. Perhaps he has access to a 7-element hyperdimensional communications processor or something. "Fascinating", as Spock would say. He's probably a skilled hypnotist besides...

Terence McKenna, author, lecturer, and shamanic explorer of the realm of psychedelic states, has been described by some as being "so far out, nobody knows what he's talking about", and by others as "the most innovative thinker our times". You be the judge.

The writings of the McKenna brothers are fascinating to me, not because I agree with everything they are saying (I don't), but because they are presenting ideas which are self-propagating. The Invisible Landscape triggered more questions in my mind than it answered; the impression is that the ideas presented are just the tip of the iceberg, a single needle on the redwood tree, one cell within the nervous system. In this sense, The Invisible Landscape is a book that's more than a book. I decided to talk to the author.

Psychozoic Press: Mr. McKenna, what's the most important shortcoming as you see it of science's approach to studying the world around us?

Terence McKenna: Science is interested in the kind of phenomena where, when you recreate the initial conditions, the same effect is always observed. And yet in life, you never experience the same sort of initial conditions; they're always different. Every set of processes that are really interesting has many end states. So you can think of science as a kind of large-grid description of the world. It only explains the simple phenomena that can be repeatedly triggered. All the complex phenomena--consciousness, memory, culture--these things slip right through it.

PP: In the lecture you gave at the Esalen Institute on "Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness", you talked about calling yourself an explorer. You referred to LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and other hallucinogens as each being a distinct phenomenological universe. Would the physics of concrescence you're talking about in The Invisible Landscape be a sort of proto-science which seeks to integrate these various phenomenological universes?

TM: Concrescence is a philosophical term taken from Alfred North Whitehead. It means the growing together of something. And on the highest level, the growing together of everything. And in that sense, yes, these psychedelic drugs anticipate future states of human consciousness. The historical process is an exploration of these psychedelic states at the cultural level. You can actually say society is becoming more psychedelic; it means that society is becoming more and more reflective of the modalities of mind, and that process can be seen as an informational "growing together", a concrescence.

PP: Yes. When you stop to think about the way thinking has evolved in physics, you can see that it covers larger and larger domains in trying to describe the material aspects of three-dimensional matter.

TM: Well, science has outsmarted itself by pushing its analysis of the physical world to such a limit that it becomes recursive. You discover that you're no longer talking about velocity and momentum and charge and spin, you're talking about syntax and language and point-of-view and perspective and emphasis. The language of psychology almost emerges as a necessary consequence of examining matter at the very deepest level. This is symbolized by the ouroboric snake taking its tail in its mouth. Any analysis pursued deeply enough will lead back to the question of who analyzes, and this is what has happened in physics.

PP: Some of the labels they have come up with to name these different qualities reflect that, too: "charm", "color", and "beauty". The problems they have with labeling these things are kind of interesting in themselves.

TM: Well, they intuitively feel them to be primary qualities, so they want to label them with primary philosophical values. It's very platonic--almost Pythagorean.

PP: Yes, I was reading something not long ago about the "truth" quark--that's getting pretty fundamental.

TM: That's right, the search is on for the truth quark, now that naked beauty has been observed!

PP: You also spoke of "tuning" images so that the intent of meaning could be beheld in 3-D space--a technique of communication for which language is just a foreshadow. I understand what you're talking about, but it seems you're avoiding the term "telepathy".

TM: Telepathy I assume to be mind-to-mind transfer of thought, but with no ontological transformation of language. In other words, if you could hear what I'm thinking without me speaking, that would be telepathy. But I'm talking about something very different. It's actually an ontological transformation of the language so that language is no longer perceived with the ears, it's perceived with the eyes. When I speak, between you and me there comes into being the subject that I am discussing, and we can both look at it. And I turn it for you, and you behold, then, my intent, rather than hearing my intent.

When you hear my intent, what happens is I make small mouth noises, which have meanings assigned to them in the language called English. You have an English dictionary in your head. So my small mouth noises impinge on your brain, and you look in your English dictionary, and you figure out what I'm saying. Because we have a more-or-less common body of meaning. Although there can be misunderstanding if the subject is subtle.

I'm talking, though, about a kind of psychedelic language. You can almost think of it as an audio hologram, where sound is used to produce visual displays that are mutually beheld.

This idea, which sounds fairly outlandish, is actually very old. Philo Judaeus, an Alexandrian Jew of the second century, talked about the more perfect Logos, posing the question: "What would be the more perfect Logos?" And he said it would be a phenomenon that would move from being heard to being beheld without there being at any point a noticeable transition from one to the other.

