Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
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Bruce Damer takes the 2012 Palenque Norte audience at the Burning Man Festival on a far flung journey into what he calls his practice of “global multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-technic shamanism” where you “put yourself on the shelf” and dive deeply into the worlds of Pentagon think tanks, NASA mission designers, the tribal cultures of Pakistan, the Swiss, Egyptologists, IT professionals, and Christian Evangelicals, to come back with the true alchemical gold. With apologies to Terence McKenna, he says “there is no dominator culture” and that if we aren’t careful we can collectively fall for cartoon epistemologies, chase chains of weaker and weaker claims, and become a victims of our own delusions, and fall prey to others’ unsubstantiated theories. Bruce advises everyone to become their own best skeptic and develop “critical intelligence”. If someone says something that strikes you as flaky or just doesn’t feel right, Bruce suggests that you think it through before you pass on their meme.

Check out all of the projects Bruce talks about at his personal site at: www.damer.com

Dr. Bruce’s Levity Zone Podcast

Guest speaker: Annie Oak
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Today we hear from civil rights activist and the founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress in her 2012 Palenque Norte Lecture at the Burning Man Festival. Anyone who is feeling that they are “out there at the end of the line” may find great encouragement in what Annie has to say as she tells the story of her own unique journey through life. And for the psychedelic community she has these powerful words, “We’re not the counter-culture. We are the culture, and we need to make the culture visible.”

The Women’s Visionary Congress
Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice

Links mentioned in this podcast

The Terence McKenna Legacy Library book list at LibraryThing

Dr. Bruce’s Levity Zone

The Evolver Network

BrynStoneBooks.com

UKCSC Podcast 006: Please Hire Me, I’m a Cannabis Campaigner!

Guest speaker: Allyson & Alex Grey
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“If it’s a psychedelic family business, then you’ve got to consider the ‘top line’ [as contrasted with 'the bottom line']. What’s the top line? The top line is: You have one unique life, and what do you love to do? What do you want to spend your life doing? What is the highest impact you can have on the world in a positive way?” -Alex Grey

“We know that in the wake of our psychedelic experiences we’re awakened to a oneness with the environment and with a sense of the need to protect it. And at least the dream of Eco-sustainability and how could we possibly manage that at this point in our trip. And yet it’s up to us to take responsibility for it. All of these things kind of naturally evolve in the wake of the psychedelic experience for many people.” -Alex Grey

“If you really want something big to happen in your life you have to make promises that you don’t know how you’re going to keep, and you have to keep them. That’s all. That’s all it takes.” -Allyson Grey

COSM

Allyson & Alex Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors
A sanctuary for seeing ourselves and the world as reflections of the Divine

Guest speaker: John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder
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This podcast features another of the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures that were held at the Burning Man Festival. The speakers are John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder, both of whom have been involved in many large-scale Earth Science projects, including Biosphere 2. In his presentation, John makes a strong plea for all of us to gain a better understanding of not just our own local ecosystems, but of the Earth’s entire biosphere as well. It is a fascinating talk and is followed by an interesting Q&A session.

Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir by the Inventor of Biosphere 2
By John Allen

The publishing home of John Allen and Tango Parrish Snyder

Upcoming Events

Books from the Synergetic Press

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck
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This podcast features my friend Daniel Pinchbeck as our guest speaker. As you know, Daniel wrote a book titled “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”, also, he is widely known as a speaker and writer about many things psychedelic and esoteric. However, I know him best as a fellow alumnus of the Entheobotany Seminars at Palenque, where Terence McKenna and his merry band of psychonauts would hold forth each January. In this talk, one that he gave at the Palenque Norte lectures during the 2012 Burning Man festival, Daniel follows the format of other psychedelic luminaries and lets the audience guide the direction of the lecture through their questions. Among other topics that Daniel covers are 2012, consciousness, the Occupy Movement, and possibilities for the future.

Direct link to video of this talk

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

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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.

TerraLucida-The Terence McKenna Experience-test sequence from Ken Adams on Vimeo.

Ken Adams “Producing “The Terence McKenna Experience”” – Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.

Rolling Jubilee
A bailout of the people by the people

Guest speaker: Charles Shaw
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PROGRAM NOTES:

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Charles Shaw.]

“Having a felony conviction, and having a drug conviction, essentially makes you a second class citizen.”

“For the lower classes, the poorer classes, which generally in this country are people of color, drug laws have always been used as a way to control them.”

