Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don’t actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it’s the phenomenon of our own existence”

“These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.”

“Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.”

“In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, tainted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.”

“To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.”

“For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.”
» Continue reading “Podcast 347 – “This counts, somehow it matters””

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
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PROGRAM NOTES:

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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PROGRAM NOTES:

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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PROGRAM NOTES:

“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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PROGRAM NOTES:

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

Have you had a “bad trip”
on psilocybin mushrooms?

If so, please take this anonymous
Johns Hopkins survey,

and please tell others about it.

www.ShroomSurvey.com

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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“This is where I think the psychedelics come in, because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.”

“Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.”

“I think it’s the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that’s because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that’s a thrill, you’ll probably love psychedelics.”

“The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.”

“We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.”

“Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization.”

“The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.”

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.”

“It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.”

“It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.”

“And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.”

“The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.”

“In cyberspace things are built out of light.”

“Apparently, in the Avesta classical period [early Iron Age and before] no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.”

“To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.”

BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST
» Continue reading “Podcast 337 – “The World Could Be Anything””

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck
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PROGRAM NOTES:

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 speakers: Amanda Sage and Bruce Damer
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Watch a video of this talk

Watch a video of Bruce Damer’s brief history of the Palenque Norte lecture series

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Amanda Sage.]

“Let’s turn the museums into temples. I think the new museums are going to be temples.”

“I’m interested in this collaboration, because I’m interested in what can we do to wake people up, to turn people on.”

“And dream. I mean if this is about dreaming, what can each of us do to evoke the dream, a deeper dream, in another?”

Amanda Sage (official site)

eARTh Voyage:::

The mission is the art of transformation

Amanda Sage “Vision Mapping for the Golden Age” – Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.

A brief history of Palenque Norte, from which the podcasts sprang . . . by Dr. Bruce Damer

Dr. Bruce Damer “A Brief History of Palenque Norte” – Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.

The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman

Dark Ages America by Morris Berman

Guest speaker: J. Krishnamurti
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J. Krishnamurti ONLINE

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by J. Krishnamurti.]

“The crisis is not in the outward technological advancement, but rather in the way we think, and the way we live, and the way we feel. I think that is where a revolution must take place.”

“No revolution, psychologically I’m talking about, is possible if there is merely the imitation of a particular ideology. To me, all ideologies are idiotic.”

“What has meaning is what IS, not what should be.”

“I think that is the worst thing one can do, to break up one’s own existence into various fragments, and that’s where contradiction lies.”

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Martin Wittfooth Web Site

Corey Helford Gallery