And this would have just remained wild theological rambling, if it weren't for the fact psilocybin and the tryptamine hallucinogens, especially DMT, make this possible. By singing and making linguistic vocalizations on these psychoactive compounds you can then produce a synesthetic glossolalia; you can control the contour of the hallucinogenic topology to such a degree that you can put meaning onto it. In other words, you are no longer the passive observer of an alien continuum; you are, in fact, through sound, imprinting onto this continuum intent and meanings. So it becomes a sculptable medium. And this is what mushroom shaman know. I think this is happening at higher doses than are usually taken in a recreational context in this society. But above five grams--if you weigh in the 140 pound range, and you take it in comfortable, dark, situations where you lie still in complete darkness with your eyes closed, no music, and you work with it--this becomes possible. The whole shamanic tradition that touches mescaline, as well, stresses the magic song--the song which is not willed, but comes through you. With ayahuasca in the Amazon, it's the same thing; the magic song is very much stressed.

So I think there is a potential technology--a fusing of language, psychoactive drugs, and thought--that could produce this ontologically different form of communication. In a sense, to return to your question, it is telepathy, But it's a whole different idea about what telepathy would be like, rather than being mind-to-mind transfer of spoken thought.

And I lecture about this. What I'm concerned to do professionally is to try and get people to redefine the psychedelic experience--at least the tryptamine-based psychedelic experience: psilocybin, DMT, and ayahuasca. It isn't the psychedelic model that we inherit from the '50s or the '60s: that you are opened to past emotional trauma, that you have deep insight into your personal existence, that you uncover traumatic material and resolve it. The Freudian and Jungian models of the psychedelic experience don't prepare you for the phenomenology of psilocybin at high doses; something else is going on. We're going to have to have a new model because it relates to all this linguistic stuff and the way in which language and the visual cortex are keyed and controlled. It hints at a new potential for an expression of humanness that is not technological, except in the mushroom as the product of technology.

And it's like language. The way in which language emerged must have been similar to this. In fact it's possible to suggest that man was formed by the interaction of curious higher primates with hallucinogenic plants. Because in experiments with monkeys where they had available DMT pipes--where the monkey could walk over and take a hit if he wanted to, but he didn't have to--certain monkeys would become literally fascinated by consciousness, by the phenomenon of watching themselves go through some kind of totally weird transformation.

That lays the basis. Once you are fascinated by a neurophysiological response, the more you trigger it, the more the credos are laid down for it to be more and more accessible. So you can just imagine these monkeys bootstrapping themselves toward Milton, Shakespeare, Bach, and Einstein, with these plant hallucinogens.

PP: So you're actually saying then that we're going through a second or higher phase of learning with these hallucinogens.

TM: Right. The cultural catalysis that is a product of hallucinogens is now entering a new phase. It's related to an ontological transformation of how we perceive and handle language. And I'm sure technology will have some role to play in this.

Information is what is loose on this planet. If you were to come in a flying saucer from another star system and observe the Earth, you would not have Linnaean bias of seeing everything in terms of competing species. What you would see is that there is a gene swarm on this planet; an immense gene swarm is furiously exchanging genes, but species are not being differentiated out of it. And that gene swarm represents an information swarm, because DNA is essentially a way of storing and transmitting and replicating information. That is what life is.

But then with culture and the advent of language, and then the further advent of alphabets and writing, information is taking on this more and more intense, rapidly replicating and self-reflecting ability. And when you get to the level of computers and technology, it's almost like consciousness is beginning to move out of the monkeys and into the excreted, reef-like, technoconcrescense that the monkeys produce. We are more like coral animals taking metal out of the earth, crimping it with ideas, and excreting it as machinery. I think it was Marshall McLuhan who said people are the genitals of technology. They exist to design next year's model and make it better. Information has this desire to self-reflect and replicate itself.

And of course, the psychedelics relate very closely to this. Because they are essentially information probes of some sort, reporting telemetric data coming in from nearby and not-so-nearby dimensions. But they are entirely interpretable as information, and in that sense probably susceptible to analysis by information theory.

PP: You've talked quite a bit too, about the UFO experience. I've read a few references to people who have had a perception of "galactic consciousness" with LSD. I've had that experience, too. But I notice you have made quite a point of differentiating the tryptamine hallucinogens from the others.