“And if you take away the distinction between tobacco and alcohol and cannabis and cocaine or alkaloids or whatever, what you’ve got is a war against altering consciousness.”

“But what they’re trying to stop more than anything is ideas. Because what it is is a war of ideas. And it is a war of control, a breaking away from an external control factor, like a government, or a religion, or an ideology, or an economy that enslaves you, and thinking outside the box in revolutionary terms to try to solve it.”

“It’s no secret that psychedelics change consciousness. It’s no secret that they’re revolutionary. I mean, we’ve known this for a while. What is absolutely fascinating to me is how easily that culture was dismissed.”

“The true revolutionary leaders, I think, are going to be the ones who figure out how to not go in the street and how to disseminate the revolution by other means.”

“I also think that the real revolution is going to come from women, personally. I think enough guys have tried to lead the revolution, and it’s always the same thing because men have the same intentions, we always enter into a war paradigm. And we’ve gotta stop that war paradigm, and at least the feminine will allow us to get out of that war paradigm and get into something that is a collaborative negotiation of disputes and grievances. But I don’t know what’s that going to look like.”

Charles Shaw “Living in the Exile Nation” – Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.

Charles Shaw’s Exile Nation Project

“Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics, and Spirituality” by Charles Shaw

“The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade” by Alfred W. McCoy

Rolling Jubilee

Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors. The Rolling Jubilee intervenes by buying debt, keeping it out of the hands of collectors, and then abolishing it. We’re going into this market not to make a profit but to help each other out and highlight how the predatory debt system affects our families and communities. Think of it as a bailout of the 99% by the 99%.

Guest speaker: Dr. Brian Hewlett
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PROGRAM NOTES:

PROGRAM NOTES:

This podcast features the third in the series of the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures at the Burning Man festival. The speaker is Dr. Brian Hewlett and he titled his talk “An Algorithm of Human Consciousness and Implications for Artificial Intelligence”. As you can see, I have re-titled the talk “Understanding the Default Process of Consciousness” to better fit with some of his closing remarks which included: “If you understand the default process of your consciousness, and you work with that default process and start to pay attention to that process, then you can actually start to manipulate the process, just like you can manipulate any process that you understand.”

“What you experience as reality IS reality, and it’s got consequences for you.” – Dr. Brian N. Hewlett

Dr. Brian Hewlett “Understanding the Default Process of Consciousness” – Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.

The Psychedelic and Entheogenic Society of New York City

Guest speaker: Dr. Maddy Corbin
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Maddy Corbin.]

“I’ve been a nerd for a long time. That’s how you get a Ph.D.”

“At least in my experience of psychedelics, and people who take psychedelics and why they value psychedelics, is because it helps to critique you. It helps to break you down. It helps to challenge your assumptions. Isn’t that part of what we find, whether it’s in our meditation or in our psychedelic practices is it pushes you to your edge, and it teaches you about your assumptions that you are making without even realizing it. And you learn to challenge yourself.”

“How can we be as rigorous in our engagement with the outer world as we try to be with our engagement with our inner world?”

“Psychedelics don’t actually come from the counterculture. They come out of scientific laboratories.”

“And because it came through a chemical that allowed them to study it, they began to engage with spirituality in a way that was historically unprecedented. The doorway, I argue that [psychedelics] are a doorway through which spirituality entered the scientific laboratory in a way that it usually doesn’t.”

Dr. Michelle (Maddy) Corbin

Dr. Maddy Corbin “The Politics of Knowledge in the Psychedelic Sciences” – Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.

Women’s Visionary Congress

Guest speaker: Jonathan Talat Phillips
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PROGRAM NOTES:

This podcast features a talk given by Jonathan Talat Phillips in Vancouver sometime earlier this year. In it, Jonathan tells the story of how, after a devastating loss as countercultural activist, he embarked on a mystical initiation involving underground ayahuasca ceremonies, kundalini awakenings, DMT cowboys, shapeshifting extraterrestrials at Burning Man, miraculous healings, and an international movement trailblazing visionary ways to help our planet in crisis. Along the way he uncovers the lost rites of the Christian mystery schools and secret “electric” messages for personal and global transformation.

Jonathan is the author of “The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic.” He co-founded the cutting edge web-magazine Reality Sandwich and The Evolver Network, coordinating 40+ regional Evolver communities. He is a religion blogger for “The Huffington Post,” the creator of “The Ayahuasca Monologues: Tales of the Spirit Vine,” a Reiki Master and Bioenergetic Healer.

The Starck Project

The Starck Project on Kickstarter