TM: Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "galactic consciousness". I can imagine that LSD gives you a vast and sympathetic perspective with nature on an astronomical scale. But what I'm talking about with these tryptamines is something a little different. It's the sense of the presence of an intellect of some sort--the sense that there are life forms, and forms of conscious organization, that really are alien and bizarre. But the problem is that they are not 30,000 light years away; they somehow, someway, interpenetrate the here-and-now.

This is a persistent claim of shamanism, and of true folkloric thinking worldwide. But it's a very alien idea to the last thousand years of Western thinking, where we have been definitely on the retreat from the idea that the universe is populated with teaming angels, demons, or anything else.

Again, the reason I link the UFO to psilocybin is because in the high-dose situation, or in the repeated high-dose situation in isolation, the psilocybin experience blends imperceptibly into what is called the "contact experience".

And nobody likes to hear this, because the UFO people are very jealous of their UFOs and absolutely convinced that they come from the stars and are made of metal and bear great hope for mankind. They think that any explanation which explains this in terms of human psychology or something like that is a reductionment. But actually, I don't think this is true. I think the UFO represents a sort of "shock wave" of concrescence; it precedes concrescence. It's a shadow of concrescence that haunts time and has always haunted time. It comes and goes, in and out of history. It is like a reflection of the end of history. It is the spiral lens-shaped topology left when everything flows together--when the temporal vectors collapse, you know, and we pass beyond description...

PP: The thing I was thinking of, just then, is that the attitude we hold toward these UFOs now probably is not much different than that which primitive men held about the moon and stars 10,000 years ago. They probably looked up in the sky and wondered what the silvery disk of white light was that moved across the sky at night.

TM: Yes, that's right. And you don't have to go back 10,000 years. A very interesting parallel to the relationship of the flying saucer to modern people is the relationship of the search for the philosopher's stone to the psychology of people in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Here it was rumored, you know, that certain people could produce a magical object that would give you long life, transmute substances into gold; it was just this mystical substance that would do everything, the universal panacea. Certain people claimed to have seen it or possessed it at one time, and wild and fantastic speculation was launched around this thing. Thus it served as a great impetus to the exploration of physical matter. And then, as more and more was discovered about physical matter, obsession with the philosopher's stone was slowly itself transformed into modern science. And I think the UFO obsession, if it develops correctly, will slowly change from an obsession with brotherly space people who will come and save us from ourselves into a much deeper appreciation of the hyperdimensional nature of consciousness, and the realization that all mind is Mind. There is only one Mind. Humanness is a name for a section of Mind that we exercise some control over. But information passes everywhere. There's an aphorism: Understanding passes everywhere.

PP: How about the UFO experience in relation to other types of light visions, like people seeing angels and saints and Virgin Marys? Ezekiel's UFO, are you familiar with that?

TM: Sure. That's all this business of "the other" presenting itself within the context of the historical situation. In other words, what happens is that you're somebody in some historical period and you're out in the wilderness. Something very strange begins to happen. The immediate symptoms of it are that the hair on the back of your neck stands up and your knees feel weak and you see a tremendous light descending from the sky. At that point your mind throws an enormous question out in the universe, which is: "WHAT'S HAPPENING?" And the answer comes back dependent on your historical situation. It is either without doubt, a manifestation of Krishna, or the Virgin Mary, or the flying saucer, or the philosopher's stone, or your personal guardian spirit--it depends entirely on who you are. You explain. The mind just goes into a tizzy of explanation. Whenever the mind is confronted with something it can't immediately dismiss, it falls into a frenzy of explanation, and that is what happens in that situation. And again, it has close parallels with these tryptamine hallucinogens. Because what happens when you smoke DMT, and what makes it so strange, is you immediately have these very complicated three- (at least, possibly four-) dimensional hallucinations by which you are surrounded. And you attempt immediately to pour language onto them. You say, "It's a . . . it's like a . . ." And it doesn't work. And the more that it doesn't work, the monkey inside you begins to go into some kind of shock. Because language is supposed to work.

PP: So that triggers the glossolalia-like phenomenon you were talking about in the Esalen lecture?1

TM: Well, in an effort to utter what the thing is, and seeing that English is hopeless, you are abandoned to your deeper intuition. And out of that comes the glossolalia, which then is actually able to "lock" that modality and affect it or "dance" with it. You wouldn't say "control" it, but you can then enter the flow and go through these changes with it.

I think that the great failing of psychedelic reportage and research is that the content of the experience is not stressed. They say "you have vivid hallucinations". But what the hell is a "vivid hallucination"?

I think people should be questioned very, very carefully. This is the interesting part. What it does to your heartbeat and whether your sweat increases and all that may be interesting to pharmacologists, but how many of us are pharmacologists? Most of us live in the real world, and what we want to know is what did it say to you about the real world, and the nature of reality, and how we should behave in the situation in which we find ourselves. That's what is most "obviously" important; and everybody's relationship to psychedelics is like that. They are into it for what it does for them--how it makes them understand being. But then when we rise to the level of scientific and psychological and clinical descriptions, all we hear about is heartbeat and whether the pupils are dilated, whether the reflexes were impaired.

PP: Is the psychedelic experience, then, going to be of paramount importance in the evolution of consciousness, or would these experiences be more appropriately regarded as accessory conveniences rather than essential elements? Just how important is the psychedelic experience?

TM: I think it's absolutely central. As I mentioned earlier, I think it not only causes us to become human beings, to emerge out of the primate substratum, but it is also driving us to move beyond being human beings. Speaking specifically of psilocybin, DMT, and ayahuasca, these are the hallucinogens which most closely resemble neurotransmitters. LSD does not occur in mammalian metabolism, [lysergic acid amide] only occurs in morning glories and ergot. Mescaline occurs in cacti, ketamine occurs in no organic situation. But DMT occurs endogenously in the brains of all mammals, including man. The β-carbolines occur endogenously in the brain of man. In fact, as you ascend the primate phylogeny, more and more occurs, so that man has the greatest concentration. N,N-dimethyltryptamine is very closely related to serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine and is the major neurotransmitter that's driving the brain.

So I think it's possible even to suggest that to produce a state of mind roughly analogous to ayahuasca intoxication, all that's required is a one-gene mutation in the human genome. My hit on what these tryptamine hallucinogens are doing, is that they are literally anticipating future states of human evolution. This is the way the human mind is going to evolve. This is why, I think, there is such a persistent report that psilocybin hallucinations are science-fiction-like and seem to present these, you know, super-glossy, machine-like, highly polished surfaces that you can see into; I think that's an anticipation of cultural modalities. Like science fiction is an anticipation of the future, so is psilocybin. These things all come together. We are moving into the kinds of chemical brain states that will allow this kind of synesthesia--the visible glossolalia that I talked about. It could be a voluntary activity of normal metabolism.

PP: It seems odd, then, that the Eastern mystics haven't recognized this. Most of them are saying if there is any kind of drug involved, it's not a valid experience.

TM: Well, this is a special gripe of mine. I'm not impressed with priest craft. I think hierarchical religions are anti-progressive. This is why I have such respect for shamanism, since what it chiefly is, is very idiosyncratic. Shamanism is experimental psychology carried out by people who are not like us. It is not a religion in the sense of a set of dogmas; it's more like a set of maps that are given to you, and then you travel where you will.

I don't think that the yogic states approximate the tryptamine intoxication. In fact, part of what I'm trying to do with my career is point people to this and say look at this. This has been overlooked. Psilocybin, which is the most often contacted of these tryptamine hallucinogens, has--in the literature and the legal codes and all that--been treated as though it were like LSD. People say, "LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, etc.". But psilocybin is totally different from anything else. It has a phenomenology that we need to look at very, very carefully. It raises all kinds of questions in areas where we have never before been able to do anything. It allows you the repeated phenomena of "contacting an alien intelligence". We can do this with psilocybin in the laboratory with naive subjects. So that's big news for experimental psychology. Even if this "talking to aliens in the head" is only a psychosis, it's still big news that here is a compound that will repeatedly trigger it in a situation where you can study it.

Experimental psychology, pharmacology, linguistics, information theory, aesthetics, heuristics--all these disciplines would profit themselves by including the psychedelic experience in the province of things to be integrated.

PP: Yes, I think so. The concept of communication with an alien intelligence, which you brought out in the Esalen lecture, has been part of my own experience, too. And much more so with psilocybin than with any other type of hallucinogen.

TM: Yes. Well, because of the book we had written about growing the mushroom, we had access to name lists of people who had expressed interest in the book.2 We sent out many questionnaires about how people related to psilocybin. One of the questions was: "How much do you take?" Another was: "Do you hear voices?" We discovered that people who never took more than two or three grams (that's probably eighty-five percent of all people who take mushrooms) did not report voices. But the group using the high doses, seventy to eighty percent of those people checked that they heard voices, and some people felt inspired to write paragraphs about it.

PP: You spoke about getting in touch with the over soul through psychedelic drugs and leaving behind an era when man is "disciplined" by messiahs and saucers and progress is halted for millennia at a stretch. But wouldn't that make us as reliant on psychedelic drugs as we now are on technological materialism and hard science?

TM: No, because I assume that once you have contact with the over soul, ways will be found to access it without dependence on psychedelics. The idea of the over soul is another one of these metaphors to try and explain this "voice which integrates everything".

The reference to man being disciplined by saucers and messiahs is the idea that these religions, which arise from time to time and which halt all progress in any area except the exegesis of their own religious message, are like cultural governors. They occur because society becomes neurotically imbalanced. And in order to save it from itself, a kind of stasis is imposed in the form of some very autocratic, dogmatic religious faith which holds everything together for a thousand years or so while everybody catches their breath. Then it is eroded, and then progress in psychology and science and mathematics and other things begins again. But then the culturally neurotic situation arises again. And each time the intervention by the over soul is appropriate to the historical context.

For instance, the Hellenistic world, groaning under Roman imperialism, which was based on Greek philosophy, was totally ripe for a guy who rises from the dead after three days and preaches a certain gospel. And it's amazing, you know, where in a world where information moved no faster than a horse could gallop, Christianity exploded out of the Middle East. And the Roman authorities couldn't believe it. To them, it was just the wildest garbage! They were trained in Greek materialism and Euclidian mathematics and epicurean ethics. The idea that somebody could rise from the dead was utterly preposterous. Yet the servants were whispering and attending meetings, and the authorities dismissed it till it was too late.

Now, the flying saucer thing is very, very similar. No serious person gives it a moment's thought. It's just the stuff of the National Enquirer. Nevertheless, these polls keep coming out: thirty-seven percent of the American people believe flying saucers are real; eleven percent claim to have seen one. What's happening is that loyalty is being transferred from scientific institutions to the "space brothers". Not on the governing level of society, where everything is calm and controlled, but with the great masses who read the National Enquirer and say, "Well Ma dear, it seems tuh me th' space folk know a great deal more about it than prezydent Raygun!' That's dangerous talk. That means the official religion, which is science, is helpless in the face of this thing. They say, "It's something, but it's nothing." But they don't realize the important thing about the flying saucer is not, "What is it?" The important thing about it is, "What is it doing to human society?" What it's doing is throwing open the door to the legitimate belief in the irrational, and all kinds of other stuff.

It's changing, in other words, the social mass psychology. And that is something the government is usually the one to look after--our mass psychological images. Then here comes this other thing--out of the unconscious, I claim--to subvert the historical dreams of people who think they run things, and to instead send society in some other direction. It's like a metaphysical spanking. A mature society would not need messiahs or flying saucers to keep kicking it back into line. A mature society would just avoid being neurotic and things would develop without these lurches in one direction then another.

PP: I'm not sure if I'm going to agree with that completely, but...

TM: (laughter) If you don't, just walk out!

PP: Well, you talked along the same line about science betraying human destiny. The impression I have is not that science is betraying human destiny, but that science is dispensing its discoveries similar to the way the rain is sent on the unjust and the just. It seems that the political and economic communities have polluted science by applying that knowledge for localized and sometimes devious personal objectives. So all that comes down from science can go either way. Einstein wasn't thinking about Hiroshima, for example, when he worked out the equations of General Relativity.

TM: That's right. But on a larger scale, science has biases that have led us into the place we are: the fantastic concentration on understanding matter. What if, in the thirteenth century, they had become as obsessed with psychology as they become with matter; where would we be today?

PP: We'd probably be in our caves and huts meditating.

TM: Possibly. Or maybe that route would have taken us to the stars far sooner. What if shamanism had not been stomped on and pushed to the edge of the empire? What if instead we had pursued a route such as the Druids or the Incas or the Mayans? Because these were high civilizations; they attained levels of civilization comparable to where Europe was around 1200.

But we chose a certain path--a bias in favor of certain rules of evidence, certain ideas about what constituted claims on our cultural attention.

PP: I think that was necessary, though, to lay the foundations for more metaphysical developments later.

TM: Actually, I agree with you. What I often say in my public lectures is that civilization is the 10,000-year dash from the campfire to the starship. And it's a complete riot, and nobody knows till the last second whether it ends in complete catastrophe or in, you know, everybody being gathered into the Lord and setting off for the galactic center. And we won't know. It just becomes more and more frenzied and crazed. And in geological and biological terms it lasts only a micro-second. But if we who live seventy years have the fortune or misfortune to be born and die anywhere in that tiny 10,000-year span, it's a pretty crazy situation.

PP: You also talked about the primary and secondary qualities of matter such as mass, location, and velocity as opposed to color and texture, and then gave some discussion about these qualities being equivalently real, and pointed out that there's no justification for holding one set more real than the other.3 This brings us to the question: Is there any objective reality, or should we dispense with what is called objective reality?

TM: I think we should probably dispense with that notion. At bedrock, I don't believe the universe is made of quarks, or particles, or electromagnetic fields, or God's love, or anything like that. What I think it is made of is language. And where does language come from? It seems like it comes from inside our heads.

All these things--the Universe is this, it's that--these are just word nets. The Universe seems to be what you say it is. And to some degree, not what I say it is, or what you say it is; we are embedded in a cultural voice which says what it is. Then within that cultural voice we have our own small voice and we can "tinker" with the cultural definition of reality to some degree.

But over millennia, the cultural voice has changed its mind several times about what reality is. So I think we need, not a physics of what reality is, but a syntax, a grammar. We need to approach reality the way we would approach a work of literature, rather than the way we would approach a material system.

PP: So would you say language is rapidly becoming obsolete as a means of communication?

TM: It's self-transforming. Language begets meta-language, and so on. It's a bootstrapping effect.

PP: How does this sound: The probability that objective reality exists at all varies between zero and certainty as a function of the state of mind?

TM: Oh, I could "fly" with that.

Notes
1. Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness by Terence McKenna. Dolphin Tapes, Big Sur, CA. 1982.
2. Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide by O. T. Oss and O. N. Oeric. And/Or Press, Berkeley, CA. 1976.
3. See page 32 of The Invisible Landscape by Dennis and Terence McKenna. Seabury Press, New York, NY. 1975.

Hallucinogen actions on human brain revealed

noreply@blogger.com (EROCx1) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:59:25 PST

Mushrooms' magic? Tuning out is key to turning on
By: Melissa Healy
From: Los Angeles Times
Date: January 23, 2012

Psilocybin mushrooms' power to throw open the doors of perception is well documented in ancient legend and modern song. But not until now have high-tech brain-scanners captured the process by which psilocybin causes a sudden shift in human cognition. The secret to its mental magic? It appears to power down the brain's seat of reason and disconnect it from regions that process the way we see, hear and experience the world.

Those findings, gleaned by a group of British neuroscientists, were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Within a minute after subjects got an infusion of psilocybin, researchers said, scanners that plot blood flow within the brain detected a sudden drop in activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex, two areas of the brain that appear to be key in "grounding" us in reality. These areas also are key nodes of the brain's newly identified Default Mode Network, which springs to life when our minds wander.

Thus untethered, the brain's sensory regions are free to soar. Subjects reported unusual changes in their visual experiences, including geometric patterns, distortions of space and size, and dreamlike perceptions. They reported that their thoughts and imaginations wandered, their perceptions of time were changed, and sounds they heard brought on vivid images -- a mingling of sights, sounds and thoughts such as those experienced by people with the brain regions that showed the most consistent decline in activity under psilocybin's influence were the same brain regions that are most active in everyday cognition, said the study's authors, who come from a consortium of British universities and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Those regions function not only as "connective hubs" among brain regions with different functions; they are key in the kind of idle thinking in which we place ourselves at the center of our surroundings and experience.

The study's authors suggest that psilocybin's outsized effect on the brain's Default Mode Network may reveal a key function of the system. The findings suggest that a working Default Mode Network "is crucial for the maintenance of cognitive integration and constraint under normal conditions."

The study also may help suggest why psilocybin is increasingly seen as a promising treatment for a number of psychiatric conditions, including depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder. By suppressing the intrusive and self-centered ruminations that are hallmarks of depression and allowing individuals to transcend themselves, drugs like psilocybin may be key to shifting perspectives and priorities, the authors wrote.

Complete Article: Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies With Psilocybin

This article contains supporting information online at: www.pnas.org

By: Robin L. Carhart-Harrisa, David Erritzoea,Tim Williams, James M. Stone, Laurence J. Reed, Alessandro Colasanti, Robin J. Tyacke, Robert Leech, Andrea L. Malizia, Kevin Murphy, Peter Hobden, John Evans, Amanda Feilding, Richard G. Wise, & David J. Nutt

www.GaianBotanicals.com